Tag: Marie Yovanovitch

  • Personal lawyer

    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.

  • Private influence and personal gain have usurped diplomats’ judgment

    There is reporting on Yovanovitch’s testimony even though the deposition is behind closed doors.

    Marie Yovanovitch told the House committees investigating impeachment that Trump had pushed for her removal as ambassador to Ukraine based on “false claims”, according to the New York Times.

    The Times reports:

    Marie L. Yovanovitch, who was recalled as the American ambassador to Ukraine, testified to impeachment investigators on Friday that a top State Department official told her that President Trump had pushed for her removal for months even though the department believed she had ‘done nothing wrong.’

    In a closed-door deposition that could further fuel calls for Mr. Trump’s impeachment, Ms. Yovanovitch delivered a scathing indictment of his administration’s conduct of foreign policy, warning that private influence and personal gain have usurped diplomats’ judgment, threatening to undermine the nation’s interests and drive talented professionals out of public service.

    According to a copy of her opening statement obtained by The New York Times, the longtime diplomat said she was ‘incredulous’ that she was removed as ambassador ‘based, as far as I can tell, on unfounded and false claims by people with clearly questionable motives.’

    Also:

    According to her opening statement published by the Washington Post, Marie Yovanovitch said she had few interactions with Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer.

    But she noted that, based on news reports, some of Giuliani’s associates may have believed they would suffer financial losses due to the ambassador’s anti-corruption efforts.

    Yovanovitch told the House committees: “With respect to Mayor Giuliani, I have had only minimal contacts with him—a total of three that I recall. None related to the events at issue. I do not know Mr. Giuliani’s motives for attacking me.

    “But individuals who have been named in the press as contacts of Mr. Giuliani may well have believed that their personal financial ambitions were stymied by our anti-corruption policy in Ukraine.”

    Could ambassadors from decent sane countries please come to the US to promote an anti-corruption policy here? As a matter of urgency? Please?

    In her opening statement to the House committees, Yovanovitch sought to dispel some of the smears thrown at her by far-right pundits.

    The former ambassador to Ukraine said: “I want to categorically state that I have never myself or through others, directly or indirectly, ever directed, suggested, or in any other way asked for any government or government official in Ukraine (or elsewhere) to refrain from investigating or prosecuting actual corruption.

    “Equally fictitious is the notion that I am disloyal to President Trump. I have heard the allegation in the media that I supposedly told the Embassy team to ignore the President’s orders ‘since he was going to be impeached.’ That allegation is false. I have never said such a thing, to my Embassy colleagues or to anyone else.”

    Yovanovitch added that she never discussed Hunter Biden or his Ukrainian company with Joe Biden or any other Obama official, although she has met the former vice president on several occasions.

    Are we going to believe Yovanovitch, or Trump?

    The question answers itself.

  • She persisted

    The Guardian’s Julian Borger has background on Marie Yovanovitch:

    Since leaving Kyiv, Yovanovitch has been on sabbatical at the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University, but is still a serving foreign service officer.

    Her reported decision to appear seems to be in defiance of a block imposed by the secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, ordering state department officials not to give depositions to the congressional impeachment hearings. It is unclear whether the Trump administration will take further measures to try to stop her, in which case the Democrats running the House committees leading the impeachment investigation have signaled they are ready to issue friendly subpoenas.

    First Pompeo yanks her out of Ukraine at Trump’s behest, then he orders state department officials to refuse to answer Congress’s questions. They think they have already completed the coup.

    Pompeo’s claim that the House committees were seeking to “intimidate, bully and treat improperly” state department officials has drawn accusations of hypocrisy, particularly in light of his treatment of Yovanovitch.

    He appears to have bowed to pressure from the White House by pulling her out of Kyiv two months before her posting was due to end, and failed to speak out in her defence when she was smeared by rightwing pundits and talkshow hosts.

    Pompeo likes to claim he has brought “swagger” to the state department, but the treatment of Yovanovitch and the state department’s embroilment in the impeachment scandal has badly hit morale at the organisation.

    Fuck swagger. Swagger is a Trump thing, an aggressive guy thing, a bully thing; at the extreme an authoritarian and/or fascist thing. Pompeo is a Tea Party hack and a very bad man.

    In picking on Yovanovitch, the detractors have chosen a tough target. She has had a stellar career, serving as ambassador under three presidents to three countries (a rare distinction), Kyrgyzstan, Armenia and Ukraine, as well as senior adviser to the under secretary of state for political affairs.

    She is one of the state department’s foremost experts on Russia, Ukraine and the surrounding region. She was born in Canada to Soviet emigrants and grew up speaking Russian, and is known to friends and colleagues as Masha. Her parents moved to the US when she was young and she became a naturalised US citizen in her teens, studying history and Russian studies at Princeton, and doing her postgraduate studies at the Pushkin Institute and the National War College.

    Former colleagues all describe her as meticulous, calm under pressure, supremely qualified and steeped in the nonpartisan culture of professional diplomacy, all which set her apart from the campaign donors who are given an increasing share of ambassadorial posts.

    In other words all of which set her apart from the people who buy an increasing share of ambassadorial posts.

    After Trump’s election, according to former officials, Yovanovitch lost a good deal of her clout because the Ukrainians to whom she was talking began to suspect she was not speaking for the White House, which had its own agenda. Lutsenko and others looked instead for other channels, like Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani.

    That split widened when Yovanovitch would not help Giuliani look for compromising material about Hunter Biden, the son of the Democratic frontrunner for next year’s presidential election.

    “She refused to allow her embassy to be dragged into some sort of effort to concoct dirt for political purposes,” a former official said, adding that she was also not prepared to bend the rules by using personal devices for off-the-books conversations, a mistake made by the former special envoy to Ukraine, Kurt Volker. Volker’s messages, reflecting enthusiastic cooperation with Giuliani, made him look complicit. He has resigned from that part-time envoy job and also lost his academic post.

    What Trump said about Yovanovitch on that phone call:

    Months after the US Ambassador to Ukraine was unexpectedly recalled from her post, President Donald Trump disparaged the career diplomat in a call with his Ukrainian counterpart, a White House transcript released on Wednesday revealed.

    Trump’s comments about Marie Yovanovitch — a member of his own country’s diplomatic corps — are a stunning breach of norms, former officials say, and lend credence to the claim that her early departure from the post was politically motivated.

    “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,” Donald Trump told Volodymyr Zelensky in a July 25 call, according to a White House transcript released Wednesday.

    Zelensky, who was elected in April 2019, echoed the US President’s sentiment, saying “I agree with you 100%.”

    “She’s going to go through some things,” Trump added.

    Tables turned, except this time it’s not a criminal in a secretive phone conversation the transcript of which will be hidden in a Top Secret file where it doesn’t belong. This time it’s “the woman” talking to Congress in a closed but far from secret session of the impeachment inquiry. Donnie the rat is going to go through some things.

  • Good morning Ms Yovanovitch

    Oh hey – Marie Yovanovitch has arrived to testify. They failed to stop her.

    Former US Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch just walked into the Capitol for her deposition in the House’s impeachment investigation.

    Image

    No doubt most or all of her testimony will be kept secret at least for now, but their failure to stop her is itself of note.