Member-only story
Never Heard Of Marie Yovanovitch? You Will Now…
Former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine could be a key component to impeachment investigation of Trump
The document that’s out right now from the White House is not the “complete, fully declassified and unredacted transcript” Trump promised in an earlier Tweet. Instead, it’s being called a “rough log” of a 30-minute call between the President and Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, which took place in July of this year, a month or two after his election. We are providing a direct link to it here.
This is purely conjecture on our part, but if the White House’s depiction of the call was not robustly edited (and clearly their document does not represent a full 30-minute call), it was almost certainly robustly “shaped”. That’s because it reads like nobody talks in real life.
Of course there is one other possibility: the reason the language used by both parties is so stilted is because they’re speaking in a kind of code.
But whether the Trump team’s output is the outcome of an effort to neaten things up, or Trump and Zelensky were speaking in easily decodable code, the results are damning enough.
The White House was pretty clearly hoping their abbreviated document would become accepted as the defining and…
