The whistleblower complaint declassified and released Thursday is "riddled with third-hand gossip and outright falsehoods," Sean Davis of The Federalist said, likening the document to the unsubstantiated dossier by former British spy Christopher Steele linked to the Russia investigation.
"Rather than provide direct evidence that was witnessed or obtained firsthand by the complainant," Davis, the Federalist's co-founder, argued, "the document instead combines gossip from various anonymous individuals, public media reports, and blatant misstatements of fact and law in service of a narrative that is directly contradicted by underlying facts.
"A footnote in the document even boasts about its use of 'ample open-source information,'" he said.
In a brutal take-down of the complaint, Davis noted, for instance, that it contained numerous phrases admitting that key evidence was not directly observed.
"The complainant then devotes several pages to summaries of various news articles as proof of the underlying allegations in the complaint," he said.
Regarding the July 25 telephone call between President Donald Trump and his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky, Davis argued that Trump never asked Zelensky about "locating and turning over multiple servers" of the Democratic National Committee to the U.S.
As for Trump asking Zelensky to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden, Davis noted Biden's bragging last year about holding $1 billion in Ukrainian aid in 2015 if it did not fire a prosecutor involved in a probe of a state gas company with ties to Hunter Biden.
Davis concluded: "A review of the entire complaint shows it is not so much an example of whistle-blowing, an act that can only be done by the individual holding the whistle, but an elaborate gossipy game of telephone between unnamed individuals whose motives and credibility are impossible to ascertain."
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