Diplomat lays out White House campaign to oust and ‘hurt’ her

WASHINGTON » It started with a warning to watch her back, that people were “looking to hurt” her. From there, former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch told House investigators, it escalated into a chilling campaign to fire her as President Donald Trump and his allies angled in Eastern Europe for political advantage at home.

Testimony from Yovanovitch, released Monday, offered a first word-for-word look at the closed-door House impeachment hearings. Inside, Democrats and Republicans are waging a pitched battle over what to make of Trump’s efforts to get Ukraine’s leaders to investigate political rival Joe Biden, Biden’s son and Democratic activities in the 2016 election.

The transcript came out on the same day that four Trump administration officials defied subpoenas to testify, acting on orders from a White House that is fighting the impeachment investigation with all its might. Among those refusing to testify: John Eisenberg, the lead lawyer at the National Security Council and, by some accounts, the man who ordered a rough transcript of Trump’s phone call with Ukraine’s leader moved to a highly restricted computer system.

During nine hours of sometimes emotional testimony, Yovanovitch detailed efforts led by Rudy

Giuliani and other Trump allies to push her out of her post. The career diplomat, who was recalled from 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 was revealed in her opening statement, Monday’s 317page transcript provided new details.

Yovanovitch offered significant threads of information including the possibility that Trump was directly involved in a phone call with Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, and the Ukrainians dating back to January 2018. And she pushed back on Republican suggestions that she harbored opposition to Trump.