After I learned that there was a whistleblower report pertaining to the president, I naturally wanted to know more. I became especially curious when I realized that it centered around a phone call Trump had in July with the president of Ukraine. When I finally saw a partially redacted transcript of the call, there were many things that caught my attention but only one thing that genuinely surprised me.
President Trump’s words about Marie L. Yovanovitch, his former ambassador to Ukraine, were ominous. In a telephone conversation that has set off a political crisis for Mr. Trump, he told Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, that she was “bad news.”
“She’s going to go through some things,” he added.
Those words—”she’s going to go through some things”—were what I’d expect to hear on the surreptitiously recorded conversations of an old school mob boss. The brash John Gotti might have said he had someone “whacked,” but the more traditional godfathers would just say, “you won’t hear from him again.”