Ousted Ukraine envoy says she felt ‘threat’ from Trump
As Yovanovitch testifies at House hearing, president tweets new criticism
WASHINGTON >> The former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine told the House impeachment inquiry Friday that she felt threatened by President Donald Trump and “shocked, appalled, devastated” that he vilified her in a call with another foreign leader, as Trump attacked her in real time on Twitter, drawing a stern warning about witness intimidation from Democrats.
The extraordinary back-andforth unfolded on the second day of public impeachment hearings, only the third in modern history, as Marie Yovanovitch, who was ousted as the envoy in Ukraine on Trump’s orders, detailed an unsettling campaign by Trump’s allies to undermine her as she pushed to promote democracy and the rule of law in Ukraine.
In deeply personal terms that put a human face on the president’s pressure campaign on Ukraine, Yovanovitch described to the House Intelligence Committee how Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, worked
hand in hand with a corrupt Ukrainian prosecutor to circumvent official channels, smear her and push her out of her job. Her testimony, in a packed and hushed House Ways and Means Committee Room, was an indictment of foreign policy in the Trump era, outlining the harm to American diplomacy and national security from a president who embraced false claims to target his own officials representing the United States overseas.
“Everywhere Marie Yovanovitch went turned bad,” Trump wrote on Twitter, at the very moment that Yovanovitch was testifying about having felt threatened by the president. “She started off in Somalia, how did that go? Then fast forward to Ukraine, where the new Ukrainian President spoke unfavorably about her in my second phone call with him. It is a U.S. President’s absolute right to appoint ambassadors.”
Rep. Adam B. Schiff, D-Calif., chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, interrupted his counsel’s questioning to read the president’s words aloud to Yovanovitch. There were audible gasps in the stately hearing room as he did so, and asked Yovanovitch for her reaction.
“It’s very intimidating,” she replied, taken aback.
To that, Schiff replied gravely, “Some of us here take witness intimidation very, very seriously.”
Democrats said the president’s comments were clear attempts by Trump to intimidate a crucial witness in the impeachment inquiry and do the same to others who might yet come forward, arguing that they could constitute grounds for an article of impeachment against Trump.
At the White House, Trump angrily denied the charge.
“I want freedom of speech,” he told reporters, lashing out at Democrats for conducting what he called an unfair impeachment process.
“It’s considered a joke all over Washington and all over the world,” Trump said of the proceedings, claiming after hours of tweeting about it that he had only watched “a little bit” of the hearing.
Yovanovitch’s testimony, which drew a loud round of applause after she finished, capped a revealing first week of public hearings in the inquiry, as Democrats seek to make their case that Trump abused his power to enlist Ukraine’s help in discrediting his political rivals, chiefly former Vice President Joe Biden. Speaker Nancy Pelosi this week called it “bribery,” echoing the language in the
Constitution that describes impeachable offenses.
Yovanovitch’s testimony did not go precisely to the heart of that allegation; she was gone from Ukraine by the time of the July 25 telephone call in which Trump asked President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine to “do us a favor” and look into Biden and his son Hunter.
But Trump brought up Yovanovitch during that call, shortly after he praised a Ukrainian prosecutor who had been at odds with Yovanovitch over her efforts to root out corruption and shortly before he asked Zelensky about the Bidens. Trump called her “bad news” and said she was going to “go through some things,” a comment that Yovanovitch told the committee had taken her breath away when she read a reconstructed transcript of the call.
She testified that the color drained from her face and she was “shocked, appalled, devastated that the president of the United States would talk about any ambassador like that to a foreign head of state — and it was me. I mean, I couldn’t believe it.”
“It sounded like a threat,” Yovanovitch added.
Her experience set the stage for what happened in the crucial months that followed. In an impassioned defense of the State Department and the career foreign service officers who work — and sometimes give their lives — to advance the interests of the United States, Yovanovitch recounted how she became the target of a smear campaign led by Giuliani, two of his associates — Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, who have since been indicted — and the rightwing news media.
She spoke of her astonishment at how the men, working with a corrupt Ukrainian prosecutor who opposed her efforts to promote the rule of law in the country, were ultimately able to turn Trump against her.
“Perhaps it was not surprising that when our anticorruption efforts got in the way of the desire for profit or power, Ukrainians who preferred to play by the old, corrupt rules sought to remove me,” Yovanovitch said. “What continues to amaze me is that they found Americans willing to partner with them and, working together, they apparently succeeded in orchestrating the removal of a U.S. ambassador.
“How could our system fail like this?” she wondered aloud. “How is it that foreign corrupt interests could manipulate our government?”
Known as Masha to her friends, Yovanovitch, a Canadian immigrant whose parents fled the Soviet Union and Nazis, was known as a vigorous fighter against corruption in Ukraine. She has become a hero to her colleagues in the diplomatic corps (a hashtag #GoMasha has sprung up on Twitter), who say what happened to her did not simply damage a single person’s reputation and career but was also a blow to U.S. foreign policy.
Republicans argued that Yovanovitch is, essentially, irrelevant to the inquiry, because she left before the July 25 call and because ambassadors serve at the pleasure of the president, who may recall them for any reason. And they tried to prove an unsubstantiated theory that Ukrainian officials conspired with Hillary Clinton’s campaign to interfere in the 2016 election at Trump’s expense.
Yovanovitch was recalled from Ukraine abruptly in May, two months earlier than planned. She told lawmakers that she learned she was being pulled back from the deputy secretary of state, John J. Sullivan, who called her while she was hosting an “International Woman of Courage” event honoring a Ukrainian anti-corruption activist who died after having acid thrown at her.
She said Sullivan relayed “words that every foreign service officer understands: ‘The president has lost confidence in you.’ That was a terrible thing to hear.”