JUSTICE DEPARTMENT/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT/UKRAINE/WHISTLEBLOWER: “The Trump administration on Wednesday [9-25-19] released a reconstructed transcript of President Trump’s 30-minute conversation with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine on July 25 that was at least in part the focus of a disputed whistle-blower complaint. Separately, the Justice Department released a revised version of a memo by its Office of Legal Counsel that declared that it was lawful to withhold that complaint from Congress, notwithstanding an inspector general’s determination that the complaint was credible and raised an ‘urgent concern’ of the sort that a statute says must be shown to lawmakers. Both documents should be treated with caution. A footnote in the five-page reconstructed transcript says it is not verbatim, and its text contains ellipses. Similarly, a footnote in the Office of Legal Counsel memo says it is a rewritten version and that ‘we have changed the prior version to avoid references to certain details that remain classified.’”
–Charlie Savage and Adam Goldman, “The Trump-Zelensky Phone Call: Key Takeaways From Two New Documents,” The New York Times online, September 25, 2019