The whistle-blower complaint alleges that the president abused his position to pressure Ukraine into finding dirt on Joe Biden that would personally benefit Trump's 2020 campaign, and that White House officials then engaged in a cover-up to hide records of that call. It also appears that the complaint says that Trump also pressured Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to do things to benefit Russia—namely, help cover up their involvement in the 2016 election. Whoa.

As the whistle-blower states at the outset of the nine-page complaint, which you can read here: "the President of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 US election. This interference includes, among other things, pressuring a foreign country to investigate one of the President's main domestic political rivals. The President's personal lawyer, Mr. Rudolf Giuliani, is a central figure in this effort. Attorney General Barr appears to be involved as well."

The whistle-blower alleges that people in the White House knew the import of Trump's phone call with Ukraine's president on July 25, that Trump said things in that call to benefit himself (and Russia), and that special measures were taken to conceal records of that call from the American people.

"In the day following the phone call, I learned from multiple US officials that senior White House officials had intervened to 'lock down' all records of the phone call, especially the official word-for-word transcript of that call that was produced—as is customary—by the White House Situation Room. This set of actions underscored to me that White House officials understood the gravity of what had transpired in the call," the whistle-blower writes.

"White House officials told me they were 'directed' by White House lawyers to remove the electronic transcript from the computer system in which transcripts are typically stored for coordination, finalization, and distribution to Cabinet-level officials," the whistle-blower continues.

"Instead the transcript was loaded into a separate electronic system that is otherwise used to store and handle classified information of an especially sensitive nature. One White House official described this act as an abuse of this electronic system because the call did not contain anything remotely sensitive from a national security perspective."

On July 26, the day after the call, the complaint says that a US special representative for Ukraine negotiations named Kurt Volker met with the president of Ukraine to give "advice... about how to 'navigate' the demands that the [US] president had made of Mr. Zelensky."

A week later, Giuliani traveled to meet one of Zelensky's advisers, although this was apparently a secret meeting (it was "not reported publicly at the time") and it took place not in Ukraine (which would have attracted attention—what's Rudy doing in Ukraine?) but in Madrid, Spain. US officials characterized this meeting as a "direct follow-up" to "the President's call with Mr. Zelensky." According to the whistle-blower, "multiple US officials told me that Mr. Giuliani had reportedly privately reached out to a variety of other Zelensky advisers" as well.

What's attorney general William Barr's purported involvement in all this? And what's the connection to Russia?

As you know if you read the partial transcript of the July 25 call with Zelensky, President Trump mentioned Barr over and over again as someone Zelensky needed to talk to and coordinate with as well, in addition to Giuliani.

The whistle-blower states: "In May, Attorney General Barr announced that he was initiating a 'probe' into the origins of the Russia investigation."

As the whistle-blower explains elsewhere, in addition to pressuring President Zelensky about the Biden stuff, President Trump also pressured Zelensky to "assist in purportedly uncovering that allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election originated in Ukraine."

Suddenly that Crowdstrike mention in the partial transcript from yesterday makes a little more sense. President Trump's "specific request [was] that the Ukrainian leader locate and turn over servers used by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and examined by the US cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike, which initially reported that Russian hackers had penetrated the DNC's networks in 2016."

The whistle-blower adds in a footnote: "I do not know why the President associates these servers with Ukraine."

In other words, if I'm reading this correctly, in that July 25 call, the president was not only asking Zelensky for help in the upcoming 2020 election, but he was also asking Ukraine to provide a server that had been examined by Crowdstrike after the 2016 election—an examination that led to the US to establish that Russia was the country that hacked the Democrats and interfered with our election—so that the president's henchmen, perhaps in coordination with Russian, could retroactively create the impression that "Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election originated in Ukraine" instead of Russia.

That's pretty rich. Trump accuses Democrats all the time of being obsessed with the 2016 election, but he's the one still obsessed with it—and still abusing his position as president to conceal and obscure Russia's clear involvement in it.