Check the facts: Trump claims falsely that he released “the tape” of his Zelensky call while fabricating an entirely fake narrative.

TFD – Explore the controversy surrounding Donald Trump’s recent claims during an Ohio event, where he made untrue statements and criticized Adam Schiff’s campaign for a California US Senate seat. Get the full story with The Fox Daily.

On Saturday, the former president of the United States, Donald Trump, narrated a completely made-up tale about how he had allegedly outwitted his Democratic rivals by disclosing “the tape” of the 2019 phone conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, which was a major contributing cause to Trump’s first impeachment.

During a campaign rally on Saturday in Ohio, Trump asserted that he let Democrats to make “wilder and wilder” claims regarding his conversation with Zelensky, “and then we released the tape.” Subsequently, Trump asserted that Democratic Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the Speaker of the House at the time, was incensed that she had been duped by her allies’ earlier “false” accounts of the call and exclaimed to “her people”: “What the hell did you get me into? Have you heard this call? All of this stuff is not his fault!

Pelosi was allegedly instructed, “Let’s just pretend he did and keep going forward,” according to Trump. He went on, “They died after they heard the audio and after they made up the story. They had no idea the phone call had been recorded. That was one good case of a phone call being taped. They were apprehended after being taped.

First the facts: Trump’s narrative is wholly untrue. No tape of his call with Zelensky was ever released; Pelosi could not possibly have been angry with her allies after hearing a tape of the call because she has never heard a tape of the call. In actuality, no US tape of the July 2019 call is known to exist as of almost five years later. What Trump’s White House actually released in September 2019 was a rough written transcript of the call — which corroborated, rather than contradicted, a government whistleblower’s central allegations about what Trump had said. Pelosi spokesperson Aaron Bennett said Sunday that Trump’s story is “fact-free nonsense.”

Telephone conversations between foreign leaders and the president are usually not recorded by the United States. Instead, a combination of technologies and listening US authorities creates an imperfect textual memorial.

There is “no recording” of the call, according to a text message sent to CNN on Sunday by retired Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, who was among the officials listening to Trump’s call with Zelensky while serving as the White House’s top Ukraine expert at the time and going on to become a key witness in the impeachment investigation.

Vindman remarked, “He’s lying.”

Trump’s latest narrative repeats his fabrications during his time in office.

Since late 2019, Trump has been attempting to distort the truth surrounding the conversation he had with Zelensky. During that conversation, Trump pressed Zelensky to look into Joe Biden, the Democratic nominee facing Trump in 2020, and to look into an unfounded conspiracy theory regarding alleged Ukrainian meddling in the 2016 election (which Russia was involved in). Trump’s fabrications from his rally on Saturday were a more theatrical take on lies he told more than four years prior, which CNN fact-checked at the time.

In the earlier reports, Trump asserted that he had defeated Democratic Representative Adam Schiff of California, a significant player in the impeachment process, by making public the raw transcript of the conversation with Zelensky, following Schiff’s deceptive paraphrasing of Trump’s remarks. He asserted that if Schiff had known Trump would make the preliminary transcript public, he would never have said what he did.

However, that assertion by Trump was also nonsensical, given he had made public the preliminary transcript prior to Schiff providing his inflated version of it during a congressional hearing.

According to Trump’s 2019 interpretations of events, Pelosi was shocked by her friends not after hearing “the tape,” but rather after reading the draft transcript. However, there was no evidence to support even that assertion; following the publication of the preliminary transcript, Pelosi made a harsh statement accusing Trump of acting in a “lawless” manner and of trying “to shake down other countries for the benefit of his campaign.” In 2019, a representative for Pelosi told CNN that Trump’s description of her purported ideas was “pure fiction.”

Trump continued to make a lot of other untrue statements during the Ohio event on Saturday. He recounted the “tape” version of events while criticizing Schiff once more. Schiff is currently vying for a California US Senate seat.