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Impeachment Inquiry Updates: Ex-Ambassador Condemns ‘Hollowed Out State Dept.’
What Happened Today in the Trump Impeachment Inquiry
(about 3 hours later)
President Trump will travel to Lake Charles, La., on Friday evening for his second rally in two days. But while the president will continue to excoriate the impeachment process, House Democrats are moving steadily forward with fact-finding. After issuing a raft of new subpoenas on Thursday, Democratic leaders are waiting for word on whether several witnesses will testify in coming days. Marie L. Yovanovitch, the former American ambassador to Ukraine, is speaking with impeachment investigators privately on Capitol Hill.
Marie Yovanovitch, the former American ambassador to Ukraine, told impeachment investigators in a closed-door interview that a top State Department official told her that President Trump had pushed for her removal even though the department believed she had “done nothing wrong.”
Ms. Yovanovitch, who was abruptly recalled as the American ambassador to Ukraine in May, told impeachment investigators during a closed-door deposition on Capitol Hill that she believed Mr. Trump had intervened to have her removed “based, as far as I can tell, on unfounded and false claims by people with clearly questionable motives.”
Ms. Yovanovitch said people associated with Rudy Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, “may well have believed that their personal financial ambitions were stymied by our anti-corruption policy in Ukraine.”
The former ambassador, who spoke to the House Intelligence Committee in defiance of the White House’s declaration that administration officials would not cooperate with the House impeachment inquiry, delivered a scathing account of her own treatment and the Trump administration’s conduct of foreign policy.
Gordon Sondland, the American ambassador to the European Union, like Ms. Yovanovitch, agreed to comply with a House subpoena and testify, defying a State Department order not to appear.
According to a copy of her opening statement obtained by The New York Times, she said that the deputy secretary of state, who at the time was John Sullivan, had told her that Mr. Trump had pushed for her removal for months even though the department believed she had “done nothing wrong.”
Ms. Yovanovitch delivered her searing account before Congress at the risk of losing her job, since the White House has ordered officials not to cooperate with the impeachment inquiry. This afternoon I stopped by the desk of Sharon LaFraniere, who has written about Ms. Yovanovitch, to discuss why the former ambassador to Ukraine was so intent on speaking out.
She also described a “hollowed out State Department” under Mr. Trump, where private influence and personal gain have usurped diplomats’ judgment, threatening to undermine the nation’s interests and drive talented professionals out of public service.
Sharon, how unusual was her participation? And how unusual was her testimony?
Ms. Yovanovitch’s searing account, delivered at the risk of losing her job, contradicts the State Department’s initial claim that her term had simply ended.
She testified despite a White House declaration that there would be no more cooperation with Congress. She’s acting in defiance of the White House. Her testimony today was a really damning indictment of how the Trump administration is conducting foreign policy. She warned against people who in search of personal gain or private influence undermined the work of American government officials and threatened the policy goals of the United States. And on top of all that, she said the State Department is being hollowed out from within, because diplomats don’t feel the government has their back.
Her account could lend new momentum to the impeachment inquiry that threatens to swamp Mr. Trump’s presidency. She said undermining loyal diplomats would embolden “bad actors” who would “see how easy it is to use fiction and innuendo to manipulate our system” and serve the interests of adversaries, including Russia.
What does she know that House Democrats want to know?
“Today we see the State Department attacked and hollowed out from within,” she said. She said the allegations that she was disloyal to Mr. Trump, circulated by allies of Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, were totally “fictitious.”
She seemed to suggest that businesspeople who are allies of Rudy Giuliani may have orchestrated this campaign to get her out for their own private gain. Was she removed because she was standing in the way of some sort of quid pro quo deal that the White House was planning to execute? Did they see her as unwilling to play ball in what might have been a corrupt game? Those are the questions impeachment investigators want to answer.
The House Democratic committee chairmen leading the impeachment inquiry know that any witnesses who defy the president’s order not to cooperate risk retaliation, even the loss of their jobs. So they announced witnesses like Ms. Yovanovitch have no choice but to cooperate.
“Smart, charismatic, ruthless, a little megalomaniacal.” “Ambitious, righteous, then self-righteous.” “Personable ... for a little while.” “Decisive, combative, conspiratorial.” “Pugilistic, erratic, extremely smart, reckless.” “Forceful, combative, energetic, vindictive, tireless, annoying.”
