A4 EZ SU T H E W A S H I N G T O N P O S T.S A T U R D A Y, O C T O B E R 5 , 2 0 1 9
whatever he wanted to say.”
As a result, staff fretted that
Trump came across ill-informed
in some calls, and even oafish. In a
conversation with China’s Xi,
Trump repeated numerous times
how much he liked a kind of
chocolate cake, one former offi-
cial said. The president publicly
described the dessert the two had
in April 2017 when Trump and Xi
met at the president’s Mar-a-Lago
resort as “the most beautiful
piece of chocolate cake you have
ever seen.”
Trump preferred to make calls
from the residence, which frus-
trated some NSC staff and West
Wing aides who wanted to be on
hand to give the president real-
time advice. If he held the call in
the Oval Office, aides would gath-
er around the desk and pass him
notes to try to keep the calls on
point. On a few occasions, then-
Chief of Staff John F. Kelly muted
the call to try to get the president
back on track, two officials said.
Though calls with foreign lead-
ers are routinely planned in ad-
vance, Trump a few times called
Canadian Prime Minister Justin
Trudeau and French President
Emmanuel Macron unan-
nounced, as if they were friends, a
former administration official
said.
But officials who had served in
the White House through the end
of 2018 were still shocked by the
whistleblower complaint about
the effort to “lock down” records
of Trump’s July 25 call. The com-
plaint said White House officials
ordered the transcript moved
into a highly secure computer
system, known as NICE, which is
normally reserved only for infor-
mation about the most sensitive
code-word-level intelligence pro-
grams.
“Unheard of,” said one former
official who handled foreign calls.
“That just blew me away.”
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]former official said.
Russia was kicked out of the
group in 2014 for violating inter-
national law when it invaded
Ukraine and annexed Crimea.
Trump has publicly advocated for
Russia to be allowed back in.
Saudi Arabia, which oppresses
women and has a record of hu-
man rights abuses, wasn’t a fit
candidate for membership, the
former official said.
Saudi Arabia was not admitted
to the group.
Calls with foreign leaders have
often been highly orchestrated
events in past administrations.
“When I was at the White
House, there was a very delibera-
tive process of the president ab-
sorbing information from people
who had deep substantive knowl-
edge of the countries and rela-
tionships with these leaders.
Preparation for these calls was
taken very seriously,” Willett said.
“It appears to be freestyle and
ad-libbed now.”
Trump has rejected much of
the protocol and preparation as-
sociated with foreign calls, even
as his national security team tried
to establish goals for each conver-
sation.
Instead, Trump often sought to
use calls as a way to befriend
whoever he was talking to, one
current senior administration of-
ficial said, defending the presi-
dent. “So he might say something
that sounds terrible to the out-
side, but in his mind, he’s trying to
build a relationship with that
person and sees flattery as the
way to do it.”
The president resisted long
briefings before calls or reading
in preparation, several former of-
ficials said. McMaster, who pre-
ferred providing the president
with information he could use to
make decisions, resigned himself
to giving Trump small notecards
with bulleted highlights and talk-
ing points.
“You had two to three minutes
max,” said one former senior ad-
ministration official. “And then
he was still usually going to sayAides bristled at the dismissive
way he sometimes addressed
longtime U.S. allies, especially
women.
In a summer 2018 call with
Prime Minister Theresa May,
Trump harangued the British
leader about her country’s contri-
bution to NATO. He then disput-
ed her intelligence community’s
conclusion that Putin’s govern-
ment had orchestrated the at-
tempted murder and poisoning of
a former Russian spy on British
soil.
“Trump was totally bought into
the idea there was credible doubt
about the poisoning,” said one
person briefed on the call. “A solid
10 minutes of the conversation is
spent with May saying it’s highly
likely and him saying he’s not
sure.”
Trump would sometimes make
commitments to foreign leaders
that flew in the face of U.S. policy
and international agreements, as
when he told a Saudi royal that he
would support their country’s en-
try into the G-7.
“The G-7 is supposed to be the
allies with whom we share the
most common values and the
deepest commitment to uphold-
ing the rules-based order,” thestruck with Chinese President Xi
Jinping, Turkish President Recep
Tayyip Erdogan and Putin.
