The whistleblower complaint, annotated

A line-by-line analysis of the report that triggered the Ukraine scandal.

By Zachary B. Wolf and Curt Merrill, CNNPublished September 26, 2019

A complaint against President Donald Trump concerning his

interactions with the Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky was
released with few redactions. It offers a detailed look at concerns from
a government official that Trump has abused his office by soliciting
“interference” from a foreign country in the 2020 presidential
campaign — specifically, that he asked for help digging up damaging
material on a leading Democratic rival, former Vice President Joe
Biden — and that White House officials tried to cover it up. Read the
latest on the complaint. Below is a line-by-line examination of the
allegations.

The Honorable Richard Burr

Chairman
Select Committee on Intelligence
United States Senate

The Honorable Adam Schiff

Chairman
Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence
United States House of Representatives

Dear Chairman Burr and Chairman Schiff:

I am reporting an “urgent concern” in accordance with the procedures outlined

in 50 U.S.C. §3033(k)(5)(A). This letter is UNCLASSIFIED when separated
from the attachment.
The whistleblower cites the portion of US law that deals with the
Inspector General of the Intelligence Community and makes clear that
any “urgent concern” an intelligence community employee wants to
report to Congress must first go through the inspector general.

In the course of my official duties, I have received information from multiple

U.S. Government officials that the President of the United States is using the
power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020
U.S. election. This interference includes, among other things, pressuring a
foreign country to investigate one of the President’s main domestic political
rivals. The President’s personal lawyer, Mr. Rudolph Giuliani, is a central figure
in this effort. Attorney General Barr appears to be involved as well.

“I have received information” is different than witnessing information.

The whistleblower appears to be reporting second-hand information.
That might not matter since it is thoroughly documented, and as the
White House transcript of Trump’s Ukraine phone call shows, what the
whistleblower alleged, at least on that front, was true.
This raises questions that the whistleblower doesn’t address in the
complaint, but which Congress could investigate: Were these other
officials concerned? And if the interference described below is only
one kind of solicitation — “among other things” — what else did Trump
try to do?

Over the past four months, more than half a dozen U.S. officials have informed
me of various facts related to this effort. The information provided herein was
relayed to me in the course of official interagency business. It is routine for U.S.
officials with responsibility for a particular regional or functional portfolio to
share such information with one another in order to inform policymaking and
analysis.

The whistleblower report was filed August 12. Trump’s call with
Zelensky occurred July 25. But here the whistleblower seems to be
saying US officials have been discussing the effort by Trump, Giuliani
and, potentially, Barr since as early as April, the same month Zelensky
assumed office. Giuliani is Trump’s personal lawyer. But Barr is the top
law enforcement officer in the United States. His involvement would
be extremely consequential.
I was not a direct witness to most of the events described. However, I found my
colleagues’ accounts of these events to be credible because, in almost all cases,
multiple officials recounted fact patterns that were consistent with one another.
In addition, a variety of information consistent with these private accounts has
been reported publicly.

There has already been an effort by the White House to use this
admission — that the whistleblower did not directly witness everything
in the complaint — to undermine the complaint as, in Trump’s own
words, “another political hack job.” That view is not shared by the DNI
or the inspector general, who took the complaint seriously. The
whistleblower has asked to remain anonymous.

I am deeply concerned that the actions described below constitute “a serious or

flagrant problem, abuse, or violation of law or Executive Order” that “does not
include differences of opinions concerning public policy matters,” consistent
with the definition of an”urgent concern” in 50 U.S.C. §3033(k)(5)(G). I am
therefore fulfilling my duty to report this information, through proper legal
channels, to the relevant authorities.

One of the definitions of “urgent concern” in US law is: “A serious or

flagrant problem, abuse, violation of law or executive order, or
deficiency relating to the funding, administration, or operation of
an intelligence activity within the responsibility and authority of
the Director of National Intelligence involving classified information,
but does not include differences of opinions concerning public policy
matters.”
This complaint, along with the related transcript of Trump’s Ukraine
call released by the White House, has already led to calls for Trump’s
impeachment. Remember, the Constitution says a President should be
impeached not for breaking US law, but rather for committing treason,
bribery or “high crimes and misdemeanors.” It’s Congress’s job to
determine what those are, in what are known as articles of
impeachment.

