Speculation over reported promise to foreign leader mounts as Giuliani seems to admit to pressing Ukraine to investigate Biden

This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

Speculation in Washington is at fever pitch over the reports that Donald Trump’s promise to a foreign leader so troubled a US intelligence official that it prompted a whistleblower complaint, with the focus now shifting to Ukraine.

Top Democrats could go to court in an attempt to force details of the complaint to be revealed to Congress, after the acting director of intelligence refused to be forthcoming in a closed door hearing on Capitol Hill on Thursday, apparently blocked from doing so by the White House and the Department of Justice.

The whistleblower’s claim centered on Russia’s neighbour, according to reports in the Washington Post and the New York Times, noting that the complaint was filed weeks before Trump spoke to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy.

In a testy interview on CNN on Thursday night, Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, offered conflicting answers to questions on whether he had asked Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden, the former vice-president and 2020 presidential hopeful. At one point he dismissed the claim as ridiculous before admitting it and saying he was proud of it.

Cuomo Prime Time (@CuomoPrimeTime) CNN's @ChrisCuomo: "Did you ask Ukraine to look into Joe Biden?"@RudyGiuliani: "Of course I did"



President Trump's attorney says he had spoken with a Ukrainian official about Joe Biden's possible role in that government's dismissal of a prosecutor who investigated Biden's son. pic.twitter.com/hqmqtmx2VW

The intelligence community inspector general, Michael Atkinson, determined that the whistleblower’s complaint was credible and troubling enough to be considered a matter of “urgent concern”, a legal threshold that requires notification of congressional oversight committees.

The complaint’s existence was first reported on Wednesday night by the Post, which said a former official familiar with the matter said the communication it concerned was a phone call.

But further reporting by the New York Times, which also reported a possible connection to Ukraine, suggested the whistleblower’s intervention was prompted by multiple actions rather than a single conversation with a foreign leader.

Earlier this year Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, canceled a trip to Ukraine over a perceived conflict of interest between his ties to the White House and his apparent partisan political mission to dig for dirt against Biden, whose son once had a role in a Ukrainian gas company.

After the news of a whistleblower alarmed at Trump’s “promise” emerged, Giuliani sent a cryptic tweet about defending “yourself from big fat bullies”.

In a closed-door meeting of the House intelligence committee, Atkinson, the inspector general, said the investigation touched on multiple contacts Trump had with his opposite parties.

Mike Quigley, a Democratic congressman from Illinois, said, according to the Hill: “He didn’t talk about anything about the allegations, where he was very protective. But he did mention that this complaint was based on a series of events, ‘more than one’ to get the exact wordage right.”

Letters from Atkinson to the committee, released on Thursday, said it was an “urgent” matter of “serious or flagrant abuse” that must be shared with members of Congress. But concerns grew on Capitol Hill that intelligence officials were striving to shield Trump from damaging revelations.

Last month the president named Joseph Maguire, a former navy official, as acting director of national intelligence after the departure of Dan Coats, who often clashed with Trump, and the retirement of Sue Gordon, a career professional in the number two position.

Now Maguire is refusing to share details about the whistleblower complaint with the House intelligence committee, asserting that its subject is beyond his jurisdiction.

The committee chairman, Democrat Adam Schiff, said this was an unprecedented departure from the law. “There is an effort to prevent this information from getting to Congress,” he told reporters.

Schiff added that Maguire, in a further departure from standard procedure, consulted with the justice department in deciding not to transmit the complaint to Congress. It is not clear whether the White House was also involved, he said.

Adam Schiff (@RepAdamSchiff) The Inspector General found a whistleblower complaint alleging serious misconduct to be not only credible, but urgent.



Yet the Acting DNI has withheld that complaint from Congress on the basis of potential privilege. He’s wrong.



There's no privilege to be corrupt. pic.twitter.com/80US0rdSJv

Since the director is claiming privileged information, Schiff said he believes the whistleblower’s complaint “likely involves the president or people around him”. The chairman said he would go to court, if necessary, to try to force the administration to turn over the information in the complaint.

On Friday, the Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe tweeted that Schiff could potentially coerce the whistleblower to testify.

Laurence Tribe (@tribelaw) The House Intell Cmtee chaired by @RepAdamSchiff could ask the DC district court to issue a writ of mandamus compelling Acting DNI Maguire to transmit the whistleblower’s urgent report to his Committee forthwith and issue a subpoena to get Maguire & the whistleblower to testify https://t.co/jKhpcBKpmY

Jim Himes, a Democratic congressman from Connecticut, told the MSNBC network that Maguire “broke the law when he decided to basically intercept the inspector general’s report to Congress”.

He added this has “never been done before in the history of inspector general reports to the Congress, and the American people should be worried about that”.

On Thursday Trump lashed out at the initial Washington Post report. “Another Fake News story out there - It never ends!” he wrote on Twitter. “Virtually anytime I speak on the phone to a foreign leader, I understand that there may be many people listening from various U.S. agencies, not to mention those from the other country itself. No problem!”

He added: “...Knowing all of this, is anybody dumb enough to believe that I would say something inappropriate with a foreign leader while on such a potentially ‘heavily populated’ call. I would only do what is right anyway, and only do good for the USA!”

Maguire has been subpoenaed by the House intelligence committee and is expected to testify publicly about the whistleblower complaint next Thursday. Both Maguire and Atkinson are also expected next week at the Senate intelligence committee.

The Trump administration has cut back on its predecessors’ longtime practice of issuing summaries of the president’s conversations with world leaders.

Trump reportedly spoke with Volodymyr Zelenskiy, the president of Ukraine, this summer. The two leaders are due to meet next week in New York, on the sidelines of the annual UN general assembly.

Tribe on Thursday voiced concern in a post on Twitter that the action by Trump could be a breach of national security.

The complaint was filed with Atkinson’s office on 12 August, when Trump was at his golf resort in New Jersey, the Post reports.

California Democratic congressman Ted Lieu said on Twitter that intelligence officers must have been “freaked out” by Trump’s conduct, raised the alarm and alerted the press.