Former Ukraine Ambassador Ordered to Praise Trump on Twitter or Lose Her Job
On Monday, the three House committees driving the impeachment inquiry—the Intelligence, Oversight, and Foreign Affairs committees—of Donald Trump began releasing transcripts of the closed-door meetings held during the fact-finding portion of the investigation. One of the first testimonies the House released is that of Marie Yovanovitch, former ambassador to Ukraine.
Yovanovitch was forced out of her position this past May, after reportedly running afoul of Rudy Giuliani, Trump's personal lawyer, who was trying to push the president for a more aggressive stance with Ukraine. During the now-infamous July 25 phone call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, when Trump pressured Zelensky to investigate the Bidens' business dealings in exchange for military aid, Trump referred to Yovanovtich as "bad news" and "the woman." He added that she was "going to go through some things."
Speaking to Congress, Yovanovtich said that after she was "shocked" by the record of the call: "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." She also told Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan that it was a "dangerous precedent" for "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."
In her testimony, Yovanovitch also said that Trump's European Union ambassador Gordon Sondland told her that if she wanted to keep her job, she should tweet out support and praise for the president. In a recent, exhaustive catalogue of Donald Trump's tweets, the New York Times found that, numerically and not surprisingly, one of the president's favorite topics is how great he is and how great a job he's doing. Over the 33 months of his presidency, he's tweeted 11,000 times and praised himself in more than 2,000 of those. And, apparently, a good way for his underlings to endear themselves to him is to join the lovefest too. Yovanovitch declined.
In addition to the release of Yovanovitch's testimony, Congress released that of Michael McKinley, a former senior adviser to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. He said that Yovanovitch's treatment was was clearly the result of "bullying tactics," and that it "had a very serious effect on morale." He told members of Congress, "I'm just going to state it clearly, as a foreign service officer, to see the impugning of somebody I know to be a serious, committed colleague in the manner that it was done raised alarm bells for me."
As the House impeachment inquiry moves into the public phase, committees will likely be releasing more testimonies.
And everything else you need to know about the Trump impeachment inquiry.
Originally Appeared on GQ
