WASHINGTON — The former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, felt threatened when she heard President Donald Trump warn that she was “going to go through some things.”
And it was from Ukrainian officials that she first heard that Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, was plotting to remove her from her job as ambassador.
These were some of the startling revelations that emerged on Nov. 4 when three U.S. House of Representatives committees began releasing testimony given to them last month behind closed doors.
Yovanovitch also painted a bleak picture of senior State Department officials too cowed by Trump to defend her against charges which they privately told her they knew were “fabrications” and which cost her her job.
The release of testimony given by Yovanovitch and another senior State Department official, Ambassador Michael McKinley, was the first part of a new public phase of a Congressional impeachment inquiry about whether Trump tried to force Ukrainian officials to gather dirt on one of his main political rivals in exchange for American military aid.
Representative Adam Schiff, chairman of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Representative Eliot Engel, chairman of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, and Representative Carolyn Maloney, acting chairwoman of the Committee on Oversight and Reform, said more testimony gathered over previous weeks would be made public this week.
The House of Representatives and its committees are controlled by Democratic Party politicians who have been gathering evidence to see if a full-blown impeachment of Republican Trump is warranted.
A two-thirds majority of the Republican-dominated Senate would then be required to remove Trump from office.
Trump denies the allegations that he tried to strong-arm Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky in a July telephone call between the two leaders.
A White House “whistleblower” first raised concerns that Trump was improperly trying to manipulate American foreign policy to undermine former Vice-President Joe Biden, a top contender to be the Democratic candidate in 2020’s U.S. presidential election.
A transcript of the telephone conversation, released by the White House in September, and fragments of other testimonies made public, seem to bear out the whistleblower’s concerns and the three committee heads said, in a joint statement, the evidence so far demonstrated Trump’s “contamination of U.S. foreign policy.”
They said: “With each new interview, we learn more about the president’s attempt to manipulate the levers of power to his personal political benefit.
“The transcripts of interviews with Ambassadors Yovanovitch and McKinley demonstrate clearly how President Trump approved the removal of a highly respected and effective diplomat based on public falsehoods and smears against Ambassador Yovanovitch’s
In the call with Zelensky Trump said, “The former ambassador from the United States, the woman, was bad news and the people she was dealing with in the Ukraine were bad news, so I just want to let you know that.”
When asked by the impeachment inquiry on Oct. 9 what she felt when she heard those words, Yovanovitch said: “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.”
When asked what she thought Trump meant when he told Zelensky, “Well, she’s going to go through some things” she said: “I didn’t know what it meant. I was very concerned. I still am”
Asked whether she felt threatened, she said: “Yes.”
Lutsenko central to plot against Yovanovitch
The testimony showed that Giuliani had enlisted former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko to target her because he viewed her as disloyal to Trump.
Since the October testimony, it has emerged that Giuliani also worked with two Soviet-era emigres, Igor Fruman and Lev Parnas, who may have wanted to remove Yovanovitch because they saw her as blocking a murky, multi-million dollar Ukrainian energy scheme they were involved in.
Yovanovitch said that Ukrainian Interior Minister Arsen Avakov warned her in late 2018 about Giuliani’s plans to target her with Lutsenko’s aid.
“That they were going to, you know, do things, including to me,” she said.
Avakov, Yovanovitch said, believed that since independence Ukraine had depended on bipartisan support from both Democrats and Republicans and that “to start kind of getting into U.S. politics, into U.S. domestic politics, was a dangerous place for Ukraine to be” because it could erode that unity of support.
Yovanovitch said: “Basically there had been a number of meetings between Mr. Lutsenko and Mayor Giuliani, and… that Mr. Lutsenko was looking to hurt me in the U.S.”
She said she did not initially understand what Lutsenko’s motive was but subsequently saw he wanted to remove her from Ukraine.
She said Lutsenko began spreading “falsehoods” about her after she continued to press for three goals that he had promised to implement but reneged on.
She described those as: “One was to reform the office, one was to prosecute those who killed the innocent people on the Maidan during the Revolution of Dignity, and one was to prosecute money laundering cases to get back the $40 billion-plus that the previous president and his cronies had absconded with.
“None of those things were done. And we thought those were great goals, and we wanted … to encourage him to continue with those goals … and I don’t think he really appreciated it.”
Yovanovitch said that Lutsenko kept asking the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv to set up meetings for him with the American attorney general, the director of the FBI, and others because he claimed he had important information for them which he refused to share with the embassy.
“And now, I think I understand that that information was falsehoods about me,” she said. Those included Lutsenko’s claims that she gave him a “do-not-prosecute list” of individuals not to be touched – something she denied doing.
Avakov anxious U.S. bipartisan support for Ukraine might erode
By getting dragged into American politics, Yovanovitch said Avakov was referring to issues such as “the black ledger” documenting hidden payments made to Paul Manafort by Ukraine’s ousted pro-Kremlin ex-President Viktor Yanukovych.
