CNN on the Giuliani-Parnas-Yovanovitch papers:

Former US Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch on Tuesday called for an investigation into the “disturbing” notion that she was under surveillance from associates of the President’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani.

I’ve asked this before, but the question is even more pressing now: what business would anyone’s personal lawyer have interfering with a US ambassador on the job? Giuliani was emphatic on the point that he wasn’t working for Trump the [pretend] president, he was working for Trump the person. Trump the person has even less right to sandbag an ambassador for his own criminal interests than Trump the [pretend] president has. It’s as if Trump’s dentist tried to pull an ambassador’s teeth out.

The texts released by the House Democrats Tuesday show Connecticut Republican congressional candidate Robert Hyde berating Yovanovitch and suggest he was monitoring her while she was in Kiev and relaying her movements to Parnas. Hyde declined to comment to CNN when asked if he had surveilled Yovanovitch, who served as a key witness in the House impeachment probe.

Robert Hyde is a strikingly horrible character. He’ll probably be president after Trump.

Three retired ambassadors who know Yovanovitch expressed shock and horror Tuesday at the idea that the longtime diplomat was being surveilled by an American.

“It’s horrifying, it’s just unbelievable,” retired ambassador Jim Melville said in a phone conversation with CNN. “The very idea that there were elements, possibly of the US government or connected to the US government, who were trying to do an end run around everything that we’ve established to keep our mission safe is just outrageous.”

Connected to the US government but not officially. Off the books connected. “Private” connected. Connected the way the plumbers were connected to Nixon.

Retired ambassador Nancy McEldowney echoed that sentiment.

“I find this really shocking and alarming and the idea that American citizens would be surveilling an American ambassador with the endorsement of the President’s personal attorney, it’s just so troubling to me,” McEldowney told CNN.

Another retired ambassador said they had “never heard of anything like it.”

“It’s common that terrorists and former communists do this to us. It’s appalling and incomprehensible that somebody who is working for the President’s personal lawyer would have been doing this to our ambassador,” they told CNN.

We get such an onslaught of outrageous criminal actions from Trump and his trumpers that we lose track of how outrageous some of the actions are. This business of having shadowy gangsters abusing an ambassador who is doing her job (and by all non-trumpian accounts doing it brilliantly) is hard to take in.

Asked whether they believed it would be helpful for Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to come out in Yovanovitch’s defense in light of the latest developments, both Melville and McEldowney slammed the top US diplomat.

Pompeo isn’t the top US diplomat. He’s a hack, in way over his head. Diplomats are professionals; Pompeo is a hack.

“He hasn’t stood up for anybody in the foreign service. All he’s looking out for is his own back and the President,” Melville said. “He has no interest in the good of the service and its people and he’s made that abundantly clear repeatedly.”

McEldowney told CNN she believes Pompeo is “derelict in his duty for refusing to speak out about diplomats who are loyally and faithfully and professionally carrying out their responsibilities and who are being slandered by political attacks.”

Oh well, it’s only the State Department.