Envoy tells of Trump threats
Former US ambassador to Ukraine says she was warned she was being targeted
Laying out the anatomy of a chilling smear campaign, former United States Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch has told House investigators in a transcript released yesterday that Ukrainian officials had warned her in advance that Rudy Giuliani and other allies of President Donald Trump were planning to “do things, including to me” and were “looking to hurt” her.
The former envoy, who was pushed out of her job in May on Trump’s orders, testified that a senior Ukrainian official told her that “I really needed to watch my back”.
While the major thrust of Yovanovitch’s testimony had come out on the day she testified behind closed doors last month in the impeachment inquiry, yesterday’s 317-page transcript provided new details about the bewildering sequence of events that led to the career diplomat’s ouster.
Her account started with the warnings from Ukrainian officials and then led legislators through various attempts to badmouth her both in Ukraine and the US.
Yovanovitch also offered significant new threads of information — including the potential that Trump was directly involved in a phone call with his lawyer Giuliani and the Ukrainians dating back to January 2018 — while pushing back on Republican questions suggesting that she harboured opposition to Trump.
She had been recalled from Kiev before the July 25 phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy that’s at the centre of the impeachment inquiry but was “surprised and dismayed” by what she understood from the transcript of the call.
Yovanovitch told investigators that she was shocked to learn Trump had called her “bad news” in the phone call, adding that she felt threatened and perplexed by his remark that she was “going to go through some things”.
Yovanovitch was recalled from Kiev as Giuliani pressed Ukrainian officials to investigate baseless corruption allegations against Democrat Joe Biden and his son Hunter, who was involved with Burisma, a gas company there.
Giuliani’s role in Ukraine was central to Yovanovitch’s testimony. She said she was aware of an interest by Giuliani and his associates in investigating Biden and Burisma “with a view to finding things that could be possibly damaging to a presidential run”, as well as investigating the 2016 election and theories of Ukraine interference instead of Russian interference.
She drew a link between Giuliani and two businessmen — Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, who have been indicted in the US on charges stemming from campaign donations they made to US politicians with foreign money — as part of the campaign to oust her.
She understood they were looking to expand their business interests in Ukraine “and that they needed a better ambassador to sort of facilitate their business efforts here”.
Yovanovitch said she was told by Ukrainian officials last November or December that Giuliani was in touch with Ukraine’s former top prosecutor, Yuri Lutsenko, “and that they had plans, and that they were going to, you know, do things, including to me”.
She said she was told Lutsenko “was looking to hurt me in the US”. At one point in April, Yovanovitch said she received an early-morning call from Carol Perez, a top foreign service official, abruptly telling her she needed to immediately fly back to Washington. Yovanovitch said when she asked why, Perez told her, “I don’t know, but this is about your security. You need to come home immediately. You need to come home on the next plane.”
The diplomat said she sought advice from Gordon Sondland, Trump’s ambassador to the European Union, after an article appeared in The Hill newspaper about Giuliani’s complaints against her and Sondland told her, “You need to go big or go home,” advising her to “tweet out there that you support the President”. Yovanovitch said she felt she could not follow that advice.
The former envoy stressed to investigators that she was not disloyal to the President.
“I have heard the allegation in the media that I supposedly told our embassy team to ignore the President’s orders since he was going to be impeached,” she said.
“That allegation is false.” She answered “no” when asked point blank if she’d ever “badmouthed” Trump in Ukraine.
The impeachment panels also released testimony from Michael McKinley, a former senior adviser to Pompeo, who testified that he decided to resign from his post after his repeated efforts to get the State Department to issue a statement of support for Yovanovitch after the transcript of the Trump-Zelenskiy phone call was released.
“To see the impugning of somebody I know to be a serious, committed colleague in the manner that it was done raised alarm bells for me,” he said.
House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff says the panels are releasing the transcripts so “the American public will begin to see for themselves”.
Republicans have called for the release of the transcripts as Democrats have held the initial interviews in private, although Republican lawmakers have been present for those closed-door meetings.