Axed envoy’s fear
Alarmed by Don’s Kiev call
Marie Yovanovitch, the ousted US ambassador to Ukraine, told lawmakers that she was “shocked” and felt threatened when she learned that President Trump had made an ominous comment about her to his Ukrainian counterpart.
She also said Ukrainian officials told her that Rudy Giuliani was orchestrating a smear campaign against her to help two Sovietborn associates, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, according to a partial transcript of her Oct. 11 impeachment-inquiry testimony released by House Democrats on Monday.
Yovanovitch was asked about Trump’s remark to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in their July phone call that she was “going to go through some things.”
The diplomat said she was floored that Trump would badmouth her to a foreign leader.
“I was shocked. I mean, I was very surprised that President Trump would ... would speak about me or any ambassador in that way to a foreign counterpart. I didn’t know what it meant. I was very concerned. I still am,” she said.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi also released a partial transcript of testimony from former Ambassador P. Michael McKinley, who was a senior adviser to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo before quitting over Yovanovitch’s treatment. Also revealed in the transcripts:
Yovanovitch said that she first learned of Giuliani’s effort to have her ousted in December 2018 from a Ukrainian official, and that
Ukrainian officials told her that the Trump lawyer wanted her replaced as part of an effort to launch business ventures with Parnas and Fruman, both now indicted.
She said Ukrainian Interior Minister Arsen Avakov thought “getting into US politics . . . was a dangerous place for Ukraine to be” after Trump asked Zelensky to probe Joe Biden and his son Hunter and an unsubstantiated theory that Ukraine, not Russia, meddled in the 2016 US election.
She said the US ambassador to the EU, Gordon Sondland, told her, “You need to, you know, tweet out there that you support the president.” She didn’t.
McKinley said that he urged Pompeo to release a memo backing Yovanovitch after Trump criticized her, but that he declined.
Yovanovitch said she had angered Yuriy Lutsenko, then Ukraine’s prosecutor general, by pushing him to follow through on his promises to fight corruption.
When Yovanovitch was ordered to take the next plane out of Ukraine, then-Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan told her that she had “done nothing wrong” but that Trump “lost confidence” in her, she said.
Pelosi and Reps. Adam Schiff and Eliot Engel, who are leading the impeachment inquiry, charged in a statement that the transcript showed Trump attempted “to manipulate the levers of power to his personal political benefit.”
Later Monday, Trump claimed he didn’t know Yovanovitch but said that “if you look at the transcripts, the president of Ukraine was not a fan of hers, either.”