In a staff editorial entitled “Thanks Whistleblower, Your Work is Done,” The New York Times includes an annotated version of the original intelligence community whistleblower complaint. They note that “every piece of information that the public first learned from the whistle-blower’s complaint has been corroborated.” You can find it all in the transcript of the call, congressional testimony and news reporting.
The Times offers a highlighted version of the compliant: Yellow marks the points confirmed by White House transcript, blue for statements from officials, purple for testimony, green for news reports and red for “not yet proven.” There’s one minor fact in red.
Highlighted in yellow.
The President did solicit interference.
“I would like you to do us a favor,” Mr. Trump said in a July 25 phone call with Mr. Zelensky, according to the White House account of the call…
“There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution … so if you can look into it … I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike … The server, they say Ukraine has it,” Mr. Trump said in the call, citing a conspiracy theory about the 2016 election. “That whole nonsense ended … they say a lot of it started with Ukraine. Whatever you can do, it’s very important that you do it if that’s possible.”
Highlighted in purple
Ambassador William Taylor, the top American diplomat in Ukraine, covered a number of points in his testimony last week.
Giuliani reached out to senior Ukrainian officials.
“Bohdan … told me that they had heard from Mr. Giuliani that the phone call between the two presidents was unlikely to happen,” Ambassador William Taylor, the top American diplomat in Ukraine, said in his opening statement to House investigators.
Ukraine aid was frozen.
In a video-conference call on July 18, Mr. Taylor said, “I heard a staff person from the Office of Management say … her boss had instructed her not to approve any additional spending of security assistance for Ukraine until further notice.”
The aid freeze was ordered by the president.
“All that the OMB staff person said,” according to Mr. Taylor, “was that the directive had come from the President.”
Comments were running fully in favor of the whistleblower. One reader offers this:
Imagine this story being presented as a movie pitch? A lone employee, working in a bureaucratic system sees corruption so blatant, so dangerous and so casual that he feels he needs to document an example of said corruption because he can’t trust anyone else in the system. Not the police, not the judges, not the lawmakers and, absolutely, no one in the inner circle. The story is compelling as a western, a swashbukler, a knight’s tale, a comedy, a Kafka nightmare or a Hitchcock thriller, it just doesn’t work as reality. No one would believe it. That many corrupt people, that many compromised souls, that many venal players, that may insane characters, that many gullible followers and this is supposed to be happening in America? In fiction it could only be considered farce, in reality, it’s a horror show.