Marie Yovanovitch, the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, pointed her finger at President Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani while detailing her sudden removal from her diplomatic post during Friday’s nationally-televised impeachment testimony, as the president fired back in realtime and said every place she worked “turned bad.”
Trump’s comments ignited an outcry from Democrats: Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff read Trump’s anti-Yovanovitch tweet during the hearing, and called it “witness intimidation.”
During her appearance, Yovanovitch, a career diplomat who served both Republican and Democratic presidents, relayed her story of being suddenly recalled by Trump in May, saying she believes Giuliani played a key role in telling people she was not sufficiently supportive of the president.
“I do not understand Mr. Giuliani’s motives for attacking me, nor can I offer an opinion on whether he believed the allegations he spread about me,” Yovanovitch said.
….They call it “serving at the pleasure of the President.” The U.S. now has a very strong and powerful foreign policy, much different than proceeding administrations. It is called, quite simply, America First! With all of that, however, I have done FAR more for Ukraine than O.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 15, 2019
She argued the efforts against her by the president’s allies hindered her work.
“If our chief representative is kneecapped, it limits our effectiveness to safeguard the vital national security interests of the United States,” Yovanovitch said.
After the hearing started, Trump began attacking her, tweeting, “Everywhere Marie Yovanovitch went turned bad.” He added, “It is a U.S. President’s absolute right to appoint ambassadors.”
At the same time the hearing began Friday, the White House released a new transcript of the president’s first call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, which showed Trump agreeing to meet with Ukraine’s president-elect — without preconditions — in the first official phone call between the two leaders.
Intelligence Committee ranking member Devin Nunes, R-Calif., read the entire letter in his opening statement. A separate call between the two leaders ignited the impeachment inquiry, and Republicans suggested the new transcript is helpful to the president’s argument he did nothing wrong in his conversations with Zelensky.
Yovanovitch’s removal is one of several events at the center of the impeachment effort.
“These events should concern everyone in this room,” Yovanovitch said in her opening remarks. “Shady interests the world over have learned how little it takes to remove an American ambassador who does not give them what they want.”
Democrats have worked to connect the circumstances of Yovanovitch’s ouster to Trump’s alleged pressure campaign to enlist Zelensky in the effort to damage 2020 rival Joe Biden.
“Some have argued, that a president has the ability to nominate or remove any ambassador he wants, that they serve at the pleasure of the president. And that is true,” Schiff, D-Calif., said. “The question before us is not whether Donald Trump could recall an American ambassador with a stellar reputation for fighting corruption in Ukraine, but why would he want to?”
Republicans portrayed the hearing as a waste of time.
“It’s unfortunate that today, and for most of next week, we will continue engaging in the Democrats’ day-long TV spectacles instead of solving the problems we were all sent to Washington to address,” Nunes said.
In particular, Yovanovitch and others have described Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, as leading what one called an “irregular channel” outside the diplomatic mainstream of U.S.-Ukraine relations.
Giuliani and others had claimed Yovanovitch was not supportive of the president and that she had criticized him to others. Trump, in a conversation with Zelensky, referred to her as “bad news.”
Asked on Friday what she thought of those comments from Trump, she said, “I couldn’t believe it. Shocked appalled. Devastated.”
Schiff claimed Friday she was “too tough on corruption for some, and her principled stance made her enemies” and it became clear Trump “wanted her gone.”
Meanwhile, Giuliani also blasted Yovanovich during her testimony, noting that he collected information from “a number of witnesses” about her. In a lengthy statement to Fox News, Giuliani accused Yovanovich, and the U.S. embassy in Ukraine, of “being involved in blatant partisan political activities during the 2016 election.”
“The information I obtained was in the nature of evidence form a number of witnesses. All of them, some allies, some opponents, agreed on Ambassador Yovanovich’s wrongdoing,” Giuliani said, adding that the witnesses “could testify among other things that she blocked Ukrainian witnesses who had evidence of illegal interference in 2016 election from getting visas and coming to the U.S.”
Lawmakers, as they have in previous meetings, on Friday clashed with each other over procedure. Before the testimony began Friday, Schiff shut down New York Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik after Stefanik asked if he would “continue to prohibit witnesses from answering Republican questions.” Schiff said it wasn’t a “proper” point of order, and then declined to recognize Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan who also tried to raise a parliamentary question.
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5 Responses
Diplomacy as with all International spycraft are in the words of late John McCain: mirrors reflecting mirrors
therefore these hearings Are unlikely prove anything
some of the biggest crimes cannot be discovered in hearings
or in a court of law for that matter
Trump would be well advised to shut up and let his lawyers do the talking. So far most of what the Democrats have produced “hearsay” (someone saying what someone else said that they heard that Trump said) which is inadmissable in a criminal trial, The “witnesses” are all showing a personal hatred of Trump (undermines the witnesses credibility) and all they managed to prove is Trump honestly believed there was much corruption in Ukraine (note: so do most Ukranians), and that Biden was part of it (and at best, his son’s “job” doesn’t past the “smell test”). Attacking senior civil servants justs get them sympathy which they probably don’t deserve. Trump should wait until the Senate trial, demand it be televised (uncensored by the left-leaning networks), and use it as a gigantic, free, campaign ad.
She was rightfully fired from her post because she was covering for corrupt Hunter Biden, not to mention that she was on George Soros’s payroll.
The more Trump tweets, the more the debate may shift from impeachment to the 25th Amendment. Even the Fox anchors and guests such as Ken Starr were saying it was crazy for the Trumpkopf to be tweeting such meshugaas while she is testifying. Perhaps, the reality is that the Trumpkopf is crazy as a fox and instead, the President intends to invoke an “insanity defense” once the impeachment moves to trial in the Senate.
He’s so childishly insecure.