I am also concerned that these actions pose risks to U.S. national security and
undermine the U.S. Government’s efforts to deter and counter foreign
interference in U.S. elections.
 This is a good time to recall that special counsel Robert Mueller’s
investigation was about allegations that Trump’s campaign colluded
with Russia in 2016 and that Trump then tried to shut down
investigations into those claims. The final act of that investigation,
Mueller’s testimony before Congress, occurred the day before Trump’s
phone call with Zelensky. A President using his office to influence a
foreign power to get involved in a US election would be different — and
arguably much worse — than an unelected candidate asking for help.

To the best of my knowledge, the entirety of this statement is unclassified when

separated from the classified enclosure. I have endeavored to apply the
classification standards outlined in Executive Order (EO) 13526 and to separate
out information that I know or have reason to believe is classified for national
security purposes. 1

This whistleblower is clearly an intelligence pro and wrote this report

from the outset with an eye to public, unclassified consumption. The
Mueller report went through a long redaction process by the
Department of Justice and during that period, Barr released a short
summary that selectively quoted the report, the result of which was
that the initial public focus was on elements less damning to Trump —
which has not happened in this case.

 If a classification marking is applied retroactively, I believe it is incumbent

upon the classifying authority to explain why such a marking was applied, and
to which specific information it pertains.

Elements of the complaint are redacted later on in the classified

appendix.

I. The 25 July Presidential phone call

Early in the morning of 25 July, the President spoke by telephone with

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. I do not know which side initiated
the call. This was the first publicly acknowledged call between the two leaders
since a brief congratulatory call after Mr. Zelenskyy won the presidency on 21
April.

Multiple White House officials with direct knowledge of the call informed me
that, after an initial exchange of pleasantries, the President used the remainder
 of the call to advance his personal interests. Namely, he sought to pressure the
Ukrainian leader to take actions to help the President’s 2020 reelection
bid. According to the White House officials who had direct knowledge of the
call, the President pressured Mr. Zelenskyy to, inter alia:

 initiate or continue an investigation into the activities of former Vice

2

President Joseph Biden and his son, Hunter Biden;

 assist in purportedly uncovering that allegations of Russian interference

in the 2016 U.S. presidential election originated in Ukraine , with a specific
request that the Ukrainian leader locate and turn over servers used by the
Democratic National Committee (DNC) and examined by the U.S. cyber security
firm Crowdstrike, which initially reported that Russian hackers had penetrated
3

the DNC’s networks in 2016; and

 meet or speak with two people the President named explicitly as his
personal envoys on these matters, Mr. Giuliani and Attorney General Barr, to
whom the President referred multiple times in tandem.

A White House transcript of the call was released September 25. Read
it with context and analysis here.
The whistleblower apparently did not see the White House transcript
of the call, but clearly it was discussed within the US government. The
description of the call is generally accurate. It’s interesting that the
whistleblower notes this is the first “publicly acknowledged” call since
April. The implication is that Trump potentially may have had other,
unacknowledged, calls.
The bigger context is this: Trump is preoccupied with Biden, and has
repeatedly predicted that Biden will win the Democratic primary and
be his opponent in November 2020. This is all about damaging a
potential opponent, but it’s also the American President asking a
foreign country to help investigate two American citizens — Biden and
his son, Hunter. There is no evidence of wrongdoing by either Biden.

The President also praised Ukraine’s Prosecutor General, Mr. Yuriy

Lutsenko, and suggested that Mr. Zelenskyy might want to keep him in his
position. (Note: Starting in March 2019, Mr. Lutsenko made a series of public
allegations-many of which he later walked back-about the Biden family’s
activities in Ukraine, Ukrainian officials’ purported involvement in the 2016
 U.S. election, and the activities of the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv. See Part IV for
additional context.)

Then-Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yury Lutsenko said in May he was

looking to “reanimate” an investigation of Hunter Biden’s former
employer – but that apparently never happened. He also said there was
no evidence of any crime by Biden. Lutsenko left office in August after
the new administration of Zelensky took office.

The White House officials who told me this information were deeply disturbed
by what had transpired in the phone call. They told me that there was already a
“discussion ongoing” with White House lawyers about how to treat the call
because of the likelihood, in the officials’ retelling, that they had witnessed the
President abuse his office for personal gain.

This is an important passage because it suggests unease inside the

White House over Trump’s actions — but also that staffers were
worried they might get in trouble as witnesses.

