President Donald Trump started the morning of Sept. 20 dismissing headlines about someone who blew the whistle on a phone call he had with the president of Ukraine. The call, he
tweeted, was "pitch perfect."
Later that morning, Trump and first lady Melania opened the White House for a day of ceremony with Australia’s prime minister and his wife. Before their dinner of sunchoke ravioli and Dover sole, the four sat in the Oval Office as reporters asked Trump about the whistleblower’s account.
"It’s a ridiculous story. It’s a partisan whistleblower," Trump said, though he added he didn’t know who it was and hadn’t read the complaint.
Since the Sept. 26 release of the whistleblower complaint about his call with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump has insisted more than 80 times that the whistleblower’s account is fake, fraudulent, incorrect, "total fiction," "made up," and "sooo wrong."
On Oct. 5 he
tweeted that the "second hand information ‘Whistleblower’ got my phone conversation almost completely wrong."
"Everything he wrote in that report, almost, was a lie," Trump told reporters Nov. 8.
"The whistleblower defrauded our country, because the whistleblower wrote something that was totally untrue," he said to the approval of supporters at a rally Dec. 10 in Hershey, Pa.
Despite what Trump claims, the whistleblower got the call "almost completely" right.
