"Trump went through his calls that day until he got to the last one on the list: Taiwan. Because there was so much confusion during the transition, according to some White House insiders, nobody noticed in time to stop it."
In the case of Trump’s Taiwan call, the most often reported version of the story also is the one the least believed by people actually in the know. This version was largely accepted by the Washington establishment because it was plausible enough and because, in the chaos of the moment, there were too many other scandals drawing the media’s attention to search for a better version after this basic explanation was printed.
This widely accepted version, as reported by The New York Times and others, credits the Taiwan call to former Kansas senator Bob Dole, whose lobbying law firm, Alston & Bird, gets paid $280,000 a year by the Taiwanese government. Dole “worked behind the scenes over the past six months to establish high-level contact between Taiwanese officials and President-elect Donald J. Trump’s staff.” The Times story even included an interview with Dole himself, speaking on behalf of the Taiwanese government. “They’re very optimistic,” Dole said.
But that’s not the way it actually went down, according to the people who were directly involved. The real connection between the Trump team and Taiwan, they say, was made when Randy Schriver, a former Pentagon official who at the time led a small think tank called the Project 2049 Institute that was partially funded with Taiwanese government money, reached out to a friend of his who was a staffer on the State Department transition team. Schriver told the transition staffer that he had spoken with Taiwanese government officials about a call between Trump and Tsai. The staffer added the call to Trump’s call sheet and sent the call sheet up to Trump Tower in New York.