Top takeaways from the Trump-Zelensky phone call - Sep. 25, 2019

It’s hard to imagine a document that could be more damning for both parties involved.

On Sept. 25, the White House released a memorandum featuring dialogue from a July 25 phone conversation between U.S. President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

That call has been at the heart of a whistleblower scandal that has led the U.S. House of Representatives to open an impeachment inquiry into Trump.

On Sept. 24, Trump promised to publish an unredacted transcript of the conversation. However, such documents are compiled from notes taken during phone calls when no recording devices are present. As a result, the memorandum is not a literal transcript of the talk, despite reading like one.

This also opens up the possibility that it may not be entirely accurate. Nonetheless, what’s written there looks particularly bad for both presidents.

Trump openly pushes an investigation against former Vice President Joe Biden and badmouths a former ambassador to Kyiv and Ukraine’s European partners. For his part, Zelensky generally agrees with Trump and appears all too eager to flatter the American leader.

The following are some of the document’s highlights and most damning moments.

1. Trump talks Biden.

According to the memorandum, Trump indeed raises the subject of former Vice President Joe Biden and his son. Between 2014 and 2019, the younger Biden served on the board of Ukrainian oil and gas extraction company Burisma Holdings. Trump and his lawyer, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, have alleged that Biden pressured Ukraine to fire Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, who was investigating Burisma, to protect his son.

As the Kyiv Post has explained, that claim is not backed up by facts.

“There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the persecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the (U.S.) Attorney General would be great,” Trump says, according to the memorandum. “Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it… It sounds horrible to me.”

Trump has admitted that he discussed Biden in his call with Zelensky, but denied that the conversation crossed any ethical lines. However, the belief that Trump tried to pressure Zelensky to take action undermining Biden, his most likely competitor in the 2020 U.S. presidential election, was what pushed the House to open the impeachment inquiry.

This memorandum effectively proves that Trump indeed asked his Ukrainian counterpart to investigate the former vice president — perhaps not as directly or forcefully as some expected, but the message was clear.

Before his call with Zelensky, Trump reportedly suspended $250 million of military aid to Ukraine. The money was later released, but its very delay raised concerns that Trump was using aid as a quid pro quo for an investigation of Biden. The memorandum does not provide direct evidence of Trump pushing for such an exchange, although it could be argued that the general tone of the discussion is extortive.

For his part, Zelensky promises that the next prosecutor general “will be 100 percent my person” and will look into the company that Trump mentioned.

“The issue of the investigation of the case is actually the issue of making sure to restore the honesty so we will take care of that and will work on the investigation of the case,” Zelensky says, according to the document.

Throughout the conversation, Trump makes multiple references to Rudy Giuliani and Attorney General William Barr. He also asks Zelensky to be in touch with Giuliani and the attorney general. This makes it clear that Trump treats Giuliani — a man with no official government position — as an important member of his administration and that he is serious about prosecuting Biden.

2. Investigating the ex-U.S. ambassador.

After that, Zelensky makes a surprising request of Trump.

“On top of that, I would kindly ask you if you have any additional information that you can provide to us, it would be very helpful for the investigation to make sure that we administer justice in our country with regard to the Ambassador of the United States from Ukraine as far as I recall her name was Ivanovich,” the Ukrainian president reportedly says.

Here Zelensky (or the compilers of the memorandum) made a mistake. He is clearly referring to Maria Yovanovitch, the former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine.

“It was great that you were the first one who told me that she was a bad ambassador because I agree·with you 100%. Her attitude towards me was far from the best as she admired the previous President and she was on his side. She would not accept me as a new President well enough,” Zelensky says, according to the document.

Despite high acclaims from her colleagues and many in Kyiv, career diplomat Yovanovitch was prematurely removed from office on May 20. She had come under attack from right-wing media, U.S. politicians and then-Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko, who accused her of handing him a list of Ukrainians the country should not prosecute. The State Department strongly denied his claim.

In a May interview with Ukraine’s Censor.net news site, Giuliani alleged that Yovanovitch was working for financier and philanthropist George Soros against Trump. Soros is a common bogeyman in right-wing and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.

At the time, two U.S. Democratic congressmen called Yovanovitch’s removal a “political hit job.” It appeared that, for whatever reason, she had run afoul of Trump and his circle.

Zelensky’s willingness to “administer justice” in the case of Yovanovitch is a worrying sign. At worst, it shows Zelensky ready to take undemocratic measures. At best, it simply shows him playing along with patently false aspects of Trump’s narrative.

