Whistleblower complaint on Ukraine call has been declassified, GOP lawmaker says
Whistleblower complaint has been declassified and contains no ‘surprises,’ GOP lawmaker says
Utah Republican Rep. Chris Stewart announced on Fox News’ “The Ingraham Angle” and on social media late Wednesday that the explosive whistleblower complaint concerning President Trump’s July call with Ukraine’s leader has been declassified — and Stewart said that it doesn’t contain any damning information.
“I encourage you all to read it,” Stewart tweeted. The complaint was not immediately available to the public, but was expected to be released Thursday morning.
“It’s been declassified and it’s been released,” Stewart separately told anchor Laura Ingraham. “So it should be available for everyone to go and look at.”
Stewart added that he has personally viewed the complaint, and was initially “anxious” before he took a look — but now is “much more confident than I was this morning that this is going to go nowhere. … there are just no surprises there.”
He continued, “The entirety of it is focused on this one thing, and that’s the transcript of one phone call, the transcript that was released this morning.”
The major development came hours before Acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire was set to testify before Congress on Thursday. Fox News is told there was serious conversation among lawmakers as to how far Maguire could go in an open session at the hearing. One source tells Fox News the administration may have declassified the document so it could be discussed publicly during the hearing.
On Wednesday, Maguire flatly contradicted a report in The Washington Post, and asserted that he never considered resigning over the whistleblower matter or for any other reason.
A bipartisan select group of intelligence committee lawmakers in the House and Senate, who have been demanding details of the whistleblower’s complaint, were granted access to the document in a secure and classified setting earlier Wednesday ahead of Maguire’s testimony.