“We couldn’t figure out early
on why he was being so nice to
Russia,” one former senior ad-
ministration official said. H.R.
McMaster, the president’s then-
national security adviser,
launched an internal campaign to
get Trump to be more skeptical of
the Russians. Officials expressed
surprise in both of his early Putin
calls at why he was so friendly.
In another call, in April 2017,
Trump told Philippine President
Rodrigo Duterte, who had over-
seen a brutal campaign that has
resulted in the extrajudicial kill-
ings of thousands of suspected
drug dealers, that he was doing an
“unbelievable job on the drug
problem.”
Trump’s personal goals seeped
into calls. He pestered Japanese
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe for
help in recommending him for a
Nobel Prize, according to an offi-
cial familiar with the call.
“People who could do things
for him — he was nice to,” said one
former security official. “Leaders
with trade deficits, strong female
leaders, members of NATO —
those tended to go badly.”“What a burden it must be to be
stuck between your position of
trust in the White House and
another obligation you may feel
to the American people to say
something,” he said.
The White House did not re-
spond to a request for comment
Thursday or Friday.
Sen. Lindsey O. Graham
(R-S.C.), a Trump ally, said the
president speaks his mind and
diverges from other presidents
who follow protocol. Graham said
he saw nothing distressing in the
president’s July 25 call with Zel-
ensky and said he expected it to
be worse, partially given his own
experience with Trump on the
phone.
“If you take half of my phone
calls with him, it wouldn’t read as
cleanly and nicely,” he said, add-
ing that the president sounded
like a “normal person.”
This story is based on inter-
views with 12 former or current
officials with knowledge of the
president’s foreign calls. These
officials had direct involvement
in the calls, were briefed on them
or read the transcripts afterward.
All spoke on the condition of
anonymity to discuss the presi-
dent’s private conversations with
world leaders.
The first call Trump made that
set off alarm bells came less than
two weeks after his inauguration.
On Jan. 28, Trump called Putin for
what should have been a routine
formality: accepting a foreign
leader’s congratulations. Former
White House officials described
Trump as “obsequious” and
“fawning,” but said he also ram-
bled off into different topics with-
out any clear point, while Putin
appeared to stick to formal talk-
ing points for a first official ex-
change.
“He was like, ‘Oh my gosh, my
people didn’t tell me you wanted
to talk to me,’ ” said one person
with direct knowledge of the call.
Trump has been consistently
cozy with authoritarian leaders,
sparking anxiety among aides
about the solicitous tones healliance, or simply pressure a
counterpart for a personal favor.
“There was a constant under-
current in the Trump administra-
tion of [senior staff ] who were
genuinely horrified by the things
they saw that were happening on
these calls,” said one former
White House official, who spoke
on the condition of anonymity to
discuss the private conversations.
“Phone calls that were embar-
rassing, huge mistakes he made,
months and months of work that
were upended by one impulsive
tweet.”
But Trump’s July 25 call with
Ukrainian President Volodymyr
Zelensky went beyond whether
the leader of the free world had
committed a faux pas, and into
grave concerns he had engaged in
a possible crime or impeachable
offense. The release last week of a
whistleblower complaint alleging
Trump pressured Ukraine to in-
vestigate his political rivals as
well as the release of a rough
transcript of the July call led to
House Democrats launching an
impeachment inquiry against
Trump.
The Ukraine controversy has
put a renewed focus on Trump’s
unorthodox way of interacting
with fellow world leaders in dip-
lomatic calls.
Critics, including some former
administration officials, contend
that Trump’s behavior on calls
with foreign leaders has at times
created unneeded tensions with
allies and sent troubling signals
to adversaries or authoritarians
that the United States supports or
at least does not care about hu-
man rights or their aggressive
behavior elsewhere in the world.
Joel Willett, a former intelli-
gence officer who worked at the
National Security Council from
2014 to 2015, said he was con-
cerned both by the descriptions of
a president winging it, and the
realization that the president’s
behavior disturbs and frightens
career civil servants.
CALLS FROM A
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) did
not defend Trump but said he did
not take the president’s calls for
foreign investigation of political
rivals seriously.
