The House Intelligence Committee has released the whistleblower complaint involving President Donald Trump that led House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to announce a formal impeachment inquiry into the president. The nine-page complaint accuses Trump of "using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election" after he asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to investigate Joe Biden and his son for corruption.
The whistleblower, who has not been identified, wrote that they became concerned with the efforts by officials in the White House to "'lockdown' all records of the phone call, especially the official word-for-word transcript of the call that was produced as is customary by the White House Situation Room."
The transcript was loaded into an electronic system meant for conversations that are considered to be of an "especially sensitive nature." The whistleblower says the system is supposed to be used when a conversation involves national security issues, but the phone call between Trump and his Ukrainian counterpart did not contain anything "remotely sensitive."
The whistleblower, who did not hear the phone call, learned from other high-ranking officials that it was not the first time the system was used "for the purpose of protecting politically sensitive — rather than national security sensitive — information."
"I was not a direct witness to most of the events described," the whistleblower wrote. "However, I found my colleagues' accounts of these events to be credible because, in almost all cases, multiple officials recounted fact patterns that were consistent with one another."
President Trump has denied doing anything wrong and White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham said the document is "nothing more than a collection of third-hand accounts of events and cobbled-together press clippings — all of which shows nothing improper."
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