An Open Letter to American Journalists: It’s NOT a Transcript, and Yes, that matters.

This morning, the Washington Post broke a story under their National Security header, “Trump offered Ukrainian president Justice Dept. help for Biden investigation, memo shows.” The opening of the piece says this …

President Trump told his Ukrainian counterpart to work with the U.S. attorney general to investigate the conduct of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and offered to meet with the foreign leader at the White House after he promised to conduct such an inquiry, according to a rough transcript of the call released Wednesday.

The link takes you to another link on the Washington Post’s website, which shows the document in question. Here’s a picture of the first page of the memorandum. It’s not called a transcript in the official documents. It’s called a “MEMORANDUM OF TELEPHONE CONVERSATION.”

This is not a transcript. The document even tells you so if you look closely at it.

If you look more closely, you can even see, in BOLD, a CAUTION at the bottom of the page that says, “ … A Memorandum of a Telephone Conversation (TELCON) is not a verbatim transcript of a discussion.”