WASHINGTON — The second day of public hearings of the impeachment inquiry into whether U.S. President Donald J. Trump tried to force Ukraine to find political dirt about his potential 2020 election rival took on aspects of bizarre reality television.
While ex-U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie L. Yovanovitch testified to the U.S. House Intelligence Committee, including her reaction to Trump’s denigration of her during the infamous July 25 phone call with President Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump tweeted new insults about her as she was speaking.
Yovanovitch described how she faced a smear campaign from late 2018 onward led by Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and his associates, including Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, who are facing criminal charges alleging campaign finance violations. They were joined in their skullduggery by Ukraine’s former Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko, who was repeatedly labeled corrupt during the Nov 15 hearing.
She told the House Intelligence Committee how “shocked, appalled, devastated” she felt when she saw the transcript of the July 25 telephone call, in which Trump disparaged her and referred to her as “bad news” while praising Lutsenko. In the reconstructed transcript released by the White House, Trump warned ominously that Yovanovitch was “going to go through some things.”
She said that people who watched her as she read the Trump-Zelensky transcript saw the color drain from her face. “It felt like a vague threat. I wondered what it meant. It concerned me,” she said.
As she was describing her feelings of dread, members of the committee became aware that Trump had launched a twitter attack against Yovanovitch.
Representative Adam Schiff, chairman of the Intelligence Committee, read out Trump’s tweet, which said: “Everywhere Marie Yovanovitch went turned bad. She started off in Somalia, how did that go? Then fast forward to Ukraine, where the new Ukrainian president spoke unfavorably about her in my second phone call with him. It is a U.S. president’s absolute right to appoint ambassadors.”
Asked for her reaction to the tweet, Yovanovitch said: “It’s very intimidating…I can’t speak to what the president is trying to do but I think the effect is to be intimidating.”
Schiff said Trump’s message was “designed to intimidate” and: “Some of us take witness intimidation very, very seriously.”
Democrats are exploring whether the tweet tirade could become another article in the case to impeach the president. At the least, it will be another black mark, as even Republicans were dismayed by Trump’s attack on somebody with an outstanding record of commitment and service to America.
The veteran diplomat served for 33 years in posts around the world, including such conflict-ridden places as Somalia, where she and her colleagues risked or actually did become victims of violence.
Yovanovitch was ambassador to Ukraine from the summer of 2016 until April this year, when she was abruptly fired and recalled from Kyiv.
The hearing explored whether Trump abused his powers by withholding nearly $400 million in military assistance to Ukraine and a White House meeting with Zelensky unless the Ukrainian president investigated Democratic rival Joseph Biden, the former vice president’s son Hunter Biden and the Burisma energy company he worked for and whether Ukraine interfered in the 2016 presidential election.
The hold was put on the aid July 18 and lifted on Sept. 11.
Giuliani worked with Lutsenko and others in the government of former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to try to arrange the investigations.
After Zelensky and his party won the presidency in spring and took control of parliament in summer elections, Giuliani and Trump began to pressure the new government for the investigations.
Trump and Giuliani demanded Zelensky announce the investigations as the price for a White House visit that the new president craved.
Acting U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine William Taylor and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State George Kent testified to the committee on Nov. 13 that they were horrified to discover that Trump was withholding military assistance for Ukraine until Kyiv opened the investigations, especially one that would damage his potential 2020 election rival’s reputation.
‘Corrupt’ Lutsenko’s central role
Giuliani’s efforts suffered a blow when Lutsenko, his ally in smearing Yovanovitch, was fired by Zelensky. Yovanovitch testified that she had heard about Giuliani’s efforts and Lutsenko’s role in smearing her from Ukrainian Interior Minister Arsen Avakov, one of the few Poroshenko-era politicians to keep his role under Zelensky.