“I don’t think it’s a real request,”
he told reporters Friday.
But the release of several text
messages from the State Depart-
ment late Thursday revealed a
concerted effort to push Ukraine
to begin the investigations desired
by Trump.
The texts show how Volker and
other State Department officials
coordinated with Zelensky’s top
aide and Giuliani to leverage a
potential summit between Trump
and Zelensky on a promise from
the Ukrainians to investigate Bu-
risma.
In his statement to Congress,
Volker said his efforts to persuade
Trump to support Zelensky were
undermined by information that
Giuliani and others had been feed-
ing the president about corrup-
tion. Trump has since linked those
corruption allegations to Biden,
calling for an investigation.
Texts among Volker, Giuliani
and the U.S. ambassador to the
European Union, Gordon Sond-
land, showed that the men coordi-
nated on a draft statement for the
Ukrainians in an effort to satisfy
Trump’s demands. After sending it
to Giuliani, who wanted an explic-
it reference to Burisma and the
2016 election investigation, Volk-
er and Sondland messaged back
and forth to work up the text to
send back to the Ukrainians, ac-
cording to Volker. The Ukrainians
ultimately did not agree to the
statement upon receiving that
version.
At least one U.S. official, William
B. “Bill” Taylor, the chargé d’affair-
es in Ukraine, voiced concern
about an apparent quid pro quo.
“As I said on the phone, I think
it’s crazy to withhold security as-
sistance for help with a political
campaign,” Taylor texted Sond-
land on Sept. 9, complaining that
the Trump administration’s deci-
sion to withhold congressionally
approved military aid to Ukraine
had already created a “nightmare
scenario.”
“The president has been crystal
clear no quid pro quo’s of any
kind,” Sondland replied.
On Friday, Trump defended the
texts by referring to Sondland’s
statement. “He said, by the way,
there’s ‘no quid pro quo,’ ” the
president said. “And there isn’t.”
[email protected]Karen Tumulty, Paul Sonne and Greg
Jaffe contributed to this report.beating their tom toms like they
want it, but they don’t. They have
the most to be concerned about
because for some of their mem-
bers, to say that we shouldn’t go
forward with this is a bad vote.”
Some Republicans have spoken
out against Trump’s behavior. Af-
ter the president said Thursday
that China should also investigate
Biden, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah)
said it was “wrong and appalling.”
“When the only American citi-
zen President Trump singles out
for China’s investigation is his po-
litical opponent in the midst of the
Democratic nomination process,
it strains credulity to suggest that
it is anything other than political-
ly motivated,” Romney, the 2012
Republican presidential nominee,
said in a statement Friday.
Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.), who is
up for reelection next year, dis-
tanced himself from Trump’s call
for a Chinese investigation target-
ing Biden.
“Americans don’t look to Chi-
nese commies for the truth,” he
said in a statement to the Omaha
World-Herald.an impeachment inquiry of Presi-
dent @realdonaldTrump,” Sen.
Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) tweet-
ed Friday. “They should — and
must — vote to open an inquiry of
impeachment so their CON-
STITUENTS, COUNTRY, and HIS-
TORY can evaluate their actions.”
House Minority Leader Kevin
McCarthy (R-Calif.) sent a letter to
Pelosi on Thursday requesting
that she suspend the impeach-
ment inquiry and ensure that the
full House be allowed to vote on
whether to proceed. McCarthy
said that Pelosi risked creating “a
process completely devoid of any
merit or legitimacy” if she did not
follow specific guidelines to give
“the bare minimum rights grant-
ed to his predecessors.”
In an interview with The Wash-
ington Post, Pelosi said holding a
vote on the House floor was an
option but not a requirement for
proceeding with an inquiry.
“There’s nothing anyplace that
says that we should. However, the
people who are most afraid of a
vote on the floor are the Republi-
cans,” she said. “That’s why they’rescrutiny by Ukrainian prosecutors
for possible abuse of power and
unlawful enrichment. Hunter
Biden was not accused of any
wrongdoing in the investigation.
