The anonymous so-called whistleblower who filed a complaint about the conduct of President Donald Trump – and it has been established that this individual has a personal dislike of the president – is not looking too credible. The complaint itself has now been publicly released, and the whistleblower could not have anticipated that either the complaint or the transcript of Trump’s conversation with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky would ever see the light of day.
The first thing to note about the complaint is that it is hearsay. The whistleblower had no first-hand knowledge of anything he or she mentions in the document. Everything in it is attributed to anonymous sources.
Democrats Misrepresented Complaint
Contrary to what certain congressional Democrats had claimed about the complaint before its release – that it covered a wide range of actions by the president that were concerning – the entire document deals with the circumstances surrounding the Trump administration’s dealings with the new Ukrainian government.
Even assuming that the information contained in the complaint is accurate – and some of it is not, as can be seen by reading the transcript of the Trump-Zelensky telephone conversation – it would be a stretch to claim that the document provides proof of any illegal activity.
Not anticipating that the transcript of the call would ever be made public, the whistleblower misrepresented what actually passed between the two leaders. Though some of what the whistleblower describes is supported by the transcript, at least one part of the account is entirely inaccurate. The whistleblower claims, for example, that President Trump praised Ukraine’s Prosecutor General, Yuriy Lutsenko, and suggested that Zelensky should leave Lutsenko in place, rather than appoint a replacement. In fact, Lutsenko was not mentioned during the call.
Credibility Issues
Even one misrepresentation of the truth – from a whistleblower who has admitted a political bias against Trump and who has identified no sources for his or her information – calls into question the entirety of the whistleblower’s claims.
The remainder of the document deals with the White House’s contacts with Ukrainian officials, none of which appear to be nefarious in any way. Trump and his attorney, Rudy Guiliani, had every right to be concerned about Ukrainian connections to the fabricated Trump-Russia collusion conspiracy. They also are justified in expressing concerns about former Vice President Joe Biden’s interactions with the Ukrainians. In particular, Biden had threatened to withhold financial aid to Ukraine unless the country’s top prosecutor was removed during an open investigation into energy company Burisma, which inexplicably employed Biden’s son.
Much of what the whistleblower recounts is information already in the public domain. In fact, he or she appears to have taken most of what is in the complaint from previously published news articles. The whistleblower also implies that the transcript of the phone conversation had been hidden away on a server usually dedicated to storing classified material. That is somewhat embarrassing for this individual: The transcript is made public just weeks after the whistleblower’s claim that it was so incriminating it had to be hidden.
It appears that this phony Unraine scandal, just like the phony Russia scandal, is not going away any time soon. This will likely prove fatal for Joe Biden’s nomination hopes, as any conversation about US-Ukraine contacts cannot be carried on without Biden and his son coming up.
It is almost amusing, however, to watch the Democrats and their media lapdogs chase their tails. Since the recent release of the telephone call transcript, these people have pushed two narratives: On the one hand, the transcript, they claim, provides clear proof of Trump’s corrupt intentions regarding Ukraine. On the other hand, the transcript itself may be a fabrication.
A document that probably misrepresents what Trump and Zelensky discussed, then, is being touted as evidence of Trump’s corruption and law-breaking. Those two things together do not make for a very good case against the president.
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