The administration relents, sending the whistle-blower complaint to Capitol Hill.
The acting director of national intelligence, under pressure from Congress to release the full complaint of a whistle-blower who touched off the Ukraine impeachment furor, was to have handed over the document to the House Intelligence Committee at 4 p.m., according to a congressional aide.
The complaint was set to be delivered just hours before a planned House vote on a resolution that would have condemned President Trump and the administration for withholding the material and would have demanded that Joseph Maguire, the acting director of national intelligence, promptly furnish it.
The resolution also demands that Mr. Maguire, who is set to testify before the intelligence panel on Thursday, ensure that the whistle-blower is protected from retribution. It chastises the president for comments disparaging the whistle-blower in recent days.
With the complaint heading to Congress, it was not clear whether the vote would happen.
Democratic leaders wanted to put lawmakers in both parties on record to highlight their case. Sharing the complaint with Congress is already required by law, Democrats assert, but Mr. Maguire had declined to produce it, under instructions from the White House and the Department of Justice.
“This is not a partisan matter; it’s about the integrity of our democracy, respect for the rule of law and defending our Constitution,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, her No. 2, said in a statement on Tuesday. “We hope that all members of the House — Democrats and Republicans alike — will join in upholding the rule of law and oath of office to protect and defend the Constitution as representatives of the American people.”
White House officials were continuing to work on a deal that would allow the whistle-blower to testify before Congress about those concerns, according to people briefed on the effort. The deal could also include the release of a redacted version of the complaint, which formed the basis of a report by the inspector general for the intelligence community, people familiar with the situation said.
The Trump-Zelensky call shows the president encouraging a Biden investigation.
Mr. Trump released a reconstruction on Wednesday of a July 25 call he had with Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, in which he encouraged his Ukrainian counterpart to contact Attorney General William P. Barr about investigating a political rival. Mr. Trump has defiantly denied saying anything inappropriate on the call, but the reconstructed transcript shows he clearly referred by name to former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., a leading 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, and encouraged Mr. Zelensky to reach out to Mr. Barr.
“There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that, so whatever you can do with the attorney general would be great.”
Before the release, he declared on Twitter that Democrats had fallen into his trap, and that the release of the call would exonerate him — and make them look foolish.
The reconstructed transcript’s release and content ensured a day of intense scrutiny for Mr. Trump, who was in New York for the United Nations General Assembly. He met Mr. Zelensky there in the afternoon, and was scheduled to hold a formal news conference later on.
“Period. Full stop. That is lawless,” Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the Democratic Caucus chairman, said of Mr. Trump’s request to Mr. Zelensky. “That undermines our national security. That is an abuse of power. That is unpatriotic.” Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, marveled that the attorney general has now been pulled in and called on Mr. Barr to recuse himself from involvement in the formal impeachment inquiry that Ms. Pelosi announced on Tuesday.
Republicans stuck to their position that Mr. Trump did not offer Mr. Zelensky any inducements nor did he threaten him, so his demand for a Biden inquiry was not improper. “From a quid pro quo aspect, there’s nothing there,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina.
Zelensky treaded lightly with Trump by his side.
Mr. Zelensky and Mr. Trump went before the press after a private meeting Wednesday afternoon at the United Nations, and in the glare of the camera lights, it was not a comfortable moment.
Asked about the phone conversation, Mr. Zelensky tried not to offend. “We had, I think, a good phone call. It was normal. We spoke about many things.”
“Nobody pushed me,” he was saying when Mr. Trump jumped in, “in other words, no pressure.”
“I’m sorry, but I don’t want to be involved” in the American elections, Mr. Zelensky said almost apologetically.
It was Mr. Trump who took the conversation into political territory, once again ripping into Mr. Biden and his son, Hunter, accusing them of corruption, and then veering into familiar territory to excoriate his 2016 rival, Hillary Clinton, for deleting emails.
Biden responds: “It is a tragedy” that Trump “put personal politics above his sacred oath.”
In a statement on Wednesday, Mr. Biden called Mr. Trump’s suggestion that Mr. Zelensky should be in touch with Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, an attempt “to manufacture a smear” against him, “using a malicious conspiracy theory.”