3. Bashing Germany and the EU.

Early in the memorandum, Trump lays into the European Union for allegedly not pulling its weight in supporting Ukraine.

“I will say that we do a lot for Ukraine. We spend a lot of effort and a lot of time,” Trump says. “Much more than the European countries are doing and they should be helping you more than they are.

“Germany does almost nothing for you. All they do is talk and I think it’s something that you should really ask them about. When I was speaking to Angela Merkel she talks Ukraine, but she doesn’t do anything.”

Zelensky enthusiastically agrees, according to the memorandum. “Yes you are absolutely right. Not only 100%, but actually 1000%,” he says.

The Ukrainian President claims that he told both Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron that they should be doing more for Ukraine. He then says that Ukraine is almost ready to purchase more Javelin missiles from the U.S. for defense purposes.

There’s no doubt that Ukraine’s relations with the European Union have tensions — as do virtually any international relations, including close ones. But it’s not clear whether Zelensky actually believes what he said. He may simply have been trying to curry favor with Trump. After all, he could hardly have anticipated that his conversation would wind up in the public record so quickly.

Still, EU member states will likely not be happy with Zelensky’s comments.

4. About that Crowdstrike…

It’s one of the most bizarre moments in the memorandum: Trump asks Zelensky to look into Russia’s hacking of Democratic National Committee (DNC) servers in 2015-2016.

“(O)ur country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it,” Trump says. “I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike…I guess you have one of your wealthy people… The server, they say Ukraine has it.”

Crowdstrike is the cybersecurity firm that investigated the hack, although exactly why Trump raised this otherwise obscure reference in the conversation is anyone’s guess. Representatives of Crowdstrike told Vice News that they also don’t understand why they were name-dropped.

As a result, this passage has provoked multiple interpretations.

Max Seddon, a Moscow correspondent for the Financial Times, suggested on Twitter that Trump was “trying to absolve Russia of hacking the 2016 election.”

Daniel Dale, a reporter at the CNN television channel, also wrote on Twitter that, in 2017, Trump said he heard that Crowdstrike is based in Ukraine and owned by a wealthy Ukrainian. In reality, the company’s headquarters are in Sunnyvale, California.

The Gizmodo tech news site noted that, previously, Trump has suggested there is a missing DNC server — evidence of foul play or other nefarious dealings in the DNC hacking case. However, this has been proven untrue.

In the past, Trump has also suggested that the DNC should have given the servers to the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) instead of Crowdstrike. However, the company told CNBC that it had provided the forensic evidence it gathered to the FBI.

5. I stayed in Trump Tower…

Near the end of the transcript, Zelensky tells Trump that the last time he traveled to the United States, he stayed at Trump Tower in New York.

Zelensky is hardly alone in staying at a Trump property. News media have reported a growing trend of U.S. and foreign officials, as well as lobbyists and others, visiting and staying at Trump properties, likely to curry favor with the president.

Even Trump’s own vice-president, Mike Pence, stayed at a Trump resort in Ireland, despite the location being nearly 200 miles away from the meetings he planned to attend, the New York Times reported.

As he promises to root out corruption in Ukraine, Zelensky also appears to have told Trump that he is a participant in this corrupt practice in the United States.

6. Performance of his life.

If there is one word commentators have repeatedly used to describe Zelensky’s statements and behavior in the memorandum, it is obsequious. The Ukrainian president flatters Trump, professes friendship, and strokes the U.S. president’s ego.

At the start of the conversation, after Trump praises Zelensky’s election victory, the Ukrainian president says that he learned many lessons from Trump’s unorthodox campaign. Zelensky tells Trump that his administration wants “to drain the swamp in our country” — using Trump’s pet phrase — and terms the American president a “great teacher for us” in breaking with old-school politics.

At times, Zelensky’s flattery of Trump is uncomfortably pitiful — for example, when he suggests they visit Ukraine after an August meeting in Poland. “We can either take my plane and go to Ukraine or we can take your plane, which is probably much better than mine,” Zelensky says.

Trump ultimately did not travel to Poland, so Zelensky could not give him a tour of Ukraine.

At the same time, it is difficult to take Zelensky’s tone with Trump at face value. The Ukrainian president is, after all, an actor known for his personal magnetism. And Trump is known to be susceptible to flattery.

“Zelenskyy was well-briefed for this discussion, and his marching orders were to get on Trump’s good side,” Olya Oliker, the Europe and Central Asia director at the International Crisis Group, wrote on Twitter. “If Ukraine loses the United States as a strong backer, its negotiating position with Russia is much weaker, no matter what the Europeans do. This isn’t just about a particular aid package.”