Trump’s troubling patterns
Marie Yovanovitch, the career diplomat swept aside as ambassador to Ukraine as President Trump and his minions urged the country to open baseless political investigations, has a disturbing personal and professional story. But she also spoke Friday to the broader havoc and harm wrought by Trump’s second misadventure in foreign election interference. “As Foreign Service officers are being denigrated and undermined, the institution is also being degraded,” Yovanovitch testified to the House Intelligence Committee on the second day of public testimony in the impeachment inquiry.
After three decades representing presidents of both parties dating to Reagan, Yovanovitch was unceremoniously recalled from Kiev without explanation in May, told to get on the next plane out for her own safety. It was the culmination of a smear campaign linked to the president’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and the Ukrainians who resented Yovanovitch’s efforts, in keeping with U.S. policy, to root out corruption linked to the country’s emergence from Soviet rule. The ambassador first learned of her ouster while conferring a posthumous honor on a Ukrainian anticorruption activist who died slowly and painfully of a sulfuric acid attack.
Yovanovitch later blanched as she read the notes of Trump’s July phone conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, which finds the U.S. president describing the former ambassador and current State Department official as “bad news” even as he praises a Ukrainian prosecutor suspected of corruption. Trump also leveled what the diplomat understood as a “vague threat” that Yovanovitch was “going to go through some things.”
Like the diplomats who testified Wednesday, Yovanovitch was a compelling witness, and her account was further bolstered by events beyond the hearing room. Most remarkably, the president attacked her on Twitter even as she spoke, citing her postings in Kiev and Somalia to assert that “Everywhere Marie Yovanovitch went turned bad.” That is, instead of thanking an American official for taking assignments in difficult places, the president ludicrously attempted to blame her for their difficulties.
Moreover, Trump was continuing the smear campaign the ambassador recounted as well as his campaign to impede this and other investigations. As Southern California Democrat and Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff noted after the hearing, the tweet was “part of a pattern to intimidate witnesses” and “obstruct justice.”
That wasn’t his only backfiring attempt to disrupt the proceedings. The White House also released notes of an earlier call between Trump and Zelensky — with a dramatic reading by the committee’s ranking Republican, Central Valley Rep. Devin Nunes — to prove the president isn’t totally incapable of having an aboveboard conversation with a foreign leader. But the notes raised further questions by contradicting an earlier White House summary and underscoring Zelensky’s eagerness for a meeting with Trump, a benefit the president apparently withheld to force the Ukrainians to probe the 2016 election and 2020 contender Joe Biden.
Also Friday, a jury found Trump adviser Roger Stone guilty on all counts stemming from the investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election. Stone’s trial detailed the Trump team’s first embrace of foreign meddling as well as obstruction. Among Stone’s crimes: intimidating a potential House Intelligence Committee witness.