Trump news: Intel chief admits Ukraine whistleblower complaint ‘unprecedented’ as details reveal White House tried to hide phone call record

A Ukrainian opposition MP has called on Volodymyr Zelenskiy's office to release a full transcript of the president's July call with Donald Trump.

Oleksiy Goncharenko demanded a full record of the conversation, translated into Ukrainian, the news agency Interfax Ukraine reported.

The White House has acknowledged that the transcript it released yesterday was not a verbatim record of the call and was instead based on "the notes and recollections" of staff assigned to listen to and "memorialise" the conversation.

Indeed, the White House may well not have an actual recording of the conversation as presidential calls have not been routinely taped by at the Oval Office since the 1970s.

There is no word yet on when the whistleblower's complaint about Trump's Ukraine call will be made public.

But Chris Stewart, a Republican member of the House Intelligence Committee, told CNN he expected it will be released this morning.

He said it had been declassified "with minimal redactions".

Donald Trump logged on to Twitter and - reading between the lines - does not seem too happy about something:

Trump has also been rattling out retweets of posts attacking Democrats, mostly by his son Donald Jr:

The House Intelligence Committee will convene in about an hour for a hearing in which Donald Trump's acting director of national intelligence Joseph Maguire will speak publicly for the first time about the Ukraine whistleblower complaint.

Maguire will then go behind closed doors to speak to the Senate intelligence panel.

The unidentified whistleblower first submitted a complaint to Michael Atkinson, the US government's intelligence inspector general, in August. 

Maguire then blocked release of the complaint to congress, citing issues of presidential privilege and saying the complaint did not deal with an "urgent concern." Atkinson disagreed but said his hands were tied.

Atkinson, who met privately with members of congress last week, will also talk behind closed doors to the Senate intelligence panel today.

The House and Senate committees have also invited the whistleblower to testify, but it is uncertain whether the person will appear and whether his or her identity could be adequately protected without Maguire's blessing.

According to the Associated Press, the whistleblower is prepared to speak privately before the Senate and House intelligence committees but their lawyers want to first ensure that they have the appropriate security clearances so that they can be present for any meeting.

The Trump whistleblower complaint is expected to allege a pattern of obfuscation at the White House, with officials moving the records of some of the presidents' communications with foreign officials onto a separate computer network from where they are normally stored. My colleague Dave McClean has more details:

Donald Trump's July phone call with the Ukrainian president was a "mob shakedown", a Democrat member of congress has said.

California representative Eric Swalwell, who sits on the House Intelligence Committee, told MSNBC the conversation was "corrupt" and "the way that third world leaders conduct themselves".

He added the whistleblower's complaint "lays out witnesses we need to follow up with, documents we need to get, and also describes a number of individuals around this disturbing conduct who never came forward".

Joseph Maguire, the acting director of national security is testifying before Congress now, and has called the circumstances facing the US "unprecedented".

Later, when asked if the whistleblower is a "political hack", Mr Maguire demurred, but said he believes the individual "did everything right."

Mr Maguire says he is not sure how the call logs were discovered publicly, when asked by Republican Devin Nunes if conversations between the president and foreign leaders are generally confidential.

Mr Nunes is trying to make the point that Mr Trump is the victim of damaging leaks — which was made into an issue at least in part through the whistleblower complaint, which drew on a half dozen or so officials who were listening in on the call.

Here's an odd moment from earlier in the hearing:

Apparently comedians had called representative Adam Schiff offering to hand over nudes of the president a while back, and Mr Schiff told them to contact the FBI.