Tag: Marie Yovanovitch

4 takeaways from Marie Yovanovitch’s testimony

Washington Post logoMarie Yovanovitch, the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine who was ousted from that job in April amid a smear campaign, testified Friday in the second public impeachment hearing into President Trump.

Below are some takeaways from what happened in the hearing.

1. Trump’s alleged ‘witness intimidation’ — and GOP blowback

Perhaps the most colorful moment in the hearing came in the 10 o’clock hour. President Trump — whom the White House had said would not be watching the hearing beyond Republican Devin Nunes’s (Calif.) opening statement — tweeted about Yovanovitch.

View the complete November 15 article by Aaron Blake on The Washington Post website here.

Trump opens new line of impeachment attack for Democrats

The Hill logoPresident Trump opened himself up to a new line of attack from Democrats by vigorously criticizing the record of a former ambassador to Ukraine who he ousted earlier this year after she faced a smear campaign from his personal lawyer.

Trump took to Twitter on Friday morning to claim that “everywhere” U.S. ambassador Marie Yovanovitch went “turned bad” and suggested she was to blame for the situation in Somalia, where she did her first tour. Yovanovitch was asked to react to the tweets during the hearing on Friday which was being carried live on air, and described them as “intimidating.” 

The president’s tweet ran counter to a desire by Republicans to avoid attacking the character of career public servants like Yovanovitch, who boasts decades of service in the diplomatic corps in both Republican and Democratic administrations.

View the complete November 16 article by Morgan Chalfant and Brett Samuels on The Hill website here.

How the impeachment inquiry has revealed a long and murky campaign to oust a veteran U.S. ambassador

Washington Post logoIn February, the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine — a 33-year career diplomat who had served presidents of both parties — received a blunt warning.

“Watch your back,” Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch said she was told by Ukraine’s interior minister.

The Ukrainian official relayed that a pair of Florida businessmen and a Kyiv prosecutor with whom Yovanovitch had clashed were working to oust her from the post she had held since 2016, she later told House investigators.

View the complete November 14 article by Rosalind S. Helderman and Tom Hamburger on The Washington Post website here.

Ousted ambassador gives deeply personal account of firing by Trump

Yovanovitch describes feeling ‘shocked and devastated’ reading transcript of Trump call with Ukrainian president

Marie Yovanovitch, the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine who was removed from her post by President Donald Trump, spent much of her Friday morning before the House Intelligence Committee disputing allegations that she worked against the president while in her post in Kyiv.

Yovanovitch told the committee that she never told U.S. embassy employees to ignore Washington’s orders because Trump would soon be impeached, that she did not work on behalf of the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016, and that she has never spoken with Hunter Biden, the son of former Vice President Joe Biden, whom Trump wanted Kyiv to investigate for his lucrative role at a Ukrainian gas company.

“Partisanship of this type is not compatible with the role of a career Foreign Service Officer,” Yovanovitch said during the second day of public impeachment hearings focusing on Trump’s dealings with Ukraine.

View the complete November 15 article by Patrick Kelley and Katherine Tully-McManus on The Roll Call website here.

Live updates: ‘It sounded like a threat,’ ousted U.S. ambassador says of Trump’s comments about her to Ukrainian president

Washington Post logoIn public testimony at the House impeachment hearings, former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch said she felt threatened when she read how President Trump talked about her to his Ukrainian counterpart on a July 25 call.

“It sounded like a threat,” she told the House Intelligence Committee during the second open hearing of the impeachment inquiry.

Yovanovitch, who was recalled from her position earlier this year, also testified that she was the target of a “campaign of disinformation” that involved Trump’s personal attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani and included “unofficial back channels.”

View the complete November 15 article by John Wagner and Colby Itkowitz on The Washington Post website here.

AP sources: State Dept. worried about defending ambassador

WASHINGTON (AP) — The State Department’s third-ranking official is expected to tell House impeachment investigators on Wednesday that political considerations were behind the agency’s refusal to deliver a robust defense of the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine.