“We also learned that he planned to involve the United States Department of Justice in this scheme — a direct attack on the core independence of that department, an independence essential to the rule of law,” he said.
But he tried deftly to make it not about him — as he made it about him.
“Congress must pursue the facts and quickly take prompt action to hold Donald Trump accountable. In the meantime, I will continue to focus my campaign not on how Donald Trump abused his power to come after my family, but on how he has turned his back on America’s families.”
Other Democratic presidential candidates condemned Trump again, saying the call is a “smoking gun” for impeachment, with at least two candidates using the phrase: Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and the former housing secretary Julián Castro.
Pelosi: “The president has tried to make lawlessness a virtue.”
Ms. Pelosi did not hold back in condemning Mr. Trump’s behavior as she indicated in a statement that the release of the phone call reconstruction would only fuel the impeachment inquiry:
“The release of the notes of the call by the White House confirms that the President engaged in behavior that undermines the integrity of our elections, the dignity of the office he holds and our national security. The President has tried to make lawlessness a virtue in America and now is exporting it abroad.
“I respect the responsibility of the President to engage with foreign leaders as part of his job. It is not part of his job to use taxpayer money to shake down other countries for the benefit of his campaign. Either the President does not know the weight of his words or he does not care about ethics or his constitutional responsibilities.”
She also made it clear that Mr. Barr would now be part of the multipronged House investigation that could yield articles of impeachment. “The transcript and the Justice Department’s acting in a rogue fashion in being complicit in the President’s lawlessness confirm the need for an impeachment inquiry,” she wrote. “Clearly, the Congress must act.”
Shortly after her remarks, the chairmen of the House Judiciary, Intelligence, Oversight and Foreign Affairs committees issued a joint statement:
“The record of the call released by the White House confirms our worst fears: that the President abused his office by directly and repeatedly asking a foreign country to investigate his political rival and open investigations meant to help the President politically. Not once, not twice, but more than half a dozen times during one telephone call. This was a shakedown. The President of the United States asked for a ‘favor’ after the Ukrainian President expressed his country’s need for weapons to defend against Russian aggression.”
The case of the White House talking points: File under “Oops.”
“Entirely appropriate.” “No quid pro quo.” “Not seeking ‘foreign interference.’”
The White House helpfully assembled talking points for congressional Republicans to use in their defense of Mr. Trump ahead of the release of the reconstructed transcript — and then emailed them to Ms. Pelosi’s office, and in effect, the world.
To make matters worse, or at least more comical, the official, Tori Q. Symonds, then sent a follow-up email saying she would “like to recall” the previous message.
Undaunted, Republicans did pick up the White House’s words. The White House had invited a dozen or so Republican lawmakers to review the document in advance and pose questions, officials familiar with the meeting said. At one point, Mr. Trump called into the meeting from the United Nations.
The group included the top leaders of the House, Representatives Kevin McCarthy of California, Steve Scalise of Louisiana and Liz Cheney of Wyoming. Several other Trump allies in the House and Senate were also on hand, including Representative Doug Collins of Georgia, the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee; Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida; Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio; and Senator Jim Risch of Idaho, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
“The House Democrats have been careening from impeachment theory to impeachment theory, they’ve careened from target to target,” Ms. Cheney went on to say. She accused Ms. Pelosi of “trying to weaken the president, trying to weaken his hand as he’s dealing with crucial issues of national security.”
One of the few exceptions was Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, who pointedly did not suggest Ms. Pelosi had gone too far: “She’s able to do what she feels is right. That’s up to her.”
And he expressed deep concern for what he had read.
“Clearly what we’ve seen in the transcript is deeply troubling,” he told reporters.
Later, at The Atlantic Magazine’s annual talk fest, he explained why he thought his party was sticking to the talking points. “I think it’s very natural for people to look at circumstances and see them in the light that’s most amenable to their maintaining power,” he said, “and doing things to preserve that power.”
Trump defends his call: “There was no pressure whatsoever.”
Mr. Trump insisted that the reconstruction of the call showed that he did not exert pressure on his counterpart to investigate a political rival.
