September 26, 2019

Read The Whistleblower Complaint at the Center of Trump’s Ukraine Scandal

“POTUS is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 US election.”

Li Muzi/ZUMA

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The whistleblower complaint at the heart of allegations that President Donald Trump pressured Ukraine’s president to investigate Joe Biden was released Thursday morning, the latest development in the exploding scandal that led House Speaker Nancy Pelosi this week to launch formal impeachment proceedings.

The public release comes one day after lawmakers on the House and Senate intelligence committees reviewed the complaint. Democrats have described it as nothing short of damning. “What this courageous individual has done has exposed serious wrongdoing,” Rep. Adam Schiff, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, told reporters after reading the complaint on Wednesday. “I think it a travesty that this complaint was withheld as long as it was because it was an urgent matter. It is an urgent matter.” Some Republicans, including Sens. Mitt Romney and Ben Sasse, have also expressed concern.

Since reports of the whistleblower complaint surfaced earlier this month, Trump has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing in his communications with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. “When you see the call, when you see the readout of the call, which I assume you’ll see at some point, you’ll understand that call was perfect,” he insisted on Tuesday. 

Instead, when the White House released a non-verbatim transcript of the call on Wednesday, it showed Trump leaning on Zelensky to do him a “favor” and investigate matters related to the origins of Robert Mueller’s Trump-Russia probe and probe Biden. Among other troubling details, the memo confirmed that Trump suggested Zelensky get in touch with Attorney General William Barr and his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani about launching a Biden probe.

Acting director of national intelligence Joseph Maguire is set to testify on the whistleblower’s complaint later this morning. 

Read the declassified complaint below:

 



20190812 Whistleblower Complaint Unclass (Text)

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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