As vice president, Joe Biden pres-
sured Ukraine to fire its top pros-
ecutor, Viktor Shokin, who Biden
and other Western officials said
was not sufficiently pursuing cor-
ruption cases. At the time, the
investigation into Burisma was
dormant, according to former
Ukrainian and U.S. officials.
Republicans have struggled to
find a consistent defense of Trump
in the wake of the whistleblower’s
report, which was published last
week. The anonymous whistle-
blower claimed that Trump
pushed for the Ukrainian govern-
ment to investigate his political
rival, allegations that have been
confirmed as the congressional
probe has uncovered text messag-
es , internal documents and sworn
testimony from the Trump admin-
istration.
“Democrat House members
cannot be allowed to hide behind
@SpeakerPelosi when it comes to“The Office of the Vice Presi-
dent received the letter after it was
released to the media and it has
been forwarded to Counsel’s Of-
fice for a response,” Katie Wald-
man, spokeswoman for the vice
president’s office, said in a state-
ment. “Given the scope, it does not
appear to be a serious request but
just another attempt by the Do
Nothing Democrats to call atten-
tion to their partisan impeach-
ment.”
Democrats are investigating
whether Trump or others in his
administration linked the release
of the aid to the president’s re-
quest that Ukraine investigate
Biden and his son Hunter.
During a July phone call with
Zelensky, Trump pushed for
Ukrainian prosecutors to work
with Attorney General William P.
Barr and Trump’s personal attor-
ney Rudolph W. Giuliani on an
investigation of alleged corrup-
tion by the Bidens.
Hunter Biden served for nearly
five years on the board of Burisma,
Ukraine’s largest private gas com-
pany, whose owner came underThe Washington Post showed that
Kurt Volker, the former U.S. spe-
cial envoy to Ukraine, defended
Biden in a statement to Congress
that directly undercut Trump’s
claims of corruption by the former
vice president.
“I know him as a man of integri-
ty and dedication to our country,”
Volker said in his testimony
Thursday.
Trump’s concession that he
would probably be impeached by
the House was the latest develop-
ment in what has become an
ad hoc response strategy largely
shaped by the president’s impuls-
es. Since Democrats announced
their inquiry last week, Trump has
shown flashes of anger, frustra-
tion, aggression, defiance and
even indifference.
On Friday, Trump continued to
take a combative stance and cast
himself as a victim of overzealous
Democrats. “We’ve been treated
very unfairly, very different from
anybody else,” he said.
Trump said he would spell out
his complaints in a letter to Pelosi
(D-Calif.), whom Republicans
have increasingly accused of
short-circuiting the formal im-
peachment process by not holding
a vote on the House floor to launch
an inquiry.
The process-based argument
has become a central part of the
GOP response to the impeach-
ment debate, with few Republi-
cans publicly defending Trump’s
behavior or his assertion that he
has the “absolute right” to ask
foreign governments to investi-
gate his political opponents.
Meanwhile, House Democrats
have ramped up their inquiry, in-
terviewing key Trump adminis-
tration officials and issuing sub-
poenas as part of their probe of the
president’s dealings with the
Ukrainian government. On Fri-
day, three House committees sub-
poenaed the White House for doc-
uments and wrote a letter to Vice
President Pence, demanding that
he turn over documents related to
his talks with Ukrainian President
Volodymyr Zelensky.
The letter called for Pence to
deliver documents by Oct. 15 to
explain what role he had in the
White House’s effort to pressure
Zelensky to open investigations of
Trump’s political opponents.
Pence met with Zelensky last
month in Poland as the White
House was withholding nearly
$400 million in aid approved for
Ukraine.
Pence’s office dismissed the re-
quest as unserious.
IMPEACHMENT FROM A
House Democrats seek Ukraine documents from Pence
Trump’s calls with foreign leaders have left some aides ‘genuinely horrified’
MELINA MARA/THE WASHINGTON POST
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) on Capitol Hill on Wednesday.
Republicans are accusing Pelosi of short-circuiting the impeachment process by not holding a vote on the House floor to launch an inquiry.PETE MAROVICH/BLOOMBERG NEWS
President Trump, on his first call with Russian President Vladimir
Putin in 2017, is said to have been “obsequious” and “fawning.”the impeachment inquiry