Special Edition: A Perfect Phone Call
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 25 September 2019
⏱️ 55 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The White House has released a memorandum of a July 25 call between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and President Donald Trump. The call is at the center of the new impeachment inquiry into the president, and is reportedly also the subject of a whistleblower complaint that the Department of Justice has prevented the Acting Director of National Intelligence from sharing with congressional intelligence committees. For the second time this week, Lawfare put together a special edition podcast. Scott Anderson, Susan Hennessey, Quinta Jurecic and Margaret Taylor joined Benjamin Wittes in the Jungle Studio, while Bob Bauer, David Kris and Bob Litt called in from afar to discuss the new revelations and what this all means for the president, Congress and the impeachment inquiry.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The following podcast contains advertising. |
| 0:04.0 | To access an ad-free version of the LawFair podcast, |
| 0:08.0 | become a material supporter of LawFair at patreon.com slash law fair. |
| 0:14.0 | That's patreon.com slash law fair. |
| 0:18.0 | Also, check out LawFair's other podcast offerings, |
| 0:22.0 | rational security, chatter, law fair no bull, and the aftermath. |
| 0:29.0 | I'm Benjamin Wittis and this is the LawFair podcast September 25th, 2019. |
| 0:37.0 | Yes, it's another emergency podcast and I'm not even going to do very much of an introduction |
| 0:43.0 | because you all know why we're here. |
| 0:45.0 | The president released the transcript of his conversation with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. |
| 0:55.0 | It contains a lot of material and we've got an incredible group of people to go over it. |
| 1:01.0 | We have a lot of people to go over it and so rather than introduce everybody at the outset, |
| 1:06.0 | I'm just going to introduce people as I bring them into the conversation |
| 1:11.0 | and hope that will make it easier for people to follow. |
| 1:15.0 | So, Quintedjurassic, LawFair Managing Editor, |
| 1:19.0 | give me to start with an overview as neutrally as you can of what is in this document. |
| 1:27.0 | The document is a memo putting together basically notes of a conversation between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. |
| 1:37.0 | Functionally for our purposes, the important material involves Trump's sudden shift of the conversation |
| 1:47.0 | away from Zelensky talking about how great the relationship between the U.S. and Ukraine is to a discussion of things Trump would like Zelensky to do for him. |
| 2:00.0 | Specifically, multiple times he indicates that he will have both his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and the Attorney General Bill Barr reach out to Zelensky to help Zelensky |
| 2:13.0 | conducting an investigation of Joe Biden and Hunter Biden. |
| 2:18.0 | And Zelensky kind of, at some point seems to push Trump away, at some point seems to yield. |
... |
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