Ukraine envoy says she was ousted by Trump
WASHINGTON — The State Department’s request went in early March to Marie Yovanovitch, a longtime diplomat who had served six presidents: Would she extend her term as ambassador to Ukraine, scheduled to end in August, into 2020?
Less than two months later came another departmental communiqué: Get “on the next plane” to Washington. Her ambassadorship was over.
How and why Yovanovitch was removed from her job has emerged as a major focus of the impeachment inquiry being conducted by House Democrats. And in nearly nine hours of testimony behind closed doors on Capitol Hill on Friday, Yovanovitch said she was told after her recall that President Donald Trump had lost trust in her and had been seeking her ouster since summer 2018 — even though, one of her bosses told her, she had “done nothing wrong.”
Her version of events added a new dimension to the tale of the campaign against her. It apparently began with a business proposition being pursued in Ukraine by two Americans who, according to an indictment against them unsealed Thursday, wanted her gone, and who would later become partners with the president’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, in digging up political dirt in Ukraine for Trump.
From there it became part of the effort by Giuliani to undercut the special counsel’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and push for damaging information about former Vice President Joe Biden, a possible Democratic challenger to Trump in 2020.
In her prepared testimony to House investigators, Yovanovitch, 60, offered no new details about how Giuliani’s campaign against her was communicated to the president or how Trump communicated his demand that she be ordered home. But her testimony, provided to the New York Times, amounted to a scathing indictment to Congress of how the Trump administration’s foreign policy intersected with business and political considerations.
Americans abroad in search of personal gain or private influence — especially in a country like Ukraine with a long history of corruption and people eager to exploit them — threatened to undermine the work of loyal diplomats and the foreign policy goals of the United States, she said.
Her removal, she said, was a case in point.
“Although I understand that I served at the pleasure of the president, I was nevertheless incredulous that the U.S. government chose to remove an ambassador based, as best as I can tell, on unfounded and false claims by people with clearly questionable motives,” she said.
Yovanovitch’s testimony, which could help build momentum for the impeachment inquiry, captured the arc of her troubled tenure in Ukraine: how Giuliani and his allies mounted a campaign against her based on what she described as scurrilous lies, how the State Department capitulated to the president’s demands to recall her, and the upshot — losing an experienced ambassador in a pivotal country that is under threat from Russia and in the middle of a change in government.
She had been removed from her post in Ukraine before the events most at the heart of the impeachment inquiry: whether Trump withheld White House meetings or military aid to Ukraine this summer to pressure its new president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, to investigate Biden and his younger son, Hunter Biden.
That Yovanovitch, who remains a State Department employee, showed up at all to testify was remarkable. In a letter this week, the White House counsel, Pat Cipollone, lashed out at the impeachment inquiry, saying government officials would not testify and no documents would be provided. The White House did not respond to requests for comment Friday.
Yovanovitch’s defiance of the administration’s directive against appearing before the impeachment proceeding raises the possibility that other government officials will follow suit. She called upon State Department leaders and Congress to defend the institution, saying, “I fear that not doing so will harm our nation’s interest, perhaps irreparably.”
The turnabout appeared to validate tactics adopted by Democrats, who have issued rapid-fire subpoenas since they opened the inquiry two weeks ago and warned that any attempts by the administration to block their factfinding will promptly become fodder for an article of impeachment charging Trump with obstructing Congress. When the State Department tried late Thursday to direct Yovanovitch not to appear, Democrats promptly issued a subpoena and told her she had no choice but to appear.
At least one other State Department official is also expected to testify, despite the White House policy: Gordon Sondland, ambassador to the European Union.