WASHINGTON (AP) — The Latest on President Donald Trump and the House impeachment inquiry (all times local):
President Trump released the full, unredacted transcript of his call with the Ukrainian President.
The memo summarizing President Donald Trump’s call with the Ukraine leader shows the president’s lingering fixation on special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.
Trump flippantly refers to the ex-FBI director as a “man named Robert Mueller” and says he turned in “a very poor performance.”
The memo also shows that the president made reference to the private cybersecurity firm that investigated Russia’s hack of the Democratic National Committee servers during the 2016 election.
Trump suggests that Ukraine may be in the possession of the email server, though it’s unclear what he’s referring to.
Trump also says he’d like to have his attorney general “call you or your people and I would like you to get to the bottom of it.”
The White House released the memo Wednesday.
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10:05 a.m.
The intelligence community’s inspector general told the acting director of national intelligence that a call between President Donald Trump and Ukraine’s leader could have been a federal campaign finance violation.
But the Justice Department determined the president did not commit a crime after prosecutors reviewed a rough transcript of the July 25 call.
A Justice Department official says the inspector general suspected that the call could have been a violation of federal law if the president was soliciting a campaign contribution from a foreign government by asking the Ukraine leader to investigate a political opponent.
The official says that was based on the whistleblower’s complaint and the inspector general didn’t have access to a rough transcript of the call.
Prosecutors from the Justice Department reviewed a rough transcript of the call and determined the president did not violate campaign finance law.
The official spoke on condition of anonymity in order to discuss internal investigative deliberations.
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10 a.m.
President Donald Trump repeatedly prodded Ukraine’s new leader to work with Rudy Giuliani and the U.S. attorney general to investigate Democratic political rival Joe Biden. That’s according to a five-page memo summarizing the July 25 call.
The White House released the memo Wednesday.
The conversation between Trump and Ukraine’s president is just one piece of a whistleblower’s complaint made in mid-August.
The complaint is central to the impeachment inquiry announced Tuesday by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Trump told the Ukrainian president “If you can look into it … it sounds horrible to me.” Trump was talking about unsubstantiated allegations that Biden sought to interfere with a Ukrainian prosecutor’s investigation of his son, Hunter.
Trump also confirmed that he ordered his staff to freeze nearly $400 million in aid to Ukraine a few days before the call.
The president says he did nothing wrong.
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9:45 a.m.
The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee is demanding that Attorney General William Barr produce the legal basis for withholding a whistleblower’s complaint against President Donald Trump.
Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff of California said Wednesday in a letter to Barr that the refusal to turn over the complaint risks raising “the specter that the department has participated in a dangerous cover-up to protect the president.”
Schiff says the statute “makes no provision” for withholding the information from Congress. He wants the Office of Legal Counsel’s reasoning.
The administration is considering whether to release the complaint, which is based in part on Trump’s conversation to the Ukraine president that reportedly involved digging up dirt on rival Joe Biden.
But Schiff told reporters the administration has communicated “nothing” about its intentions.
Trump has denied doing anything wrong.
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