There’s another transcript in Washington waiting to come to light.
Rep. Eugene Vindman, a Virginia Democrat, is alleging there was a “shocking” 2019 call between President Donald Trump and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia following the brutal killing of Jamal Khashoggi that the public needs to hear. Vindman knows about it because he was working at the time as a lawyer on the White House’s National Security Council, which produced a classified summary of the conversation.
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“For me, the call was shocking, and I think the American people deserve to hear the contents of that call,” Vindman tells TIME.
Vindman first spoke publicly about the phone call on the House floor on Tuesday, but his comments were largely swamped in the news by the landslide House vote demanding Trump release the Jeffrey Epstein case files. In his speech, Vindman called on Trump to also release the transcript of his call with MBS, as the Crown Prince is known. “If history is any guide, the receipts will be shocking,” Vindman said.
Those remarks were the opening salvo of a pressure campaign Vindman plans to unfold in the next weeks and months to demand Trump reveal to the public what he told MBS in private. That campaign will include Khashoggi’s widow, Hanan Elatr Khashoggi, joining Vindman for a press conference at the Capitol tomorrow. Vindman tells TIME he has also spoken to the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, Rep. Robert Garcia of California, about writing a bill to require Trump release the transcript.
Vindman’s unusual decision to speak about the sensitive work he was involved with on the National Security Council came about quickly this week. He says the President forced his hand. He was in his Capitol Hill office on Tuesday when he heard that Trump had defended the crown prince during their Oval Office meeting, in response to a question about Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist. Trump said on Tuesday the Saudi leader “knew nothing” about Khashoggi’s 2018 death and “things happen.” But a CIA assessment released in 2021 found that Saudi agents in Istanbul had been acting on bin Salman’s order in 2018 when they killed and dismembered Khashoggi, who had written critically of the Saudi royal family.
Trump’s defense of the Crown Prince outraged Vindman, whose work on the national security council staff during Trump’s first term involved monitoring the contents of sensitive phone calls between Trump and foreign leaders.
“We can’t whitewash what he did,” Vindman says. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Vindman’s name may be familiar because of his better-known twin brother Alexander Vindman—who also worked on the NSC during Trump’s first term and who blew the whistle on Trump’s infamous call with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky that led to Trump’s first impeachment. Trump eventually released the summary transcript of that call which shows Trump suggesting the Ukrainian President investigate his then-political rival Joe Biden.
Now the other Vindman finds himself in a similar situation, pushing for accountability over what the same President said in a private call with a foreign leader. Vindman declined to describe the exact contents of Trump’s call with MBS to TIME. The records of such calls are often classified. But, he stresses, the President has the power to release the records.
In the Oval Office on Tuesday, Trump drew international attention for both his aggressive defense of the Crown Prince and his disparagement of Khashoggi. “A lot of people didn’t like that gentleman that you’re talking about. Whether you like him or don’t like him, things happen, but he knew nothing about it,” Trump said while sitting next to MBS. “We can leave it at that. You don’t have to embarrass our guest by asking a question like that.” The comments dovetailed with ones Trump made in 2019, in an interview for Bob Woodward’s book Rage, in which Trump said he “saved” the Crown Prince’s “ass” after news of Khashoggi broke and that Trump was “able to get Congress to leave him alone.”
Vindman described the President saying “things happen” about the killing as “outrageous.” “A brutal murder like this does not just happen—of a U.S. resident,” he says.
Vindman’s efforts to shed light on the 2019 call follows the successful effort by some lawmakers to force Congress to pass a bill requiring the Justice Department to release much of what it has on Epstein. Trump signed that measure into law on Wednesday. Vindman suggests the timing could be right for another bipartisan effort toward transparency. House Speaker Mike Johnson, who tried and failed to line up Republican opposition to the Epstein vote, looks like he’s “starting to lose a little bit of control of the floor,” Vindman says.