Loyal civil servants vs. selfserving president and his enablers
Last Thursday and Friday, two important Americans bore witness to the state of our nation. One was President Donald Trump, addressing political rallies. The other was Marie Yovanovitch, U.S. ambassador to Ukraine until told to get “on the next plane” — because Trump wanted her removed.
Every American should contemplate their remarks and ask: Which speaker do you think represents the America you want to leave to your kids?
This exercise is vital because this impeachment process was not set in motion by the Democratic Party. It was set in motion by civil servants — whistleblowers from the intelligence community, now supported by National Security Council staffers and diplomats. These public servants also took an oath to serve the country and protect the Constitution, and they have shown remarkable courage to call out the president for violating his oath.
John Bolton spoke for them when, while national security adviser, he reportedly instructed Fiona Hill, the Russia expert, to tell White House lawyers he wanted no part “of whatever drug deal” the president’s cronies were cooking up as part of an offthebooks diplomatic effort led by Rudy Giuliani to get Ukraine to dig up dirt on Joe Biden.
This point can’t be stressed enough. Because if Trump is removed from office and the country is healed afterward, it will only be because a majority of Americans understand that this is a fight between apolitical civil servants and Giuliani and Trump and their pals, who care only about serving themselves and their conspiracy theories.
Trump and his enablers at Fox News want to portray this as just another partisan fight — between Trump and his Democratic rivals — in the hope that the public will shrug and say, “There they go again.” They don’t want Americans to understand that this fight is about guarding the cherished norms and institutions that define us as a nation.
Here’s Trump in Louisiana: “The radical Democrats’ policies are crazy. Their politicians are corrupt. Their candidates are terrible. And they know they can’t win on Election Day; so they’re pursuing an illegal, invalid and unconstitutional (expletive) impeachment.”
And here’s Trump in Minneapolis about Biden: “He was only a good vice president because he understood how to kiss Barack Obama’s (expletive).”
And here’s Yovanovitch in her opening statement to the House impeachment investigators: “From August 2016 until May 2019, I served as the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine. Our policy, fully embraced by Democrats and Republicans alike, was to help Ukraine become a stable and independent democratic state, with a market economy integrated into Europe.”
Then Yovanovitch added: “I have heard the allegation in the media that I supposedly told the embassy team to ignore the president’s orders ‘since he was going to be impeached.’ That allegation is false. I have never said such a thing, to my embassy colleagues or to anyone else. … With respect to Mayor Giuliani, I have had only minimal contacts with him. … I do not know Mr. Giuliani’s motives for attacking me. But individuals who have been named in the press as contacts of Mr. Giuliani may well have believed that their personal financial ambitions were stymied by our anticorruption policy in Ukraine.”
And then she explained that after being asked in early March “to extend my tour until 2020, I was then abruptly told in late April to come back to Washington from Ukraine ‘on the next plane.’ You will understandably want to ask why my posting ended so suddenly. I wanted to learn that, too, and I tried to find out. I met with the deputy secretary of state, who informed me of the curtailment of my term.
“He said that the president had lost confidence in me and no longer wished me to serve as his ambassador. He added that there had been a concerted campaign against me, and that the department had been under pressure from the president to remove me since the summer of 2018. He also said that I had done nothing wrong.”
If this is how our government will now act, great harm will be done to “our nation’s interest, perhaps irreparably,” Yovanovitch concluded. We will lose “many of this nation’s most loyal and talented public servants,” and “bad actors” in countries beyond Ukraine will “see how easy it is to use fiction and innuendo to manipulate our system. In such circumstances, the only interests that will be served are those of our strategic adversaries, like Russia, that spread chaos and attack the institutions and norms that the U.S. helped create and which we have benefited from for the last 75 years.”
In Minnesota and Louisiana, Trump supporters chanted “USA, USA, USA” at his redmeat lines. Ask yourself, who’s really protecting and honoring “USA, USA, USA”?