The whistleblower complaint at the center of a dispute between the White House and Congress concerns an August phone call President Trump had with new Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, accor…
. At the time of the phone call, there were reports that the White House considering blocking $250 million in aid to Ukraine.
Those stories built on reporting from earlier this week that suggested President Trump had made a “promise” to an unnamed foreign leader, and that an intelligence official who’d heard that promise found it troubling enough to file a whistleblower complaint. Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson, who received the complaint, deemed the situation an “urgent matter.
Important context about Ukraine: Zelenskyy, the newly elected president of Ukraine is a comedian and star of TV show about a high school history teacher who is suddenly elected president. Ukraine is a small country that is at odds with its much larger and more powerful neighbor, Russia, over the Russian federation’s annexation of the Crimea in 2014. Congress previously approved $250 million to help Ukraine fight pro-Russian separatists backed by the Kremlin.
Neither the Post nor the Times were able to confirm what, exactly, the president promised or hoped to extract by promising, but there are several possibilities that seem obvious. Earlier this month, Congressional Democrats dispatched letters to the White House and State Department requesting records related to any efforts that the president or his personal lawyer,
, had taken to “coerce the Ukrainian government into pursuing two politically-motivated investigations under the guise of anti-corruption activity.”
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