US envoy ousted after corruption challenge United States
Months before the phone call that set off an impeachment inquiry, many in the diplomatic community were alarmed by the Trump administration’s abrupt removal of a career diplomat from her post as ambassador to Ukraine.
Marie Yovanovitch’s ouster, and the campaign against her that preceded it, are now emerging as a key sequence of events behind a whistleblower’s complaint alleging that Donald Trump pressured a foreign country to investigate his political rival.
In a letter yesterday to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, New Jersey Democratic Senator Robert Menendez demanded answers about Yovanovitch’s removal in May.
Yovanovitch is one of five State Department officials who are to be deposed by the House intelligence, foreign affairs and oversight committees about the whistleblower’s complaint. The others include former US special envoy for Ukraine Kurt Volker, who resigned yesterday.
The removal of Yovanovitch gained little attention at the time. State Department officials said she was merely ending her term a few months ahead of a departure that had been scheduled for July. She kept quiet and moved back to Washington, remaining a diplomat but with a university fellowship and no fixed State Department assignment.
But, in private, many in the diplomatic community in the US and around the world were appalled, believing she had been improperly removed from a sensitive post at a critical moment, as a new Ukrainian president without any previous political experience was taking office in a struggling country in dire need of American economic and military aid in an ongoing fight against Russianbacked separatists.
Trump said in his July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy that Yovanovitch was ‘‘bad news’’ and was ‘‘going to go through some things’’.
However, that characterisation was contradicted by five current and former officials, who
described Yovanovitch as a respected and highly skilled diplomat who was carrying out two main missions on behalf of the administration: pressing the Ukrainian government to address long-standing US concerns about public corruption, and building support for Ukraine’s effort to fight the separatists.
In fact, it was only because
elements of the Ukrainian government wanted her to ease up on pressing for investigations into corruption – and expected her to do so, because they perceived that Trump would care less about the issue – that they began a campaign against her, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
That campaign gained steam
with the arrival on the scene of Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani.
Pompeo ‘‘was opposed to her early removal’’, one of the current officials said. However, when it became clear that opposition to her was not receding, Pompeo arranged for ‘‘a soft landing’’ for her in Washington.