The document contains no first-hand knowledge of the July 25 phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and relies entirely on leaks by “White House officials.” The “whistleblower” even admits: “I do not know which side initiated the call.”
Some allegations in the complaint seem to be distortions of exaggerations of information in the transcript itself, which the White House released Wednesday. For example, the whistleblower claims that Trump “praised Ukraine’s Prosecutor General, Mr. Yuriy Letsenko.” Trump appears never to have mentioned Letsenko, and his reference to a prosecutor (“I heard you had a prosecutor who was very good and he was shut down”) was a reference to former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin. Shokin was investigating Burisma Holdings, on whose board Hunter Biden served, at the time Joe Biden demanded he be fired, under threat of withholding $1 billion in American aid.
