Mike Pompeo Argued ‘It Wouldn’t Be Appropriate’ For Donald Trump To Release Ukraine Transcript
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Sunday said that the president should not release the transcript of his phone call to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky because he believed that doing so would be inappropriate.
Per a previous report from The Inquisitr, the former vice president and Democratic Party front-runner for the 2020 nomination demanded that President Trump release a transcript of the call in order to allow Americans to decide what took place during the conversation with the Ukrainian president.
As The Hill noted, Pompeo wouldn’t answer why the White House wouldn’t release the transcript if the president claims nothing inappropriate occurred on the call, telling ABC News’ Martha Raddatz on This Week that they should instead ask the White House.
Still, Pompeo defended the administration’s decision to keep the transcript between Trump and Zelensky from the public.
“Those are private conversations between world leaders and it wouldn’t be appropriate to do so except in the most extreme circumstances,” Pompeo said.
The secretary of state also told Raddatz that he was in was in favor of investigating the former vice president’s activities.
“I do think if Vice President Biden behaved inappropriately, if he was protecting his son and intervened with the Ukrainian leadership in a way that was corrupt, I do think we need to get to the bottom of that,” Pompeo said.
The controversy began last week when news reports surfaced claiming a whistleblower had reported the president for making an inappropriate promise to a foreign leader on a phone call. Subsequent news reports revealed that the call occurred on July 25 and was between Trump and the leader of the Ukraine.
The July 25 call occurred just a day after former Special Counsel Robert Mueller testified before Congress about his findings into Russian interference in the 2016 election that saw Trump rise to the nation’s highest office.
The president reportedly asked Zelensky to investigate Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, eight times. Rumors have suggested that the former vice president intervened in Ukraine in an attempt to secure the dismissal of a prosecutor in the country who was investigating his son, who is involved in the Ukrainian oil industry.
Alaska Republican Party Cancels Presidential Primary, Shielding Donald Trump. #DonaldTrump #USPolitics https://t.co/8GCx97v9w4
— The Inquisitr (@theinquisitr) September 22, 2019
The president, meanwhile, has emphatically denied reports that he asked anything inappropriate of the Zelensky. As The Inquisitr previously reported, last week Trump tweeted about the whistleblower reports, asking whether his followers were “dumb enough” to believe he would say anything inappropriate to a foreign leader on a call he said was “highly populated” with other U.S. officials.
On Friday, the president told the White House press corps that he did not know the identity of the whistleblower, but deemed the individual “partisan.” On an appearance on CNN on Friday, Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, sparred with CNN anchor Chris Cuomo and contradicted himself, first denying that Trump asked Ukraine to investigate Hunter Biden before almost immediately saying the opposite.
Trump on Saturday once again took to Twitter to defend himself against claims that he pressured the Ukrainian government. As The Inquisitr previously reported, Trump called the claims the “Ukrainian Witch Hunt,” and implied that the media was reporting the story to protect Vice President Biden. The president often referred to the investigation into whether his campaign colluded with Russian in 2016 as a “witch hunt.”
