Although the White House’s memorandum on President Trump’s now-infamous July call with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky explicitly states that it’s “not a verbatim transcript of a discussion,” a Google search result of the memo says otherwise.
Excellent detective work. Somebody got some 'splaining to do.
Maybe somebody can help me out here. I fail to see the significance of a google result. It doesn’t seem to say anything we didn’t already know. I’m also skeptical that a google result would have any standing in a court (even of public opinion).
It’s probably staring me in the face. Is there such a thing as “reader’s block”?
If there is, it’s catching.
Not sure if it’s eyebrow raising or just chin-stroking, but it sure is interesting.
And somebody had to put that “Transcript!!! - The White House” label on it and somebody had to direct that it be done.
I wonder if the 3 exclamation points give us any clue.
Can anyone just put up a pdf. with a link to whitehouse.gov and call it whatever they like? I’m guessing yes. And, hey, let’s not get into conspiracy theories of our own.
ETA: As others have pointed out on other comment threads, I think the more interesting, important and impactful thing is what Lt. Colonel Vindman and others may say about what was said by Trump that was not included in the released memo of the call, as well as other conversations they may have heard.
ETA(2): Question: Is this the search result you would have gotten yesterday or last week? Because, today Trump has posted numerous tweets where he says, “READ THE TRANSCRIPT!!!” and suggests that puts an end to and contradicts anything that Vindman or others have to say about the call. One tweet includes “READ THE TRANSCRIPT AND THE IMPEACHMENT HOAX IS OVER!”
I’m with you. While the memorandum is not a “transcript” per se, that is what it looks like, and its the word most frequently used to describe it. Its also the word most people would use were they to search for it.
I guess I"m not “most people.” I would search for “telephone call summary” or some such, since we all know it is NOT a word-for-word transcription as one would expect when using the word “transcript.” What it seems like to me is that Google is allowing misleading data to be the search outcome.
I’m finding Google results that spaceships have been sighted, Bigfoot is afoot, and Elvis is eating sandwiches in Lansing, Michigan. I’m thinking those might not all be accurate either, now.
It’s a search engine. It doesn’t make decisions. Nobody is pulling the levers, it just ingests documents and indexes content and links.
It probably got that title from the text link it crawled that pointed to that document. It found multiple sources to the same doc with different text.
The results for a search may change each time you do it, if there is re indexing in between.
It actually says “IJNCLASSIFIED”. Not “UNCLASSIFIED”. Is that significant?
There are somewhere popular links with “Transcript!!!” that are linking to the “transcript”. This is what it HAS to be, as I am sure it would have been dug out already if the term (with the exclamation marks) were somewhere in the actual documents, right?
Does not seem particularly noteworthy.
Trump musta done it in a tweet.
Yes, it shows that it was written in Dutch.
True, but someone had to put up “Transcript!!!” multiple times to get it up on the Google list, no?
I’m sure this waste of space must have made sense to someone at TPM …
In general, Google searches simply ignore punctuation.
That means Trump personally spelled it.
Someone’s been doing some Search Engine Optimization work
often see stuff like that when something has run through OCR (Optical Character Recognition) function - stuff gets electronically garbled … the image of letters gets degraded & then misinterpreted … computers can be very rapid idiots.
This is true, but you can edit the way things appear in Google’s search engine. It has been awhile and it is not my specialty, but I have worked on such things and there are search engine optimization programs that you can use to do just that.
That said, in the grand scheme of things it doesn’t amount much more than a “Oh, here’s yet another example of the White House being less than honest about something.”