The White House released a transcript of a July 25 conversation in which President Donald Trump pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate 2020 Democratic presidential front-runner Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden. But Trump said he was not the only one to speak to Zelensky.
“I think you should ask for Vice President Pence’s conversation because he had a couple of conversations also,” Trump said. Trump also said he and Pence would both be exonerated, and called the vice president’s conversations with Ukraine “perfect.”
Critics of the administration are now envisioning a scenario in which both Trump and Pence end up impeached. While it would take an unlikely sequence of events for that to happen, the reaction caused #PresidentPelosi to trend Wednesday night and yesterday morning, given that the speaker of the House would be next in the line of succession.
Meanwhile, more than half the House of Representatives have now said they support an impeachment investigation into President Trump. There are at least 218 House Democrats according to a CNN count who publicly stated support for impeachment proceedings. Rep. Justin Amash of Michigan, a former Republican who has since become an independent, has also called for an impeachment investigation, bringing the total number of representatives to 219, or just over half of the 435-member chamber.
Also, a whistleblower said in a complaint released yesterday that White House officials sought to restrict access to the transcript of the phone call between Trump and Zelensky. “I have received information from multiple US government officials that the president of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 US election,” the whistleblower, an unidentified intelligence community official, wrote in the complaint released by Congress.