Sneak peek: New book goes inside the Trump impeachments

So they had devised a plan: His aides would sell their top Hill surrogates on the transcript — but deliberately hold back the more damaging allegations in the whistleblower report, which documented how Trump systematically targeted Ukraine over several months to exact political favors, including possibly leveraging U.S. military assistance.

"If they could corner lawmakers into publicly defending Trump's call with Zelensky, they believed," the authors write, "then GOP lawmakers would be less likely to break with the White House when the full story came out."

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