Read: Summary of earlier Trump-Zelensky call released
The White House has released a summary of the call between President Trump and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky that took place prior to the July 25 phone call that is central to the impeachment inquiry of Mr. Trump. The White House release of the April 21 call came the same minute former ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch was scheduled to testify on Capitol Hill as a part of that inquiry.
But the phone call summary is missing two key things a readout of the call at the time said the president mentioned to Zelensky: Mr. Trump's commitment to "root[ing] out corruption" and to U.S. support for Ukraine's "territorial integrity." Mr. Trump does not appear to address those things in the memo released Friday. Later in the day, the White House blamed the National Security Council's Ukraine expert.
"The president continues to push for transparency in light of these baseless accusations and has taken the unprecedented steps to release the transcripts of both phone calls with President Zelensky so that every American can see he did nothing wrong," deputy White House press secretary Hogan Gidley said in a statement. "It is standard operating procedure for the National Security Council to provide readouts of the president's phone calls with foreign leaders. This one was prepared by the NSC's Ukraine expert."
The April call came shortly after Zelensky won the Ukrainian presidential election. In the call, the president invited Zelensky to the White House. The president said earlier this week that he would release the call by the end of the week. The first call is an introductory call during which Mr. Trump offered Zelensky his congratulations.
"Well, I agree with you about your country, and I look forward to it," Mr. Trump said, according to the call memo. "When I owned Miss Universe, they always had great people. Ukraine was always very well represented. When you're settled in and ready, I'd like to invite you to the White House. We'll have a lot of things to talk about, but we're with you all the way."
The earlier call memo was marked unclassified. The summary of the later July 25 call was marked secret and not for reading by foreign nationals.
Read the summary of the call here:
Transcript of President Tru... by Stefan Becket on Scribd
