Former US President Donald Trump has told a completely fictional story about how he allegedly outwitted his Democratic opponents, publishing a conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in 2019 that was a key factor in Trump's first impeachment. It is reported CNN.
Speaking at a campaign rally in Ohio on Saturday, March 16, Trump told a false story about how he made public the fake contents of a phone call to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. This forced Democrats to make "wilder and wilder" assessments of ex-president Zelenskyi's words, "and then we published the tape."
According to Trump, when then-Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi "heard" the tape, she was furious that she had been misled by earlier "false" descriptions of the call by her allies. The former president claimed that Pelosi said this to "her people": “What the hell have you gotten me into? Did you hear that call? He didn't do any of that!"
Trump claimed that Pelosi was told: "Let's just pretend he did it and move on."
He continued: “After they made up the story and then heard the recording, they died. They did not know that the phone call was recorded. It was a good case of recording a phone call. And they were recorded, and they were caught."
CNN checked the facts and noted that Trump's story is a complete fabrication. No recording of his conversation with Zelenskyi has ever been made public. Pelosi couldn't get mad at her allies after listening to the tape of the conversation because she never heard the tape of that conversation. In fact, almost five years after the July 2019 call, no known American recording of the call exists.
What the Trump White House actually released in September 2019 was a rough written transcript of the conversation that supported rather than contradicted the government whistleblower's main claims about what Trump said.
Pelosi's spokesman, Aaron Bennett, said on Sunday, March 17, that Trump's story was "absolute nonsense."
"Telephone conversations of the president with foreign leaders are usually not recorded by the American side. Instead, they are inaccurately captured in writing by the software and the American officials who eavesdrop on them." CNN notes.
Retired Army Lt. Col. Oleksandr Vindman, who was one of the officials who listened in on Trump's conversation with Zelenskyy while serving as the White House National Security Council's top expert on Ukraine at the time (and who later became a key witness in the impeachment inquiry), told the broadcaster in a text message on Sunday that “there are no records' of this conversation. "He's lying," Windman said.
Trump's new story echoes his false claims during his presidency.
Since the end of 2019, Trump has been trying to rewrite the reality of the phone conversation with Zelensky. In it, after the latter said that Ukraine wanted to buy weapons from the United States, Trump pushed him to investigate Joe Biden, then a potential opponent of Trump from the Democratic Party in the 2020 presidential election, as well as to investigate a baseless conspiracy theory about alleged Ukrainian interference in the 2016 elections (in which Russia interfered).
The false story Trump delivered at his rally Saturday was a more dramatic version of the false stories he told more than four years ago, which CNN verified at the time.
In earlier remarks, Trump claimed that he won over Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff of California, who was working to impeach Trump, by releasing a rough transcript of a conversation with Zelensky after Schiff incorrectly paraphrased Trump's words. He said Schiff would never have made his comments if he had known Trump would release the draft transcript.
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