Dear President Trump,

I did my civic duty and read both the whistleblower’s statement and the rough transcript of your call with Zelensky on 7/24/19. When I finished I felt ill. Ill and wrung out. The whistleblower statement shows that someone from the White House ordered the record of the call to be kept in the archive reserved for tippy top secret stuff, which the whistleblower said was unusual and concerning because none of the content rose to that level. Although I see their point since superficially the conversation was about as trite and banal as could be, but having the world’s most powerful person ask for “favors” from the brand new president of a struggling nation that is dependent on our aid is something that most people understand you, Sir, would never want to have see the light of day. So yes, unusual and concerning, but it really was tippy top secret stuff.

So your first instinct to squirrel it away was correct. It was a ticking time bomb and you knew it. Or at least your WH attorneys knew it and they had the wherewithal to plunk it away for what they thought/desperately hoped was safekeeping, apparently along with a bunch of other conversations you’ve had with other world leaders that were also politically radioactive (more on that last bit in a sec). I guess your shift in strategy to loudly insist that IT WAS NOTHING and to get your GOP props to throw up “nothing-burgers” whenever a microphone is thrust in their faces is really all you have left to try. Desperate times call for desperate (if stupid) measures.

You have to know that most people will see right through this, but of course you don’t care how lame it all looks to those of us with critical thinking skills. No, you’re banking on your special peeps eating it all up and asking for more. Was this why you called the brave patriotic whistleblower and the people who talked with him or her about your high crimes (no misdemeanors here) spies and intimated they should be executed? Slinging bloody red meat chunks out to your base is a specialty of yours, so yeah, here we go.

Your bullshit aside, there are two things from the whistleblower’s submission that I really want us to get a handle on. First, Congress needs to see the readouts from all your conversations with foreign leaders that have been stored in the tippy top secret vault (or whatever it is). Seriously, a good-sized handful of people with the country’s best interest at heart need to have access to the content of those conversations and they need to follow up on any that look like you threw the US under the bus for any reason.

Second, what the heck were you referring to when you said to reporters on August 9^th “I think he’s (Zelensky) going to make a deal with President Putin, and he will be invited to the White House.” There’s more included in the whistleblower’s statement (see the bottom of pg. 4), but this is the critical bit, at least to me. What gives here? How was it that Zelensky’s access to you at the WH was somehow contingent on him making a deal with Putin? That is very stinky and surely there’s something there that we need to understand. I did a search to see if I could find any analysis of this, but so far I’m coming up blank. It is listed in Phillip Bump’s WP timeline of events 10 days after you spoke with Putin and one day after you made it public that Coates was out and Maguire was in so there’s almost certainly something key behind it and we need to know what it is.

May whistleblowers be safe.
May we be willing to hold steady and stay true to what is right even as the storm rages.
May we be strong and brave and keep ourselves healthy to manage the stress.
May you not start a war.

Sincerely,
Tracy Simpson