Facts First: Trump tells a completely fictitious story and falsely says he released “the recording” of his phone call to Zelensky

Former US President Donald Trump told a completely fictitious story on Saturday about how he allegedly misled his Democratic opponents by releasing “the recording” of the 2019 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that was a key factor in the first impeachment of Trump.

Speaking at a campaign rally Saturday in Ohio, Trump said he let Democrats make “crazier and wilder” claims about what he said to Zelensky, “and then we released the recording.” Trump went on to state that when Democratic Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, who was then Speaker of the House, “heard” this recording, she was angry at having been misled by her allies’ previous “false” descriptions of the call; and claimed that Pelosi told her “her people”: “What kind of situation have you gotten me into? Are you listening to this call? He didn’t do any of this!”

Trump said Pelosi was told, “Let’s pretend he did it and keep moving forward.” He continued: “After they invented the story and after they heard the recording, they died. They didn’t know that the phone call had been recorded. That was a good case of a recorded phone call. And they were recorded and they were caught.”

Facts First: The Trump story is a complete fabrication. No recording of his call with Zelensky was ever released; Pelosi could not have been angry with her allies after hearing a recording of the call because she never heard a recording of the call. In fact, nearly five years after the July 2019 phone call, there is no known American recording of the conversation. What the Trump White House actually released in September 2019 was a rough written transcript of the call — which corroborated, rather than contradicted, a government whistleblower’s central allegations about what Trump had said. Pelosi spokesman Aaron Bennett said Sunday that Trump’s story is “fact-free nonsense.”

Presidential phone calls with foreign leaders are not typically recorded on the American side. Instead, they are memorized inexactly in writing, through a combination of software and US officials listening in.

Alexander Vindman, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who was one of the officials who listened to Trump’s call with Zelensky then in his role as the lead Ukraine expert for the White House National Security Council (and who later became a key witness in the investigation of impeachment), told CNN in a text message on Sunday that there is “no recording” of the call.

“He’s lying,” Vindman said.

Trump’s New Story Echoes the False Claims of His Presidency

Trump has been trying since late 2019 to rewrite the reality about the phone call with Zelensky – in which, after Zelensky talked about Ukraine wanting to buy weapons from the US, Trump pressured him to investigate Joe Biden, who was then Trump’s Democratic opponent in the 2020 presidential election, as well as probing an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory about alleged Ukrainian meddling in the 2016 election (in which Russia interfered). The false story Trump told at his Saturday rally was a more dramatic version of the false stories he told more than four years ago, and which CNN verified at the time.

In earlier versions, Trump claimed he had triumphed over a prominent figure in the impeachment effort, Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff of California, by releasing a rough transcript of the call with Zelensky, after Schiff had misparaphrased what Trump had said. He claimed that Schiff would never have made his comments if he had known that Trump would release the transcript.

But Trump’s claim never made any sense either — because in reality, he released the rough transcript before Schiff gave his exaggerated version at a congressional hearing.

In the 2019 versions of the story, Trump claimed that Pelosi had become disillusioned with her allies after reading the transcript, not after listening to “the tape.” But there was no basis even for this claim; After the raw transcript was released, Pelosi issued a scathing statement accusing Trump of “illegality” and trying to “shake up other countries for the benefit of his campaign.” A spokesperson for Pelosi told CNN in 2019 that Trump’s account of her alleged thoughts was “complete fiction.”

Trump made numerous additional false claims at Saturday’s rally in Ohio. He told the “recording” version of the story while again attacking Schiff, who is now running for a U.S. Senate seat in California.