Trump: White House ‘Trying to Find Out’ Identity of Person Who Filed Complaint

President Donald Trump gives pauses to answer a reporters' question about a whistleblower as he leaves the Oval Office after hosting the ceremonial swearing-in of Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia at the White House in Washington on Sept. 30, 2019. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

President Donald Trump said that officials in his administration are trying to find out the identity of the person who filed a complaint against him for alleged abuses of the office of the president.

Asked by reporters on Sept. 30 if he knows who the person is, Trump replied: “Well, we’re trying to find out about a whistleblower.”

He said the whistleblower reported things in the complaint that weren’t correct.

Trump said the person who filed the complaint “reported a totally different statement” than the one the president actually made during a phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

“I guess ’statement,' you could say, was the call. I made a call. The call was perfect. When the whistleblower reported it, he made it sound terrible,” Trump said.

He then turned to Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), who he has repeatedly hammered since Schiff fabricated parts of the call transcript while appearing to read from it during a House Intelligence Committee hearing.

“And then, you had Adam Schiff who, even worse, made up my words, which I think is just a horrible. I’ve never even seen a thing like that,” Trump said.

“He actually took words and made it up. The reason is, when he saw my call to the President of Ukraine, it was so good that he couldn’t quote from it because it—there was nothing done wrong. It was perfect,” Trump alleged.

“So Adam Schiff decided, ‘I can’t let this happen, so let me make up’—did you ever hear of this one, Gene? You ever hear a thing like this? So Adam Schiff made up a phony call. And he read it to Congress, and he read it to the people of the United States. And it’s a disgrace. This whole thing is a disgrace.”

President Donald Trump gives pause to answer a reporters' question about a whistleblower as he leaves the Oval Office in Washington on Sept. 30, 2019. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Trump, who was speaking at the swearing-in ceremony for new Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia, said that Zelensky ran for office saying he'd root out corruption and “there was a lot of corruption having to do with the 2016 election against us.”

“And we want to get to the bottom of it, and it’s very important that we do,” Trump said.

Trump asked Zelensky in the call “to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine” before bringing up Crowdstrike, a technology company that probed the reported hack into the Democratic National Committee’s computer system during the 2016 presidential election.

Trump said he wanted to have Attorney General William Barr call Zelensky or one of Zelensky’s officials to help Ukraine “get to the bottom of it.”

After Zelensky mentioned one of his assistants meeting with Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s lawyer, Trump said that “there’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son,” Hunter Biden, “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.”

Biden last year bragged that he threatened to withhold $1 billion in aid from Ukraine in 2016 while he was still vice president unless the country fired its top prosecutor, who was at the time investigating Burisma—a Company that Hunter Biden was a board member of from 2014 to 2019.

“... you’re not getting the billion. I’m going to be leaving here in—I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money,' Biden said. “Well, son of a [expletive]. He got fired.”