The Ukrainian side was the first to publicly acknowledge the phone call. On the
evening of 25 July, a readout was posted on the website of the Ukrainian
President that contained the following line (translation from original Russian-
language readout):

 “Donald Trump expressed his conviction that the new Ukrainian

government will be able to quickly improve Ukraine’s image and complete the
investigation of corruption cases that have held back cooperation between
Ukraine and the United States.”

Indeed, Zelensky has an official website that features English

translations of all postings. A statement dated July 25 mentions the
need to address corruption cases standing between countries. The
White House only later acknowledged the call. The US press has often
found out about Trump’s interactions with foreign leaders from the
foreign governments on the other end of the calls, rather than from the
White House. The most infamous instance was when Trump allowed
the then-Russian ambassador and foreign minister into the Oval Office
and they later released pictures on social media, and when the
Kremlin issued a statement about a phone call, also in late July,
 between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin and the White
House acknowledged it hours later.

Aside from the above-mentioned “cases” purportedly dealing with the Biden
family and the 2016 U.S. election, I was told by White House officials that no
other “cases” were discussed.

Based on my understanding, there were approximately a dozen White House

officials who listened to the call-a mixture of policy officials and duty officers
in the White House Situation Room, as is customary. The officials I spoke with
told me that participation in the call had not been restricted in advance because
everyone expected it would be a “routine” call with a foreign leader. I do not
know whether anyone was physically present with the President during the call.

The Situation Room duty officers who prepared the rough transcript
listed the location of the call as the White House residence, and it’s
not clear from the transcript whether anyone was with Trump. The fact
that Trump took no pains to hide the conversation from official
channels suggests that he may truly not see anything wrong with
asking a foreign ally to investigate a fellow American running for office
as a favor, in his capacity as President.

 In addition to White House personnel, I was told that a State Department

official, Mr. T. Ulrich Brechbuhl, also listened in on the call.

 I was not the only non-White House official to receive a readout of the
call. Based on my understanding, multiple State Department and Intelligence
Community officials were also briefed on the contents of the call as outlined
above.

Brechbuhl was born in Switzerland and raised in New York. He is a

West Point classmate, business partner and confidant of Secretary of
State Mike Pompeo, who appointed him to his role at the at the State
Department.

II. Efforts to restrict access to records related to the call

In the days following the phone call, I learned from multiple U.S. officials
that senior White House officials had intervened to “lock down” all 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. This set of
actions underscored to me that White House officials understood the gravity of
what had transpired in the call.

The whistleblower’s use of the phrase “lock down” and subsequent

description is another way to say “cover up.” This explosive allegation
suggests that Trump aides realized that his call was inappropriate
even if Trump publicly says it was “perfect.”

 White House officials told me that they were “directed” by White House
lawyers to remove the electronic transcript from the computer system in which
such transcripts are typically stored for coordination, finalization, and
distribution to Cabinet-level officials.

 Instead, the transcript was loaded into a separate electronic system that
is otherwise used to store and handle classified information of an especially
sensitive nature. One White House official described this act as an abuse of this
electronic system because the call did not contain anything remotely sensitive
from a national security perspective.

I do not know whether similar measures were taken to restrict access to other
records of the call, such as contemporaneous handwritten notes taken by those
who listened in.

This claim will become a key element of any investigation and may
dictate whether it extends to include officials beyond Trump,
including current White House counsel is Pat Cipollone, who took the
job last year after the departure of Don McGahn.
Any effort to conceal information using the White House electronic
system should be covered under presidential records acts, but will
almost certainly end up being the subject of a court battle over
executive privilege.

III. Ongoing concerns

On 26 July, a day after the call, U.S. Special Representative for Ukraine
Negotiations Kurt Volker visited Kyiv and met with President Zelenskyy and a
variety of Ukrainian political figures. Ambassador Volker was accompanied in
 his meetings by U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland.
Based on multiple readouts of these meetings recounted to me by various U.S.
officials, Ambassadors Volker and Sondland reportedly provided advice to the
Ukrainian leadership about how to “navigate” the demands that the President
had made of Mr. Zelenskyy.

Volker is a key player in all of this. CNN has reported that Zelensky
had joked with Volker about Giuliani in a meeting before this phone
call. Volker later set up the meeting between Giuliani and a Zelensky
adviser in an effort to get the Biden matter out of official talks. One
person who’s not mentioned in the complaint: former national security
adviser John Bolton, who was also involved in the Ukraine issue.

