Ukraine Phone Call and Whistleblower Complaint

The Phone Call

On July 25, 2019, President Trump spoke by phone with newly elected Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. During the call, after Zelensky raised the topic of U.S. military aid to Ukraine — which Trump had secretly frozen days earlier — Trump responded, “I would like you to do us a favor though.” He then asked Zelensky to investigate a debunked conspiracy theory about the 2016 election and, separately, to look into former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden, who had served on the board of a Ukrainian energy company.

The request was extraordinary: a president of the United States was using the power of his office — and leveraging congressionally approved military aid — to pressure a foreign government to investigate his leading political rival in the upcoming 2020 election. Ukraine was at war with Russia and desperately needed the military assistance.

The Whistleblower

A member of the U.S. intelligence community who learned of the call filed a formal whistleblower complaint on August 12, 2019, describing the call and an alleged cover-up. The complaint stated that White House officials had moved the transcript of the call to a highly classified server normally reserved for the most sensitive national security information — not because of its intelligence value, but to limit access to politically damaging material.

The Trump administration initially tried to suppress the complaint, with the acting Director of National Intelligence refusing to transmit it to Congress as required by law. When its existence became public in September, the pressure became overwhelming. On September 24, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced a formal impeachment inquiry. The following day, the White House released a reconstructed summary of the call that largely confirmed the whistleblower’s account.

The “Perfect Phone Call”

Trump insisted the call was “perfect” and that there was no quid pro quo. But testimony from administration officials during the subsequent impeachment hearings painted a different picture. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland testified that “everyone was in the loop” on the pressure campaign and that there was indeed a quid pro quo — linking both the military aid and a White House meeting to Ukraine announcing the investigations Trump wanted. Multiple career diplomats and national security officials expressed alarm about the scheme.

Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal attorney, had been running a shadow foreign policy operation in Ukraine for months, pressuring Ukrainian officials to open investigations that would benefit Trump politically. The effort had alarmed career State Department and National Security Council officials, some of whom reported their concerns through official channels.

Impeachment

On December 18, 2019, the House of Representatives impeached Trump on two articles: abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. It was only the third time in American history that a president had been impeached. The Senate trial in January and February 2020 ended in acquittal, with only Senator Mitt Romney of Utah breaking ranks to vote for conviction on the abuse of power charge — making him the first senator in history to vote to convict a president of his own party. The Ukraine scandal would later take on additional historical resonance when Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, underscoring the stakes of the military aid Trump had withheld.