Donald Trump made sure to directly involve Vice President Mike Pence in his scheme to strong-arm the new president of Ukraine into helping to smear his potential 2020 election opponent, Democrat Joe Biden, according to a blockbuster Washington Post report published Wednesday afternoon.
But Pence has claimed that though he met with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky in Warsaw, Poland, on September 1, he was in the dark about how Trump had tried to pressure Zelensky into staging a bogus “investigation” of Biden in a July 25 phone call. But according to the Post report, a top aide to Pence was on the line listening to the call between Trump and Zelensky — and Pence would have received a full transcript of the call “within hours.”
At the September 1 meeting, Pence informed Zelensky that Trump was holding back a military aid package worth more than $400 million until Zelensky did more to “combat corruption.” But in the July 25 call, as detailed in a partial transcript the call released by the White House, the only “corruption” mentioned by Trump were the allegations that Biden intervened in Ukraine to stop an investigation of his son, Hunter Biden, as The Inquisitr reported. Those allegations against Biden have been shown to be false
According to conservative commentator David Frum, a former top aide to President George W. Bush, however, Trump deliberately involved Pence in the Ukraine scheme in order to ensure that Pence was “dirty.”
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In an interview with MSNBC , quoted via Twitter , Frum explained that Trump needed Pence to become “dirty” by involvement in the Ukraine plot, to be sure that Pence would not betray him.
“Donald Trump is not so reckless as to let his vice president remain clean,” Frum explained in the interview with MSNBC host Ari Melber.
“That’s going to be very important to President Trump…to make sure that the vice president is as dirty as possible, to make sure that their interests are aligned.”
Frum’s explanation would seem to clarify a puzzling comment made by Trump on September 25, following the release of the phone call transcript. In those comments, Trump seemed to say that Pence had also had conversations with Zelensky, as reported by The Inquisitr .
“I think you should ask for VP Pence’s conversation, because he had a couple of conversations also,” Trump told reporters.
A separate Washington Post report on Wednesday raised serious questions about the transcript of the July 25 call released by the White House.
According to an analysis by The Post , the five-page transcript which was fewer than 2,000 words in length, was not nearly long enough to account for what has been reported to be a 30-minute conversation between Trump and Zelensky, even including translations. The transcript, according to the Post analysis, is missing about half of the words spoken between Trump and Zelensky — creating a new mystery about what was missing from the transcript.