I also learned from multiple U.S. officials that, on or about 2 August, Mr.
Giuliani reportedly traveled to Madrid to meet with one of President Zelenskyy’
s advisers, Andriy Yermak. The U.S. officials characterized this meeting, which
was not reported publicly at the time, as a “direct follow-up” to the President’s
call with Mr. Zelenskyy about the “cases” they had discussed.

 Separately, multiple U.S. officials told me that Mr. Giuliani had reportedly
privately reached out to a variety of other Zelenskyy advisers, including Chief of
Staff Andriy Bohdan and Acting Chairman of the Security Service of Ukraine
Ivan Bakanov. 4

 I do not know whether those officials met or spoke with Mr. Giuliani, but
I was told separately by multiple U.S. officials that Mr. Yermak and Mr. Bakanov
intended to travel to Washington in mid-August.

CNN reported in August on Giuliani’s meeting with Yermak, during

which Giuliani pushed for an inquiry by the Ukrainians into Biden.

On 9 August, the President told reporters: “I think [President Zelenskyy] is

going to make a deal with President Putin, and he will be invited to the White
House. And we look forward to seeing him. He’s already been invited to the
White House, and he wants to come. And I think he will. He’s a very reasonable
guy. He wants to see peace in Ukraine, and I think he will be coming very soon,
actually.”
 At that point, Trump had already put the brakes on nearly $400 million
in aid to Ukraine, including $250 million in military aid.

IV. Circumstances leading up to the 25 July Presidential phone

call

Beginning in late March 2019, a series of articles appeared in an online

publication called The Hill. In these articles, several Ukrainian officials — most
notably, Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko — made a series of allegations
against other Ukrainian officials and current and former U.S. officials. Mr.
Lutsenko and his colleagues alleged, inter alia:

 that they possessed evidence that Ukrainian officials—namely, Head of

the National Anticorruption Bureau of Ukraine Artem Sytnyk and Member of
Parliament Serhiy Leshchenko—had “interfered” in the 2016 U.S. presidential
election, allegedly in collaboration with the DNC and the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv; 5

 that the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv—specifically, U.S. Ambassador Marie

Yovanovitch, who had criticized Mr. Lutsenko’s organization for its poor record
on fighting corruption—had allegedly obstructed Ukrainian law enforcement
agencies’ pursuit of corruption cases, including by providing a “do not
prosecute” list, and had blocked Ukrainian prosecutors from traveling to the
United States expressly to prevent them from delivering their “evidence” about
the 2016 U.S. election; and
6

 that former Vice President Biden had pressured former Ukrainian

President Petro Poroshenko in 2016 to fire then Ukrainian Prosecutor General
Viktor Shokin in order to quash a purported criminal probe into Burisma
Holdings, a Ukrainian energy company on whose board the former Vice
President’s son, Hunter, sat.
7

In several public comments, Mr. Lutsenko also stated that he wished to

8

communicate directly with Attorney General Barr on these matters. 9

The allegations by Mr. Lutsenko came on the eve of the first round of Ukraine’s
presidential election on 31 March. By that time, Mr. Lutsenko’s political patron,
President Poroshenko, was trailing Mr. Zelenskyy in the polls and appeared
likely to be defeated. Mr. Zelenskyy had made known his desire to replace Mr.
 Lutsenko as Prosecutor General. On 21 April, Mr. Poroshenko lost the runoff to
Mr. Zelenskyy by a landslide. See Enclosure for additional information.

 It was also publicly reported that Mr. Giuliani had met on at least two
occasions with Mr. Lutsenko: once in New York in late January and again in
Warsaw in mid-February. In addition, it was publicly reported that Mr. Giuliani
had spoken in late 2018 to former Prosecutor General Shokin, in a Skype call
arranged by two associates of Mr. Giuliani. 10

 On 25 April in an interview with Fox News, the President called Mr.

Lutsenko’s claims “big” and “incredible” and stated that the Attorney General
“would want to see this.”

A large portion of that Fox News interview with Trump by Sean Hannity
was focused on Ukraine. “We have a great new attorney general who
has done an unbelievable job in a very short period of time.” Trump
said of Barr. “And he is very smart and tough and I would certainly
defer to him. I would imagine he would want to see this. People have
been saying this whole – the concept of Ukraine, they have been
talking about it actually for a long time.”

On or about 29 April, I learned from U.S. officials with direct knowledge of the
situation that Ambassador Yovanovitch had been suddenly recalled to
Washington by senior State Department officials for “consultations” and would
most likely be removed from her position.

