Trump wants witnesses fired
Trump is reportedly flying in the face of advice telling him the moves will be viewed as vindictive
TORONTO — A CNN report indicates that President Donald Trump is considering sending impeachment witnesses, who are currently on loan from other agencies, back to their own departments before they were due to leave the White House. In the case of others, he is indicating he has already fired them, when in fact he has not.
Trump is reportedly flying in the face of advice from aides who tell him the moves will be viewed as vindictive. His actions could even be used by Democrats as further evidence that he should in fact be impeached, CNN says.
Among the witnesses targeted for an early switch because of their impeachment testimony, CNN reports, is Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, whom Trump has attacked as a “Never Trumper.” Vindman, director of European affairs at the national security council, testified in public over Ukraine Tuesday. He has already said, in private testimony, that he had concerns about Trump’s behaviour in regard to Ukraine.
Now, Trump reportedly wants Vindman and others gone, and Republicans seem to be backing his strategy of attacking witnesses in the probe, which is centred on Trump’s July 25 phone call with the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky. The House of Representatives’ Democratic-led inquiry is looking into whether Trump misused U.S. foreign policy to undermine former vice president Joe Biden.
Last week, Trump launched into a Twitter diatribe against Marie Yovanovitch, ex-ambassador to Ukraine, as she testified, maligning her time as a U.S. diplomat in Somalia, among other insults.
Piling on, Donald Trump Jr. tweeted as Yovanovitch testified:
“America hired (Donald Trump) to fire people like the first three witnesses we’ve seen. Career government bureaucrats and nothing more.”
The Democrats reacted furiously to Trump’s attack on Yovanovitch, calling it witness intimidation.
But Republican Representative Mark Walker disagreed:
“I don’t think it’s witness intimidation. What I do think, it is a redirection to make sure that people understand, specifically at the State Department, that they serve at the pleasure of the president,” he said, Reuters reported.
Yovanovitch, for her part, said she has been the victim of a smear campaign. She said that when she learned that Trump, talking to Zelensky, had said that “the woman” (Yovanovitch) was “going to go through some things,” the colour drained from her face. She felt the words sounded “like a threat,” NBC reported.
Before Yovanovitch testified, Trump used Twitter to abuse Jennifer Williams, a Mike Pence foreign policy aide, who testified behind closed doors earlier this month that some of Trump’s comments on the phone call last summer were “inappropriate.”
“Tell Jennifer Williams, whoever that is, to read BOTH transcripts of the presidential calls. Then she should meet with the other Never Trumpers, who I don’t know & mostly never even heard of, & work out a better presidential attack!” the president tweeted.
Williams said Trump’s insistence that Ukraine carry out politically sensitive investigations — which she heard on the call to which she was listening
— “struck me as unusual and inappropriate.”
CNN reports that Pence, in the wake of her testimony and Trump’s attack, has now made attempts to distance himself from Williams, indicating that she is a State Department staffer on loan to his office, rather than someone he handpicked.
“You elected Donald Trump to drain the Swamp, well, dismissing people like Yovanovitch is what that looks like. Dismissing people like Kent and Taylor, dismissing everybody involved from the Obama holdover days trying to undermine Trump, getting rid of those people, dismissing them, this is what it looks like,” Trump tweeted on Nov. 16, indicating that he had already gotten rid of three perceived enemies.
And yet, those he was talking about — George Kent, deputy assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, and Bill Taylor, an American diplomat in Ukraine, remain in their jobs, CNN reports. Yovanovitch, too, is still employed by the State Department.
CNN reports Trump staffers as saying that the uncertainty over their co-workers’ futures is making life difficult.