Revelations about those multi-million dollar funds that Manafort failed to declare to U.S. tax authorities caused him to be fired in 2016 as Trump’s presidential election campaign manager and eventually landed him with a seven and a half year jail sentence that he is presently serving.
She said Avakov was also concerned “about the issue of whether… it was Russia collusion or whether it was really Ukraine collusion, and… looking forward to the 2020 election campaign, and whether this would somehow hurt former Vice President (Joe) Biden.”
Yovanovitch said Avakov warned her that he was “very concerned” about Giuliani and “told me I really needed to watch my back.”
“Well, I mean, he basically said, and went into some detail, that there were two individuals from Florida, Mr. Parnas and Mr. Fruman, who were working with Mayor Giuliani, and that they had set up the meetings for Mr. Giuliani with Mr. Lutsenko. And that they were interested in having a different ambassador at post, I guess for — because they wanted to have business dealings in Ukraine, or additional business dealings. I didn’t understand that because nobody at the embassy had ever met those two individuals.”
She also said Giuliani wanted to get former Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin to Washington so that, she later discovered, he could provide information intended to discredit her.
She said the embassy denied Shokin a visa because of his “known corrupt activities” and she “thought it was exceedingly strange” Giuliani sought to override that denial.
“The next thing we knew” she said, “Mayor Giuliani was calling the White House as well as the Assistant Secretary for Consular Affairs, saying that I was blocking the visa for Mr. Shokin, and that Mr. Shokin was coming to meet him and provide information about corruption at the embassy, including my corruption.”
In her testimony, Yovanovitch said she had mentioned her concerns to the State Department about Giuliani’s activities in Ukraine “but it’s not like I sent in a formal cable outlining everything. It felt very… very sensitive and very political.”
She said that some senior figures at the State Department expressed concern but she was not aware of any efforts to stop Giuliani. She said “I don’t think they felt they could.”
She said although her bosses at the State Department did not believe allegations from the Trump camp that she was disloyal to Trump, they did little to publicly defend her.
But when she sought advice from Gordon Sondland, the U.S. Ambassador to the European Union, an ally of Trump’s who was also involved in conversations with Ukrainian officials, he recommended that she tweet fulsome praise of the president.
She added: “It was advice that I did not see how I could implement in my role as an ambassador, and as a Foreign Service officer….”
Yovanovitch was told that State Department officials were hesitant to issue a statement supporting her because “the rug would be pulled out” from under them by President Trump… I was told there was caution about any kind of a statement, because it could be undermined.”
In March 2019, Yovanovitch sent a classified email, at the request of Under Secretary of State David Hale, in which she described the disinformation campaign against her.
On April 24 and 25, 2019, the State Department’s Director General of the Foreign Service Carol Perez, told Yovanovitch there was “a lot of nervousness on the seventh floor and up the street (at the White House)” and that she should board the “next plane home to Washington.”
Back in Washington she said she was shocked when told Trump had wanted to remove her from her job since July 2018 and that the Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, “had tried to protect me but was no longer able to do that.”
She said Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan informed her she had “done nothing wrong,” but the president had “lost confidence” in her.
“I wanted an explanation because this is rather unusual. But he could not offer one beyond the fact that the president had made a decision. And it is the president’s to make, as we know.
“I did ask him, though, you know, what does this mean for our foreign policy? What does it mean for our position on anti-corruption? What message are we sending to the Ukrainians, to the world? How were… we going to explain this?
“And I told him I thought it was a dangerous precedent, that as far as I could tell, since I didn’t have any other explanation, that private interests and people who don’t like a particular American ambassador could combine to, you know, find somebody who was more suitable for their interests.”
The Counselor to the State Department Ulrich Brechbuhl, who had been Trump’s “point person” for Ambassador Yovanovitch’s recall, refused to accept her request for a meeting. She did not seek a meeting with Pompeo but was told he did not feel it was the right time to speak with Trump in her defense.
In other testimony released on Monday, McKinley, a veteran diplomat and former senior adviser to Pompeo, said he resigned because of his concerns about “the engagement of our missions to procure negative political information for domestic purposes” and “the failure I saw in the building (State Department) to provide support for our professional cadre in a particularly trying time.”
He said he had never witnessed in 37 years of service such efforts to use the State Department to dig up dirt on a political opponent.
McKinley proposed issuing a public statement in support of Yovanovitch in the aftermath of the release of the president’s July 25, 2019, call record. But he said Pompeo “decided that it was better not to release a statement at this time.”
McKinley told Pompeo “this is unacceptable” and resigned. He said: “I was concerned about what I saw as the lack of public support for Department employees… On that subject, he did not respond at all, again.”