 Around the same time, I also learned from a U.S. official that “associates”
of Mr. Giuliani were trying to make contact with the incoming Zelenskyy team. 11

 On 6 May, the State Department announced that Ambassador

Yovanovitch would be ending her assignment in Kyiv “as planned.”

 However, several U.S. officials told me that, in fact, her tour was curtailed
because of pressure stemming from Mr. Lutsenko’s allegations. Mr. Giuliani
subsequently stated in an interview with a Ukrainian journalist published on 14
May that Ambassador Yovanovitch was “removed … because she was part of
the efforts against the President.”
 Read CNN’s profile of Yovanovitch, a career diplomat whose recall
drew criticism from Democrats earlier this year. In his July 25 phone
call with Zelensky, Trump disparaged his former ambassador. “The
former ambassador from the United States, the woman, was bad news,
and the people she was dealing with in the Ukraine were bad news so I
just want to let you know that,” Trump said — a highly unusual attack
by the President on an American civil servant in a conversation with a
foreign leader.

On 9 May, The New York Times reported that Mr. Giuliani planned to travel to
Ukraine to press the Ukrainian government to pursue investigations that would
help the President in his 2020 reelection bid.

 In his multitude of public statements leading up to and in the wake of the

publication of this article, Mr. Giuliani confirmed that he was focused on
encouraging Ukrainian authorities to pursue investigations into alleged
Ukrainian interference in the 2016 U.S. election and alleged wrongdoing by the
Biden family.12

 On the afternoon of 10 May, the President stated in an interview

with Politico that he planned to speak with Mr. Giuliani about the trip.

 A few hours later, Mr. Giuliani publicly canceled his trip, claiming that Mr.
Zelenskyy was “surrounded by enemies of the [U.S.] President… and of the
United States.”

CNN reported on Giuliani’s very public plans to go to Ukraine and

his subsequent decision to cancel his trip.

On 11 May, Mr. Lutsenko met for two hours with President-elect Zelenskyy,
according to a public account given several days later by Mr. Lutsenko. Mr.
Lutsenko publicly stated that he had told Mr. Zelenskyy that he wished to
remain as Prosecutor General.

Starting in mid-May, I heard from multiple U.S. officials that they were deeply
concerned by what they viewed as Mr. Giuliani’s circumvention of national
security decisionmaking processes to engage with Ukrainian officials and relay
messages back and forth between Kyiv and the President. These officials also
told me:
 that State Department officials, including Ambassadors Volker and
Sondland, had spoken with Mr. Giuliani in an attempt to “contain the damage”
to U.S. national security; and

 that Ambassadors Volker and Sandland during this time period met with
members of the new Ukrainian administration and, in addition to discussing
policy matters, sought to help Ukrainian leaders understand and respond to the
differing messages they were receiving from official U.S. channels on the-one-
hand, and from Mr. Giuliani on the other.

During this same timeframe, multiple U.S. officials told me that the Ukrainian
leadership was led to believe that a meeting or phone call between the President
and President Zelenskyy would depend on whether Zelenskyy showed
willingness to “play ball” on the issues that had been publicly aired by Mr.
Lutsenko and Mr. Giuliani. (Note: This was the general understanding of the
state of affairs as conveyed to me by U.S. officials from late May into early July.
I do not know who delivered this message to the Ukrainian leadership, or
when.) See Enclosure for additional information.

CNN has reported on this point of view. One complicating factor is that
Volker apparently helped set up Giuliani’s meeting with Yermak, the
aide to Ukraine’s president.

Shortly after President Zelenskyy’ s inauguration, it was publicly reported that

Mr. Giuliani met with two other Ukrainian officials: Ukraine’s Special
Anticorruption Prosecutor, Mr. Nazar Kholodnytskyy, and a former Ukrainian
diplomat named Andriy Telizhenko. Both Mr. Kholodnytskyy and Mr.
Telizhenko are allies of Mr. Lutsenko and made similar allegations in the above-
mentioned series of articles in The Hill.

On 13 June, the President told ABC’ s George Stephanopoulos that he would

accept damaging information on his political rivals from a foreign government.

See those comments here.

