Last week, Mike Pompeo said he didn't know anything about Trump's Ukraine call
A senior State Department official told The Wall Street Journal on Monday that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo listened in on President Trump's July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, but during an interview last week, he made it sound like he was in the dark about the entire situation.
While appearing on ABC News' This Week, Pompeo was asked by Martha Raddatz about the whistleblower complaint submitted in response to the phone call, which involved Trump discussing Ukraine opening an investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden. "What do you know about these conversations?" Raddatz asked.
"So, you just gave me a report about a I.C. whistleblower complaint, none of which I've seen," Pompeo responded, before quickly pivoting to talk about what the Trump administration has done for Ukraine. Raddatz prefaced her next question by saying, "You say you know nothing about this," and then asked Pompeo about Trump's assertion that it was "perfectly fine" to ask a foreign leader to investigate a political opponent. "I think I saw a statement from the Ukrainian foreign minister yesterday, said there was no pressure applied in the course of the conversation," Pompeo said.
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Pompeo went on to say it "wouldn't be appropriate" to release a transcript of the call, but just a few days later, the White House made public a summary of the conversation. Catherine Garcia
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Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
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