People familiar with the matter say the highest-ranking career diplomat in the foreign service, David Hale, plans to say that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and other senior officials determined that publicly defending ousted Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch would hurt the effort to free up U.S. military assistance to Ukraine.

Hale, who arrived Wednesday morning to testify behind closed doors, will also say that the State Department worried about the reaction from President Donald Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, who was one of the strongest advocates for removing the ambassador, according to the people. Several State Department officials have told lawmakers they opposed the dismissal of Yovanovitch in May, a personnel change that came at Trump’s direction.

View the complete November 6 article by Matthew Lee on the Associated Press website here.

Ex-Ukraine Ambassador Testified She Felt Threatened by Trump

New York Times logoHouse impeachment investigators released the first transcripts of their private interviews, revealing crucial details as the inquiry enters its public phase.

WASHINGTON — The former United States ambassador to Ukraine told impeachment investigators last month that she felt “threatened” by President Trump after it emerged that he told the Ukrainian president she would “go through some things,” adding that she still feared retaliation.

That was just one detail that emerged Monday as the House released hundreds of pages of testimony from Marie L. Yovanovitch, who was abruptly recalled in May and remains a State Department employee, and Michael McKinley, a top diplomat who advised Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and has since retired.

The transcripts also revealed multiple attempts by Mr. McKinley — all unsuccessful — to get Mr. Pompeo to come to Ms. Yovanovitch’s defense in a public statement as she was being publicly discredited by Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, and other Republicans. That testimony contradicted Mr. Pompeo himself, who has publicly denied having heard any concerns from Mr. McKinley about the treatment of Ms. Yovanovitch.

View the complete November 4 article by Nicholas Fandos and Michael S. Schmidt on The New York Times website here.

Yovanovitch says she felt threatened by Trump raising her on call with Ukraine

The Hill logoFormer Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch told House investigators that she felt shocked and threatened when she saw that President Trump had criticized her during a July 25 phone call with Ukraine’s president.

Yovanovitch was asked during her closed-door deposition on Oct. 11 what she thought about Trump calling her “bad news” during the call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

“I hate to be repetitive, but I was shocked. I mean, I was very surprised that President Trump would — first of all, that I would feature repeatedly in a presidential phone call, but secondly, that the president would speak about me or any ambassador in that way to a foreign counterpart,” Yovanovitch told three House committees, according to a transcript of her closed-door testimony released Monday.

View the complete November 4 article by Morgan Chalfant on The Hill website here.

House Intel releases transcript of interview with ousted Ukraine ambassador

Axios logoThe House Intelligence Committee on Monday released the transcripts of its interview with former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, a key witness in the impeachment inquiry.

Why it matters: Yovanovitch, who was removed from her post in May, testified that President Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani led a campaign to oust her as ambassador over unsubstantiated allegations that she badmouthed the president and was seeking to stop Ukraine from opening an investigation into Joe Biden and his son.

Key excerpts:

  • Yovanovitch testified that she learned about Giuliani’s plan to target her from Ukrainian officials in late 2018. She said she learned that Giuliani had met with Ukraine prosecutor general Yuriy Lutsenko, who wanted to “hurt” her “in the U.S.”

View the complete November 4 article by Zachary Basu on the Axios website here.

Ousted ambassador Marie Yovanovitch tells Congress Trump pressured State Dept. to remove her

Washington Post logoThe former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine whose abrupt ouster in May has become a focus of House impeachment investigators said Friday in remarks before Congress that her departure came as a direct result of pressure President Trump placed on the State Department to remove her.

The account by Marie Yovanovitch depicts a career Foreign Service officer caught in a storm of unsubstantiated allegations pushed by the president’s personal attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani and a cast of former Ukrainian officials who viewed her as a threat to their financial and political interests.

She told lawmakers that she was forced to leave Kiev on “the next plane” this spring and subsequently removed from her post, with the State Department’s No. 2 official telling her that, although she had done nothing wrong, the president had lost confidence in her and the agency had been under significant pressure to remove her since the summer of 2018.

View the complete October 11 article by John Hudson, Karoun Demirjian, Rachael Bade and Paul Sonne on The Washington Post website here.