On 21 June, Mr. Giuliani tweeted: “New Pres of Ukraine still silent on

investigation of Ukrainian interference in 2016 and alleged Biden bribery of
Poroshenko. Time for leadership and investigate both if you want to purge how
Ukraine was abused by Hillary and Clinton people.”
In mid-July, I learned of a sudden change of policy with respect to U.S.
assistance for Ukraine. See Enclosure for additional information.

This would be Trump’s decision to hold up aid, including military aid, to

Ukraine. An outcry from Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill
ultimately forced Trump to back down in September.

ENCLOSURE: Classified appendix

Footnotes

1. Apart from the information in the Enclosure, it is my belief that none of

the information contained herein meets the definition of “classified
information” outlined in EO 13526, Part 1, Section 1.1. There is ample
open-source information about the efforts I describe below, including
statements by the President and Mr. Giuliani. In addition, based on my
personal observations, there is discretion with respect to the
classification of private comments by or instructions from the President,
including his communications with foreign leaders; information that is
not related to U.S. foreign policy or national security—such as the
information contained in this document, when separated from the
Enclosure-is generally treated as unclassified. I also believe that applying
a classification marking to this information would violate EO 13526, Part
1, Section 1.7, which states: “In no case shall information be classified,
continue to be maintained as classified, or fail to be declassified in order
to: (1) conceal violations of law, inefficiency, or administrative error; (or]
(2) prevent embarrassment to a person, organization, or agency.”

There are many indications that this report was written with an eye to
keeping it from being classified. It relies very specifically on a lot of
press reporting and official statements.

2. It is unclear whether such a Ukrainian investigation exists. See Footnote

#7 for additional information.

3. I do not know why the President associates these servers with

Ukraine. (See, for example, his comments to Fox News on 20 July: “And
Ukraine. Take a look at Ukraine. How come the FBI didn’t take this
 server? Podesta told them to get out. He said, get out. So, how come the
FBI didn’t take the server from the DNC?”)

Here is CNN’s Fact Check of Trump’s claims, or what he seems to be

claiming about the server.

4. In a report published by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting

Project (OCCRP) on 22 July, two associates of Mr. Giuliani reportedly
traveled to Kyiv in May 2019 and met with Mr. Bakanov and another
close Zelenskyy adviser, Mr. Serhiy Shefir.

Here is the OCCRP report.

5. Mr. Sytnyk and Mr. Leshchenko are two of Mr. Lutsenko’s main domestic
rivals. Mr. Lutsenko has no legal training and has been widely criticized in
Ukraine for politicizing criminal probes and using his tenure as Prosecutor
General to protect corrupt Ukrainian officials . He has publicly feuded
with Mr. Sytnyk, who heads Ukraine’s only competent anticorruption
body, and with Mr. Leshchenko, a former investigative journalist who has
repeatedly criticized Mr. Lutsenko’s record. In December 2018, a
Ukrainian court upheld a complaint by a Member of Parliament, Mr.
Boryslav Rozenblat, who alleged that Mr. Sytnyk and Mr. Leshchenko had
“interfered” in the 2016 U.S. election by publicizing a document detailing
corrupt payments made by former Ukrainian President Viktor
Yanukovych before his ouster in 2014. Mr. Rozenblat had originally filed
the motion in late 2017 after attempting to flee Ukraine amid an
investigation into his taking of a large bribe. On 16 July 2019, Mr.
Leshchenko publicly stated that a Ukrainian court had overturned the
lower court’s decision.

6. Mr. Lutsenko later told Ukrainian news outlet The Babel on 17 April that
Ambassador Yovanovitch had never provided such a list, and that he was,
in fact, the one who requested such a list.

7. Mr. Lutsenko later told Bloomberg on 16 May that former Vice President
Biden and his son were not subject to any current Ukrainian
investigations, and that he had noevidence against them. Other senior
Ukrainian officials also contested his original allegations; one former
 senior Ukrainian prosecutor told Bloomberg on 7 May that Mr. Shakin in
fact was not investigating Burisma at the time of his removal in 2016.

Here is the Bloomberg story.

8. See, for example, Mr. Lutsenko’s comments to The Hill on 1 and 7 April
and his interview with The Babel on 17 April, in which he stated that he
had spoken with Mr. Giuliani about arranging contact with Attorney
General Barr.

