The NSC staffer said he pushed to correct the White House’s rough transcript of Trump’s July call with Zelensky.
A Republican congressman on Wednesday confirmed Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman told impeachment investigators that at least two portions of the July phone call between President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky were omitted from the summary of the conversation released by the White House.
“Yeah, he testified that in two occasions the ellipses, the dot-dot-dot, should have been some words,” Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) told NPR. “We annotated those on our copies of the call. I will tell you that some people may see them as significant. I don’t see them as significant.”
Perry, a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, was one of the lawmakers who heard more than 10 hours of explosive testimony Tuesday from Vindman, a National Security Council staffer overseeing Ukraine policy.
Vindman, who listened in on Trump’s call with Zelensky, told investigators that the president undermined U.S. national security when he pressured his foreign counterpart to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, according to a copy of Vindman’s opening statement obtained by POLITICO.
The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal reported that Vindman also testified that the White House’s readout of the call had missing words and phrases, and that he was unsuccessful in attempting to restore all the omissions to the rough transcript.
But Perry’s remarks Wednesday appear to provide the first on-the-record acknowledgment of those details of Vindman’s testimony.
“The words, generally speaking, that were replaced have already been kind of noted elsewhere, either in the call or in conjecture,” Perry said. “So it might be significant in some people’s mind. It might be just inartful, and just a clerical discrepancy.”
Perry, however, declined to comment on what the two leaders allegedly discussed during the parts of the call left out of the official White House summary. He refused to confirm reports that Vindman said that Trump referred to recordings of Biden talking about corruption in Ukraine and that Zelensky mentioned Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian energy firm on whose board Biden’s son, Hunter, sat.
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Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) confirmed that Vindman, during his 10-hour closed-door testimony, said the White House's summary of the July 25 call omitted at least two portions of the actual conversation by using ellipses "…" https://t.co/tlun3ivK2P
— POLITICO (@politico) October 30, 2019
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