WASHINGTON, Sept. 24 (Xinhua) -- U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Tuesday that the controversial phone call in July between President Donald Trump and his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky "is not a good thing," shortly after Trump said he had authorized the release of the call's complete transcript.
Trump allegedly pressed his Ukrainian counterpart about eight times in the phone call to seek information about business dealings between Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden's son, Hunter Biden, and a Ukrainian gas company. The information could potentially be damaging to Biden senior's White House bid.
"You don't ask foreign governments to help us in our election. That's what we try to stop with Russia. It's wrong," Pelosi said of Trump.
"The president's words weigh tons. And just bringing up the election is bad enough. That there would be a quid pro quo isn't necessarily in the conversation, but in the sequencing. So this is not a good thing for a democracy," added the Democratic congresswoman from California.
Trump said Tuesday that he had authorized the release of the full transcript of his phone conversation with Zelensky.
The president tweeted from New York, where he was attending the United Nations General Assembly session, that he "authorized the release tomorrow of the complete, fully declassified and unredacted transcript of my phone conversation with President Zelensky of Ukraine."
"You will see it was a very friendly and totally appropriate call," he said.
The phone call, which happened on July 25 and is now under congressional investigation, has been at the center of the increasingly heightened tensions between Congress and the White House stemming from a whistleblower complaint filed in mid-August by an unidentified intelligence official, which alleged that Trump interacted inappropriately with a foreign leader and made an unspecified "promise."
The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that Biden, during his trips to Ukraine as vice president, had asked the Ukrainian government to oust former prosecutor general Viktor Shokin, who had launched an anti-corruption investigation into Burisma Group, a private Ukrainian gas company of which Biden junior was a board member during his father's vice presidency. Biden has denied any wrongdoing.
"No pressure and, unlike Joe Biden and his son, NO quid pro quo!" Trump said in the tweet announcing the release of the transcript.
Pelosi has scheduled a meeting Tuesday afternoon with the chairs of the six committees that are currently probing Trump. That meeting will be followed by a closed-door gathering of the speaker and the 235-member House Democratic Caucus that will possibly weigh on an impeachment, according to U.S. media reports citing lawmakers and aides.
According to CNN, which is tracking Democratic support for the impeachment, 159 members of the Democratic Caucus currently endorse an impeachment inquiry. Pelosi is expected to make a statement on the impeachment after the aforementioned meetings.
