Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) said that he’s “even more worried” about a whistleblower complaint reportedly tied to President Trump after reading it on Wednesday.
“All I’ll tell you is this. Two things. Number one, having read the documents in there, I’m even more worried about what happened than when I read the memorandum of the conversation. There are so many facts that have to be examined. It’s very troubling,” Schumer said.
{mosads}The whistleblower complaint was transmitted to Congress on Wednesday. Members of the House and Senate Intelligence committees as well as members of leadership were spotted heading in and out of the Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility as they reviewed the complaint.
In a separate statement, Schumer called for the complaint to be released publicly.
“The public has a right to read the whistleblower’s complaint for themselves. The contents of the complaint should be made public immediately,” he said.
Reports about the whistleblower complaint, which is reportedly tied to Trump’s actions toward Ukraine, led House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to announce on Tuesday the formal launch of an impeachment inquiry.
Schumer threw his support behind the impeachment inquiry on Wednesday after months of refusing to take a position.
“The president kept pushing and pushing and pushing the constitutional envelope. Finally, the president’s conduct made an impeachment inquiry unavoidable,” Schumer said from the Senate floor.
He added at a separate press conference that the release earlier in the day of a partial transcript of a call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “absolutely validates” the inquiry.
In the call, Trump asked Zelensky to work with his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and expressed hope that Zelensky could “look into” former Vice President Joe Biden’s role in the firing of a Ukrainian prosecutor.
Several lawmakers who viewed the whistleblower complaint on Wednesday, including Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and John Cornyn (R-Texas), declined to comment about its contents. One lawmaker estimated that the complaint was between 10 and 12 pages.