If you read the actual released document, it has a huge disclaimer on the first page which states this.
You can see it yourself here https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/25/politics/donald-trump-ukraine...
Is it really? Are you sure you're not confused by articles referring to the same document by different names?
“[S]tandard practice when a president is talking to a foreign leader is not to make a recording but to have at least two and sometimes more note-takers from the National Security Council (NSC) on the call, a former senior NSC official told Reuters. ...
“Their notes serve as the principal record of such calls, the former official said. He was not aware of any electronic recordings made by the U.S. government on calls between Trump and other world leaders.
“Evelyn Farkas, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense during the Obama presidency, said not only would any so-called transcript be based on notes, but it would also likely be incomplete because the note-takers usually do not include issues that could be controversial if they became public. ...
“A former White House senior official concurred there was unlikely to be a recording.
“‘There’s no physical recording but there are a lot of people listening and taking contemporaneous notes of these calls,’ the official said. ‘When you read it, it looks almost like a transcript.’”
There may be no way of knowing for sure if anyone involved genuinely holds principles above power. But there are absolutely issues of principle in play, and in a well-functioning representative society, everyone has the privilege of lining up behind principles to give them currency.
Personally, I'm behind the idea that our head of state should be determining benefits offered to foreign nations by recognizable general national interest, not by personal interest, or partisan interest, certainly including tying foreign participation in investigation theater to aid.
Hell, I'm behind the idea that our head of state should have a coherent concept of what the national interest is.
But then again, that'd require voters who have some idea of this. And citizens who have a vision of society that's more than a struggle for status and privilege for those who achieve it.
"This plane's leaving in about 6 hours. If the prosecutor [investigating his son's firm] isn't fired, you're not getting the money. Well, son of a bitch, got fired!"
52 minutes in:
> Mr. Shokin was not aggressively pursuing investigations into Mr. Zlochevsky or Burisma. But the oligarch’s allies say Mr. Shokin was using the threat of prosecution to try to solicit bribes from Mr. Zlochevsky and his team, and that left the oligarch’s team leery of dealing with the prosecutor.
In addition, the US was not the only government seeking his removal:
> His dismissal had been sought not just by Mr. Biden, but also by others in the Obama administration, as well other Western governments and international lenders. Mr. Shokin had been repeatedly accused of turning a blind eye to corruption in his office and among the Ukrainian political elite, and criticized for failing to bring corruption cases.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/22/us/politics/biden-ukraine...