David Hale, the undersecretary of State for political affairs, testified under oath that Yovanovitch was the victim of a baseless smear campaign led by Rudy Giuliani, the personal attorney of President Donald Trump, which led to her ouster. According to a transcript of the closed-door deposition released Monday, the smears originally stemmed from the conservative columnist John Solomon, who wrote in The Hill that former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko had claimed that Yovanovitch gave him a “do not prosecute list.” Lutsenko later retracted that claim.
Hale, the third-ranking official at the department, claimed to impeachment investigators that Hannity had pushed the same narrative on Fox News and that Pompeo had reached out to Trump’s favorite host.
View the complete November 20 article by Igor Derysh from Salon on the AlterNet website here.