Trump's Ukraine call, what we know so far

Key from the CNN report above is the fact that the transcript (appears to be a "near complete transcript") is NOT a verbatim depiction of the actual call. This means that it was edited by WH officials before release.

From the New York Times:

WASHINGTON — President Trump repeatedly pressured the president of Ukraine for cooperation with his political agenda in a July 25 call, urging his counterpart to start corruption investigations while stressing the United States’ role in military assistance for Kiev.

In a reconstruction of the call released by the White House, Mr. Trump urged President Volodymyr Zelensky to work with Attorney General William P. Barr on potential corruption investigations connected to former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., a Democratic rival, and an unsubstantiated theory about stolen Democratic emails in 2016.

Mr. Zelensky reacted to Mr. Trump’s assertion that the United States had “done a lot for Ukraine” by saying that his country was ready to purchase Javelin anti-tank missiles from the United States for its long-running war against Russian-backed separatists in the country’s east.

“I would like you to do us a favor though,” Mr. Trump responded, several times pressing Mr. Zelensky to use Mr. Barr’s help in opening investigations of Mr. Biden and his family and of a company involved in the beginnings of the F.B.I. inquiry of Russia’s 2016 election interference. [...]

The five-page “memorandum of telephone conversation” distributed by the White House includes a cautionary note indicating that it was “not a verbatim transcript” but instead was based on “notes and recollections of Situation Room Duty officers” and national security staff. But senior administration officials said voice recognition software was used in preparing the document which included long, direct quotations. [...]

In the days before the memorandum of conversation was released, news reports revealed that Mr. Trump used the call in July to pressure Mr. Zelensky for an investigation about Mr. Biden’s actions on behalf of his son Hunter Biden’s work with a business in Ukraine.

From the CBSN video:

We know that aid to Ukraine was held up. From the President's own mouth, that he spoke to the Ukrainian president, and he spoke about corruption, and the Bidens, the bridge is the quid pro quo... she (Speaker Pelosi) is saying it doesn't matter.

HuffPost reported on Monday insight from Fox News analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano,

Fox News’ Andrew Napolitano warned on Monday that revelations of President Donald Trump’s alleged requests for election help from Ukraine are far more damning than any of the other scandals that have plagued his administration.

“I think this is the most serious charge against the president, far more serious than what Bob Mueller dug or dragged up against him, if there was a quid pro quo,” Napolitano, a judge and the network’s senior judicial analyst, said Monday, referring to the former special counsel’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 campaign.

According to The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, in an August whistleblower complaint, a member of the intelligence community flagged a July 25 phone call from Trump to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, whom Trump allegedly asked several times to assist his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani with an investigation of former Vice President Joe Biden’s son.

The same month, U.S. military aid was being withheld from Ukraine, though the decision was made in early July, The New York Times reported.

Even if Trump’s conversation with Zelensky made no explicit reference to a deal, Napolitano argued it may have been implicit.

“If you are the President of the United States and you are making a conversation that you know your intelligence community is listening to, of course you’re not going to articulate a quid pro quo,” he said. “You’ll just make the quid pro quo happen.”

THAT is why, as Pelosi indicated (see the CBSN video, at the 2:00 mark) there is NO requirement that there be a quid pro quo in the conversation.

What this boils down to is that Trump is toast. I've been saying so for more than a year. 20th Century history (of the two most high profile Fascist dictators of the WWII era, Hitler and Mussolini) coupled with social and zoological research on so-called alpha males (bullies who try to claim alpha male status) make it crystal clear that Trump's "shelf life" as occupant of the American White House can only be extremely limited.