Elizabeth Warren isn’t the only prominent Senator publicly calling for the White House to hand over transcripts of Donald Trump’s phone calls with foreign leaders in light of last week’s news that the president may have discussed two Democratic frontrunners with Xi Jinping on a June 18 call.
On Monday, Dianne Feinstein cited both CNN’s account of that call as well as Trump’s own incriminating statements in demanding that Congress be given access to any and all calls on which the president discussed political rivals with foreign governments.
On Thursday, during remarks to reporters on the White House lawn, Trump openly called for China to investigate Joe Biden, despite the impeachment inquiry, which centers around similar requests made of Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky.
Read more: A Brazen Trump Appears To Threaten Xi Jinping, Says China Should Investigate Joe And Hunter Biden
The president’s allies and foes alike were taken aback by Trump’s brazenness.
Later that evening, CNN reported that, according to a pair of sources, Trump told Xi over the summer that the White House would remain silent on pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong as long as trade talks remained on track.
The two also discussed Biden and Warren, the sources claimed. An account of that call is reportedly stored on the same secure server that housed the call with Zelensky and also another potentially inflammatory conversation with Australia’s Scott Morrison, who Trump allegedly enlisted to assist William Barr in uncovering the origins (or “oranges“, as Trump calls them) of the Mueller probe.
“Congress must have access to transcripts of President Trump’s calls with foreign leaders, including China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin”, Feinstein said Monday, in a statement.
Last month, CNN also reported that calls with Putin and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman were inexplicably sequestered away on the code-word protected server.
“It’s been reported that President Trump made similar requests for a politically-motivated investigation on an earlier call with President Xi Jinping and that transcript was hidden on the same highly secured server as the summary of the Ukrainian call”, Feinstein went on remark, on the way to calling for the White House to produce “all records of those calls and all other calls with foreign leaders in which the president’s political rivals were discussed”.
Needless to say, the administration isn’t likely to acquiesce to that demand, which potentially sets up yet another clash with lawmakers, further imperiling the president who, at this point, is presiding over one of the biggest political dumpster fires in the history of the United States of America.
It is just Trump’s MO. Use people and sell them down the river. It is only now that the endgame is near since he took it too far trying to employ those tactics as POTUS. That Teflon coating around him is wearing off fast!