USA TODAY International Edition
Ousted envoy symbolizes clash
State officials resist Trump over Ukraine
WASHINGTON – When Marie Yovanovitch, the former U. S. ambassador to Ukraine, takes her turn in the House Democrats’ witness chair on Friday, her testimony will capture a key dynamic in the scandal: a revolt by career State Department officials against what they saw as President Donald Trump’s distorted, back- channel diplomacy.
Trump yanked Yovanovitch from her post in April, after his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, targeted her with what other diplomats described as a “smear” campaign. Democrats believe Giuliani wanted Yovanovitch out because her anti- corruption work in Ukraine was an impediment to Trump’s efforts to pressure that country’s leader to investigate his political rival, former Vice President Joe Biden, and his son Hunter, who worked for the energy company Burisma Holdings.
“You can’t promote principled anticorruption action without pissing off corrupt people,” George Kent, the State Department’s deputy assistant secretary for Europe and Eurasia, told the House Intelligence Committee on Wednesday.
Career diplomats have acknowledged that presidents have the right to replace ambassadors at will, a prerogative Republican lawmakers have emphasized. But Yovanovitch’s removal struck a nerve inside the State Department and the White House because it reflected the power that Giuliani wielded despite being outside the government.
“There was no basis for her removal,” Fiona Hill, the Trump administration’s former National Security Council senior director for Europe and Russia, told the House inquiry in her deposition. “The accusations against her had no merit whatsoever. This was a mishmash of conspiracy theories that ... I believe firmly to be baseless.”
While Republicans may see Yovanovitch as part of a “Deep State” bureaucracy working against Trump from within the government, she has become a hero to career diplomats, who see themselves as nonpartisan civil servants.
“We spent our careers working to represent the policies and values of the United States,” read an Oct. 22 letter signed by more than 400 former foreign service officers, civil servants and political appointees with the U. S. Agency for International Development.
The letter, from officials who served in Republican and Democratic administrations, described their colleagues as being “under siege for their work as diplomats with the Department of State.”