Ex-U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie L. Yovanovitch, yanked unceremoniously from her duties in Kyiv by President Donald J. Trump in May, said that she was shocked and felt threatened by Trump’s denunciations of her in the infamous July 25 phone call he had with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Her remarks are part of the full transcripts of two testimonies released on Nov. 4 by the three U.S. House committees conducting an impeachment inquiry into whether Trump abused his powers by trying to get Zelensky to dig up dirt on Democratic rival Joseph Biden, the former U.S. vice president.
The House released the transcripts of the October closed-door testimonies of Yovanovitch and P. Michael McKinley, a former senior advisor to Secretary of State Michael Pompeo. McKinley quit because of what he regarded as the department’s shabby treatment of Yovanovitch and the politicization of the Foreign Service.
The testimony of Yovanovitch from Oct. 11 can be found here. Key excerpts from Yovanovitch’s testimony can be found here.
The testimony of McKinley from Oct. 16, 2019 can be found here. Key excerpts from McKinley’s testimony can be found here.
The committees plan to release the testimony of Ambassador Kurt Volker, the former special envoy to Ukraine, and Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, next.
The three committee chairmen issued this accompanying statement: “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 character and her work in support of long-held U.S. foreign policy anti-corruption goals.”
These are some other highlighted excerpts of the testimony of Yovanovitch, who served from 2016 until her departure in May 2019:
Trump threatens her
Q: President 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.” Do you see that?
A: Yes.
Q: What was your reaction when you saw that?
A: …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.
Q: At the bottom of that same page, President Trump says, “Well, she’s going to go through some things.” What did you understand that to mean?
A: I didn’t know what it meant. I was very concerned. I still am.
Q: Did you feel threatened?
A: Yes.
Lutsenko connives with Giuliani to ‘hurt me’
Q: When did you first become aware that Rudy Giuliani had an interest in or was communicating with anyone in Ukraine?
A: Probably around November, December timeframe of 2018.
Q: And describe those circumstances when you first learned about it.
A: Basically, it was people in the Ukrainian government who said that Mr. (Yuriy) Lutsenko, the former prosecutor general, was in communication with Mayor Giuliani, and that they had plans, and that they were going to, you know, do things, including to me.
Q: So you first heard about it from Ukrainian officials?
A: That’s correct.
Q: And from your staff members or your own conversations, what did you come to learn about Mr. Giuliani’s interest in Ukraine?
A: That basically there had been a number of meetings between Mr. Lutsenko and Mayor Giuliani, and that they were looking—I should say that Mr. Lutsenko was looking to hurt me in the U.S. I couldn’t imagine what that was. But, you know, now I see.
Q: What do you see now?
A: Well, that I’m no longer in Ukraine. Mr. Lutsenko began spreading ‘falsehoods” about Ambassador Yovanovitch after she continued to press for reforms at his office that he failed to implement.
Lutsenko’s record of failure
A: So I think that there was—Mr. Lutsenko was not pleased that—that we continued at the embassy to call for cleaning up the PGO, the Prosecutor General’s Office, and he came into office with, you know, three goals: 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 him [sic] to encourage him to continue with those goals. That did not happen. And so, we continued to encourage him, and I don’t think he really appreciated it. What he wanted from the U.S. Embassy was to set up meetings with the attorney general, with the director of the FBI, etcetera. And he would say, I have important information for them. As perhaps many of you know, there are, you know, usual processes for that kind of thing. We don’t have principals meet and, you know, the foreign principal springs new information that may or may not be valid to an American cabinet member, we just don’t do that. And so what we kept on encouraging him to do was to meet with the legal attaché, the FBI at the embassy. That is precisely why we have the FBI in countries overseas, to work with host-country counterparts and get information, whatever that information might be, develop cases, et cetera. He didn’t want to share that information. And now, I think I understand that that information was falsehoods about me.
Lutsenko falsehoods
Q: What falsehoods about you?
A: Well, for example, as I mentioned in the testimony, in the statement, the opening statement, that I gave him a do-not-prosecute list, a list of individuals that he should not touch.
Q: And did you do that?
A: No.
Avakov: ‘A dangerous place for Ukraine to be’
In February 2019, after communicating with Giuliani about Biden and the 2016 election, Ukrainian Interior Minister Arsen Avakov expressed concerns to Ambassador Yovanovitch that “getting into U.S. politics” would be “a dangerous place for Ukraine to be.”
Q: What were his concerns as expressed to you?