Democratic members who questioned her asked whether she agreed with Kent’s assessment two days earlier that Lutsenko was motivated because he was “pissed off” that Yovanovitch regarded him as corrupt. She agreed and explained that when Lutsenko was appointed in 2016, replacing the corrupt Viktor Shokin as the top prosecutor, the State Department had high hopes that he would fulfill his duties well.
But she said Lutsenko failed to achieve his stated three goals: to stop corruption among prosecutors, investigate the killings of more than 100 demonstrators during the EuroMaidan Revolution in 2014, and to work to repatriate an estimated $40 billion stolen by the ousted, pro-Kremlin President Viktor Yanukovych, who fled with many of his cronies to Russia.
Schiff and other Democrats suggested that Yovanovitch got fired by Trump because she stood in the way of forcing the Ukrainian government to launch politically motivated investigations against Joseph Biden. She testified that Joe Biden had not acted improperly and was following U.S. policy in seeking the dismissal of Shokin, Lutsenko’s corrupt predecessor.
She also dismissed the contention by Trump and Giuliani that Ukraine interfered with the 2016 U.S. presidential election just because a number of officials criticized then-candidate Trump for suggesting he may recognize Russia’s illegal annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula following a military takeover in 2014.
She agreed with the U.S. intelligence community assessment that Russia had interfered in the election in support of Trump.
While the Democrats’ questioning focused on why Trump and Giuliani wanted to get rid of Yovanovitch, the president’s Republican supporters portrayed his actions — including the suspension of aid — as prompted by concerns about Ukraine’s reputation for corruption.
The most senior Republican member of the Intelligence Committee, Representative Devin Nunes, dismissed Yovanovitch as irrelevant to the impeachment inquiry because she left Ukraine in May, long before the July 25 telephone conversation between the two presidents and had taken place. Republicans concentrated on defending the right of the president to choose his own ambassadors rather than challenging the main accusation that he was proposing to trade U.S. military help in return for Kyiv providing political dirt on the Bidens.
Yovanovitch, however, said no reason was given for her firing and, only a few months before she left Kyiv, she had been asked by superiors to extend her stay in Ukraine to 2020. She suspects that she got fired because her strong anti-corruption stance angered Lutsenko and other Ukrainians, who found Giuliani a willing accomplice in the campaign to smear her.
Yovanovitch said: “Ukrainians who preferred to play by the old, corrupt rules sought to remove me. What continues to amaze me is that they found Americans willing to partner with them and, working together, they apparently succeeded in orchestrating the removal of a U.S. ambassador. How could our system fail like this? How is it that foreign corrupt interests could manipulate our government?”
It was obvious that the attacks by her president and others had deeply wounded her personally.
“I do wonder why it was necessary to smear my reputation,” she asked.
The only time she refused to answer a question was when she was asked how what she had been through had affected her family.
Trump’s tweets
Referring to Trump’s tweets blaming her for disasters everywhere she served as a diplomat, Yovanovitch replied with evident sadness: “I actually think that where I’ve served over the years, I and others have demonstrably made things better, you know, for the U.S. as well as for the countries that I’ve served in.”
One of her Republican questioners listed some of the reasons that Trump was suspicious that Ukraine was trying to undermine his 2016 election chances.
One was an Aug. 4, 2016, op-ed in an American newspaper written by Ukraine’s then-Ambassador the United States Valeriy Chaly, who criticized candidate Trump’s sympathetic attitude toward Moscow over Russia’s invasion and annexation Crimea.
Another was Avakov’s Facebook posts criticizing Trump, which Republican legal counsel Steve Castor described as “especially candid” and “some really nasty things.”
Castor asked whether Yovanovitch understood that the comments could have upset Trump.
She replied: “Well sometimes that happens on social media.”
That prompted laughter among politicians, staff members and spectators. Even the person posing the question, Castor could not suppress a smile as everyone recalled Trump’s earlier tweet assault against Yovanovitch.
As Yovanovitch left, after more than five hours of testimony, Democratic Party participants in the hearing, as well as many audience members in the committee room, stood up to give her sustained applause.
