Former U.S. President Donald Trump told voters on March 16 a fictional story about how he allegedly outwitted his Democratic opponents by releasing a "recording" of a 2019 phone conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy that was a critical factor in Trump's first impeachment.
What did Trump tell the voters?
CNN writes that Trump said during a campaign rally in Ohio that he allowed Democrats to make "increasingly wild" statements about what he said to Zelenskyy, "and then we released the tape."
Trump claimed that when Democrat House Speaker Nancy Pelosi "heard" the tape, she was angry that she had been misled by earlier "false" accounts of the conversation.
Trump said Pelosi allegedly told “her people,” “What the hell have you gotten me into? Do you hear that call? He didn't do any of that!"
Trump claimed Pelosi said, "Let's just pretend he did it and move on."
What Trump lied about
CNN emphasises that Trump's story is a complete fabrication. No recording of his conversation with Zelenskyy has ever been made public.
Pelosi couldn't be mad at her allies after hearing the tape of the conversation because she never heard it.
No record of this conversation exists in the US. The Trump White House released a rough written transcript of the discussion in September 2019 that corroborated, rather than contradicted, the government whistleblower's central claim about what Trump said.
In 2019, in a conversation with Trump, Zelenskyy said that Ukraine wanted to buy weapons from the United States. Trump pushed him to investigate Joe Biden, who was then a potential opponent of Trump from the Democratic Party in the 2020 presidential election, as well as to investigate a baseless conspiracy theory about Ukraine's alleged interference in the 2016 US election (in which Russia interfered).
