WASHINGTON: The whistleblower at the centre of Congress impeachment inquiry has alleged that US President Donald Trump abused the power of his office to “solicit interference from a foreign country” in next year’s election. The White House then tried to “lock down” the information to cover it up, the official’s complaint said.

The nine-page document released on Thursday provides many new details about the summertime phone call in which Trump encouraged the president of Ukraine to help investigate political rival Joe Biden. It alleges a concerted White House effort to suppress the transcript of the call and describes a shadow campaign of diplomacy by the president’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani that unnerved some senior Trump administration officials.

“In the days following the phone call, I learned from multiple US officials that senior White House officials had intervened to ‘lock down’ all the records of the phone call, especially the official word-for-word transcript of the call that was produced as is customary by the White House situation room,” the complaint said.

The previously secret document, with its detail and clear narrative, will likely accelerate the impeachment process and put more pressure on Trump to rebut its core contentions and on his fellow Republicans to defend him or not. It also provides a road map for Democrats to seek corroborating witnesses and evidence, which will complicate the president’s efforts to characterise the findings as those of a lone partisan out to undermine him.

Trump threatened the person who gave information to the whistleblower as he spoke at a private event in New York with staff from the US mission to the United Nations.

“I want to know who’s the person, who’s the person who gave the whistleblower the information? Because that’s close to a spy,” Trump said. “You know what we used to do in the old days when we were smart? Right? The spies and treason, we used to handle it a little differently than we do now.” The remarks were reported by The Los Angeles Times and The New York Times.

‘Country is at stake’

More publicly, Trump insisted the entire controversy is political, tweeting, “The Democrats are trying to destroy the Republican Party and all that it stands for. Stick together, play their game and fight hard Republicans. Our country is at stake.” The tweet was in all capital letters.

The White House had already released a rough transcript of the phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in which Trump prodded Zelenskiy to investigate Democratic political rival Joe Biden.

But the complaint released Thursday offers a broader picture of what was happening in the White House and the administration at the time.

In the aftermath of the call, according to the whistleblower, White House lawyers were concerned “they had witnessed the president abuse his office for personal gain,” the complaint says.

The complaint is certain to revive questions about the activities of Giuliani, who it says alarmed government officials by circumventing “national security decision making processes.” Giuliani, a Trump loyalist who represented the president in special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, repeatedly communicated with advisers of Ukraine’s president in the days after the phone call.

Published in Dawn, September 27th, 2019