A: He thought it was—so he thought it was very dangerous. That Ukraine, since its independence, has had bipartisan support from both Democrats and Republicans all these years, and that to start kind of getting into U.S. politics, into U.S. domestic politics, was a dangerous place for Ukraine to be.
Q: Why did he think he would be getting into U.S. domestic politics by speaking with Mr. Giuliani?
A: Well, because—well, he told me that, but because of what you had mentioned before, the issue of the Black Ledger. Mr. Manafort’s resignation from the Trump campaign as a result. And looking into that and how did all of that come about; the issue of whether, you know, it was Russia collusion or whether it was really Ukraine collusion, and, you know, looking forward to the 2020 election campaign, and whether this would somehow hurt former Vice President Biden. I think he felt that that was just very dangerous terrain for another country to be in. …
Q: Let me ask one clarification. You described the conversation you had with Minister—
A: Avakov.
Q: —Avakov, and the minister raising concerns about how the actions of these two individuals or Mr. Giuliani might pull Ukraine into U.S. politics. And you mentioned the Manafort ledger. You mentioned the issue of Ukraine collusion versus Russian collusion. Did the issue also come up in that conversation or others about the [sic] Giuliani and his associates’ interest in the Bidens and Burisma?
A: Yeah. I mean, looking back to what happened in the past, with a view to finding things that could be possibly damaging to a presidential run.
Q: By Joe Biden?
A: Uh-huh.
Q: That was a yes, just for the record?
4 A: Yes.
‘Watch my back’
Q: Did you ever have any conversations after November, December 2018, with Ukrainian officials about Mr. Giuliani up until the time that you left in May?
A: I think perhaps in the February time period, I did where one of the senior Ukrainian officials (Avakov) was very concerned, and told me I really needed to watch my back.
Q: Describe that conversation.
A: 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. And, you know, one of the biggest jobs of an American ambassador of the U.S. Embassy is to promote U.S. business. So, of course, if legitimate business comes to us, you know, that’s what we do, we promote U.S. business. But yeah, so—
Shokin visa denial
Q: So did you deduce or infer or come to learn that the business interests they had were therefore not legitimate?
A: Honestly, I didn’t know. I didn’t know enough about it at the time. I thought it was exceedingly strange. Mr. Giuliani sought to override a visa denial for former Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin—whom consular officials determined was ineligible based on his “known corrupt activities”—by claiming to the White House and State Department that Ambassador Yovanovitch was improperly blocking the visa. And so, the consular folks, you know, got the application, recognized the name, and believed that he was ineligible for a visa, based on his, you know, known corrupt activities. And they alerted me to this. And I said, Well, what would you do if he wasn’t—if it wasn’t Mr. Shokin, if it was some other businessman that we didn’t recognize the name? And they said, we would refuse the visa. And so, my understanding is that that’s—that that is what happened, either a formal hard refusal, or what we call a 221G, which is an administrative refusal, asking for more information. The next thing we knew—so I alerted Washington to this, that this had happened.
And the next thing we knew, 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.
‘This is about your security’
In two phone calls on April 24 and 25, 2019, Director General of the Foreign Service Carol Perez informed Ambassador Yovanovitch that there was “a lot of nervousness on the seventh floor and up the street” and that she should board the “next plane home to Washington.”
Q: What did she say to you?
A: Well, in the first call, which happened at quarter of 10 in the evening Kyiv time, she said that she was giving me a heads-up, that things were going wrong, kind of off the—off the track, and she wanted to give me a heads-up. She didn’t know what was happening, but there was a lot of nervousness on the seventh floor and up the street.
Q: What did she mean by “up the street”?
A: The White House. …
A: She called me about an hour later, so it’s now 1 a.m. in the Ukraine.
Q: And what did she say to you then?
A: She said that there was a lot of concern for me, that I needed to be on the next plane home to Washington. And I was like, what? What happened? And she said, I don’t know, but this is about your security. You need to come home immediately. You need to come home on the next plane. When Ambassador Yovanovitch returned to Washington shortly after the April calls, Acting Assistant Secretary of State Philip T. Reeker informed her that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo “was no longer able to” protect her from President Trump.
Q: What did Mr. Reeker say to you at that point?
A: Mr. Reeker said that I, you know, I would need to leave. I needed to leave as soon as possible. That apparently, as I stated in my statement, the president had been—had wanted me to leave since July of 2018 and—or the summer, I should say, the middle of the summer of 2018—and that the secretary had tried to protect me but was no longer able to do that.
Q: Who had concerns as of July 2018?
A: President Trump.
Q: And was that the first that you had heard of that?
A: Yes.