“It was going to be the call from hell. It turned out to be a nothing call, other than a lot of people said, ‘I never knew you could be so nice,’” he said during a brief encounter with reporters in New York City as he attended a meeting of Latin American leaders to discuss Venezuela.
Mr. Trump blamed “corrupt reporting” and said that Democrats should be impeached for actions they took related to Ukraine, calling the inquiry “the single greatest witch hunt in American history — probably in history, but in American history. It’s a disgraceful thing.”
“If you noticed, the stock market went up when they saw the nonsense,” he said. “All of a sudden the stock market went down substantially yesterday when they saw a charge. After they read the charge the stock market went up substantially.”
Markets actually dropped when the call script was released at 10 a.m., but regained ground quickly, with the S&P 500 up about 0.21 percent in early morning trading. On Tuesday, the S&P 500 posted its biggest one-day decline in a month.
Democrats were giving no ground. Representative Katherine Clark of Massachusetts, the vice chairwoman of the House Democratic Caucus, said Mr. Trump’s decision to ask the Ukrainian president for a favor amounted to a crime in and of itself.
“The crime is when you ask for that favor, when you inject politics into foreign policy,” she said. “The initial reading shows that not only was Rudolph Giuliani brought in, but the Department of Justice, Attorney General Barr. That is exactly the crime we were concerned about, blurring those lines between the political, our national security, and the official role of the president.”
Trump’s defenders turn to the internet to battle impeachment.
The battle to defend Mr. Trump from impeachment charges is already being fought online.
On Wednesday, the president’s re-election campaign took out dozens of Facebook ads urging his supporters to join an “Impeachment Defense Task Force.” The president’s supporters also received emails urging them to join the group. It’s not clear whether such a group actually exists, or whether the campaign is simply using it to collect donations and email addresses.
“I want to know who stood with me when it mattered most, which is why my team is making me a list of EVERY AMERICAN PATRIOT who adds their name,” read one of the ads.
Democrats are also seizing on the opportunity to rally their supporters online. Senator Kamala Harris, Senator Elizabeth Warren, and Julián Castro, among others, have taken out ads on Facebook calling for Mr. Trump’s impeachment in recent days. Vice President Biden’s Facebook ads — which urged his supporters to “Stand With Joe” — were less impeachment focused.
Here’s why we are not calling the White House’s release a “transcript.”
The words released by the White House recounting Mr. Trump’s conversation with Mr. Zelensky look like a transcript, but the document is marked, Memorandum of Telephone Conversation, and it warns that it is not a verbatim account. Instead, it was “developed with assistance from voice recognition software along with experts and note takers listening.”
Because The New York Times cannot know what exactly was said, we have chosen to call the document a reconstructed transcript.
What happens next? Some things are clear. Some aren’t.
“The process will come,” said Representative Madeleine Dean, Democrat of Pennsylvania, but other lawmakers said the House needed to urgently set its course to maintain momentum and ensure that their case against Mr. Trump does not meander off course. (On Tuesday, Ms. Pelosi charged six committee chairs to put together their best impeachment evidence and transmit it to the Judiciary Committee.)
“There is an understanding that all justice should be swift and sure, and that this has to happen deliberately but relatively quickly,” said Representative Jim Himes of Connecticut.
One challenge: House leaders do not plan to cancel a scheduled two-week recess on Friday, but said that the Judiciary and Intelligence Committees would remain active.
There was also already some early disagreement about the breadth of the case the House should build. Ms. Pelosi’s instructions to the six committees suggested that she was envisioning articles of impeachment beyond just the president’s dealings with Ukraine.
But some moderate Democrats, whose support for an inquiry was key to Tuesday’s announcement, expressed reservations. Representative Mikie Sherrill, who represents a swing district in New Jersey, said Democrats had not made its case to voters on obstruction of justice or other offenses, and should narrow the impeachment case to the Ukraine matter.
Nicholas Fandos, Maggie Haberman, Catie Edmondson, Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Emily Cochrane contributed reporting from Washington and Michael Crowley and Matt Stevens from New York.