9. In May, Attorney General Barr announced that he was initiating a probe

into the “origins” of the Russia investigation . According to the above-
referenced OCCRP report (22 July), two associates of Mr. Giuliani claimed
to be working with Ukrainian officials to uncover information that would
become part of this inquiry. In an interview with Fox News on 8 August,
Mr. Giuliani claimed that Mr. John Durham, whom Attorney General Barr
designated to lead this probe, was “spending a lot of time in Europe”
because he was “investigating Ukraine.” I do not know the extent to
which, if at all, Mr. Giuliani is directly coordinating his efforts on Ukraine
with Attorney General Barr or Mr. Durham.

10. See, for example, the above-referenced articles in Bloomberg (16

May) and OCCRP (22 July).

11. I do not know whether these associates of Mr. Giuliani were the
same individuals named in the 22 July report by OCCRP, referenced
above.

12. See, for example, Mr. Giuliani’s appearance on Fox News on p April
and his tweets on 23 April and 10 May. In his interview with The New
York Times, Mr. Giuliani stated that the President “ basically knows what
I’m doing, sure, as his lawyer .” Mr. Giuliani also stated: “We’re not
meddling in an election, we’ re meddling in an investigation, which we
have a right to do… There’s nothing illegal about it. .. Somebody could
say it’s improper. And this isn’t foreign policy - I’m asking them to do an
investigation that they’re doing already and that other people are telling
them to stop. And I’ m going to give them reasons why they shouldn’t
 stop it because that information will be very, very helpful to my client,
and may tum out to be helpful to my government.”

(U) CLASSIFIED APPENDIX

(U) Supplementary classified information is provided as follows:

(U) Additional information related to Section II

According to multiple White House officials I spoke with, the transcript of the
President’s call with President Zelenskyy was placed into a computer system
managed directly by the National Security Council (NSC) Directorate for
Intelligence Programs. This is a standalone computer system reserved for
codeword-level intelligence information, such as covert action. According to
information I received from White House officials, some officials voiced
concerns internally that this would be an abuse of the system and was not
consistent with the responsibilities of the Directorate for Intelligence Programs.
According to White House officials I spoke with, this was “not the first time”
under this Administration that a Presidential transcript was placed into this
codeword-level system solely for the purpose of protecting politically sensitive-
rather than national security sensitive-information.

Unnecessarily designating something as classified has long been

criticized as a government technique to keep inconvenient facts quiet.
The whistleblower is suggesting there are other matters that have
been handled in this way under the Trump administration. The
transcript of the call with Zelensky would have stayed out of public
view until after 2040 under its original classification.

(U) Additional information related to Section IV

[Redaction]

I would like to expand upon two issues mentioned in Section IV that might have
a connection with the overall effort to pressure the Ukrainian leadership. As I do
not know definitively whether the below-mentioned decisions are connected to
the broader efforts I describe, I have chosen to include them in the classified
annex. If they indeed represent genuine policy deliberations and decisions
 formulated to advance U.S. foreign policy and national security, one might be
able to make a reasonable case that the facts are classified.

The whistleblower repeatedly makes a point of separating firsthand

knowledge from what he or she has been told or infers.

 I learned from U.S. officials that, on or around 14 May, the President

instructed Vice President Pence to cancel his planned travel to Ukraine to
attend President Zelenskyy’ s inauguration on 20 May; Secretary of Energy Rick
Perry led the delegation instead. According to these officials, it was also “made
clear” to them that the President did not want to meet with Mr. Zelenskyy until
he saw how Zelenskyy “chose to act” in office. I do not know how this guidance
was communicated, or by whom. I also do not know whether this action was
connected with the broader understanding, described in the unclassified letter,
that a meeting or phone call between the President and President Zelenskyy
would depend on whether Zelenskyy showed willingness to “play ball’’ on the
issues that had been publicly aired by Mr. Lutsenko and Mr. Giuliani.

This gets directly to the heart of the matter: Did Zelensky understand
that in order to get aid to buy his Javelins he needed to “play ball”?

 On 18 July, an Office of Management and Budget (0MB) official informed

Departments and Agencies that the President “earlier that month” had issued
instructions to sµspend all U.S. security assistance to Ukraine. Neither 0MB nor
the NSC staff knew why this instruction had been issued. During interagency
meetings on 23 July and 26 July, 0MB officials again stated explicitly that the
instruction to suspend this assistance had come directly from the President,
but they still were unaware of a policy rationale. As of early August, I heard
from U.S. officials that some Ukrainian officials were aware that U.S..aid might
be in jeopardy, but I do not know how or when they learned of it.

The aid was unfrozen in September after an outcry on Capitol Hill.

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