During a campaign rally in Ohio on Saturday, former President Donald Trump spun a tale about his infamous 2019 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, a central element in his first impeachment. Trump claimed he had outsmarted his Democratic adversaries by releasing a supposed “tape” of the call, leading to a surprised and angry reaction from then House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi. However, this narrative is entirely fictitious.
Trump alleged that Pelosi was deceived by her allies’ inaccurate descriptions of the call, leading her to question, “What the hell did you get me into? You hear this call? He didn’t do any of this stuff!” He further claimed that Pelosi was advised to “pretend he did and keep going forward.” Trump continued, “After they made up the story and then after that they heard the tape, they died. They didn’t know that phone call was taped. That was one good case of a phone call being taped. And they were taped and they got caught.”
Facts First: Trump’s narrative is entirely unfounded. No tape of his call with Zelensky was ever released. Pelosi could not have reacted to a non-existent tape. As of nearly five years after the July 2019 call, there is no known US recording of the conversation. What was released by Trump’s White House in September 2019 was a rough written transcript of the call, which supported, rather than refuted, a government whistleblower’s central allegations about what Trump had said. Pelosi spokesperson Aaron Bennett dismissed Trump’s story as “fact-free nonsense” on Sunday.
Presidential phone calls with foreign leaders are not typically recorded by the American side. Instead, they are memorialized in written form by a combination of software and US officials who listen in. Retired Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, who was one of the officials listening to Trump’s call with Zelensky in his role at the time as the top Ukraine expert for the White House’s National Security Council (and who later became an important witness in the impeachment inquiry), confirmed to CNN in a text message on Sunday that there is “no recording” of the call. “He’s lying,” Vindman said.
Trump’s latest narrative is a more dramatic version of false stories he told over four years ago, which CNN fact-checked at the time. In these previous accounts, Trump claimed that he had outsmarted Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff by releasing the rough transcript of the call with Zelensky after Schiff had misleadingly paraphrased what Trump had said. However, this claim is also baseless, as Trump released the rough transcript before Schiff gave his exaggerated rendition of it at a congressional hearing.
In Trump’s 2019 versions of the story, he claimed that Pelosi had been dismayed with her allies after she read the rough transcript, not after she listened to “the tape.” But there was no basis even for that claim; after the rough transcript was released, Pelosi issued a scathing statement accusing Trump of “lawlessness” and attempting “to shake down other countries for the benefit of his campaign.” A Pelosi spokesperson told CNN in 2019 that Trump’s account of her supposed thoughts was “complete fiction.”
Trump made numerous additional false claims at the Saturday rally in Ohio. He told the “tape” version of the story while again bashing Schiff, who is now running for a US Senate seat in California.