Reuters reports:

Trump said on Tuesday a “complete, fully declassified and unredacted transcript” of the July 25 call would be released on Wednesday. In it, the Republican president is alleged to have pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to investigate Joe Biden, the U.S. Democratic presidential front-runner.

The transcript would show the call was “totally appropriate,” Trump said on Twitter.

However, standard practice when a president is talking to a foreign leader is not to make a recording but to have at least two and sometimes more note-takers from the National Security Council (NSC) on the call, a former senior NSC official told Reuters.

Those note-takers are themselves usually Central Intelligence Agency officers on assignment to the NSC, he said.

Their notes serve as the principal record of such calls, the former official said. He was not aware of any electronic recordings made by the U.S. government on calls between Trump and other world leaders.

Evelyn Farkas, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense during the Obama presidency, said not only would any so-called transcript be based on notes, but it would also likely be incomplete because the note-takers usually do not include issues that could be controversial if they became public.

“Typically a note-taker will write notes about what the principal says in a fashion that does not embarrass their principal,” said Farkas. [Continue reading…]