Representatives Adam B. Schiff of California, Elijah E. Cummings of Maryland, and Eliot L. Engel of New York said on Friday that the State Department on Thursday tried to block the appearance of Ms. Yovanovitch, so the committees issued a subpoena Friday morning.
That’s Rudy Giuliani, as described by our reporters who have covered him over the past 35 years. A forthcoming episode of The Weekly traces his path from crime-busting prosecutor to Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, now at the center of the impeachment inquiry.
“This duly authorized subpoena is mandatory, and the illegitimate order from the Trump Administration not to cooperate has no force. As is required of her, the Ambassador is now complying,” they said in a joint statement Friday afternoon.
The episode focuses in part on a brutal zinger — that Mr. Giuliani needed only “a noun and a verb and 9/11” to construct a sentence — that was delivered by none other than Joe Biden, which helped sink the former New York City mayor’s 2008 presidential campaign.
They continued:
“Giuliani did not like that line. I don’t think he ever forgot that Biden said it,” my colleague Maggie Haberman says on the show.
“Any efforts by Trump Administration officials to prevent witness cooperation with the Committees will be deemed obstruction of a coequal branch of government and an adverse inference may be drawn against the President on the underlying allegations of corruption and cover-up.”
To better understand how we got to this point, I called Dan Barry, who appears in The Weekly episode and has chronicled Mr. Giuliani for decades.
The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled 2-1 on Friday against the White House’s effort to crush an effort by House Democrats to extract Mr. Trump’s tax returns from his accounting firm, Mazars USA.
What do you see in Rudy today that reminds you of the guy you’ve covered for so many years?
That had nothing to do with the House’s impeachment inquiry, but the dissenter, a Trump appointee, Judge Neomi Rao, raised it, saying that the House’s efforts were clearly looking for illegality and therefore those efforts should be done through an impeachment inquiry.
There’s this combativeness, that need to be at the center of attention — the willingness to go almost anywhere to champion whatever the cause of the moment is for him. All those character traits on display now are quite familiar to anyone who followed him closely 20 or 30 years ago. But the Rudy we see now is also at odds with the Rudy of the ’80s and ’90s, with his moral rectitude then. He was Mr. Law and Order.
“Impeachment provides the exclusive method for Congress to investigate actions of illegal conduct by impeachable officials, particularly with the aid of compulsory process,” she wrote.
Why, after so many years in the public eye, did he want to work for Mr. Trump?
“Throughout our history, Congress, the President, and the courts have insisted upon maintaining the separation between the legislative and impeachment powers of the House and recognized the gravity and accountability that follow impeachment,” she argued, echoing House Judiciary Committee Democrats who have said an impeachment inquiry would have legal powers unavailable to other investigations.
He was leading in the polls in the 2007 to be the Republican nominee for president. He was spending oodles of money. He was getting a lot of ink. And then it all evaporated. He spent millions and ended up with one delegate. That stung. He was an international hero, and then was roundly rejected. He always wanted to be relevant. He needed to be relevant. What happened in 2016? He becomes relevant. Now, he’s effectively the shadow secretary of state. I think he revels in that.
As Democrats consider how wide their inquiry should be, Judge Rao may have given them an invitation to expand the scope of their “compulsory process.”
Watch “The Weekly,” our new TV show, on FX Sunday at 10/9c.
Andrey Kukushkin, a third player caught in the Ukraine controversy and accused of campaign finance violations, was arraigned in San Francisco on Friday, with bail set at $1 million.
Mr. Trump’s accounting firm must comply with a House committee’s demands for eight years of his financial records, a federal appeals court panel ruled on Friday.
The government argued that Mr. Kukushkin presented a flight risk and demanded that he be confined to his home in San Francisco until the case is heard in New York next week.
The Justice Department asked another federal appeals court to stop the release of Mr. Trump’s tax returns to the Manhattan district attorney’s office, arguing that local prosecutors should have to meet a very high legal bar before investigating a sitting president.
Mr. Kukushkin helped two clients of Rudolph W. Giuliani, Lev. Parnas and Igor Fruman, funnel money from a Russian businessman to state and local candidates with the hope of expediting the licensing process for marijuana businesses, according to court papers. The foreign businessman wanted to keep his involvement private because of “his Russian roots and the current political paranoia about it,” Mr. Kukushkin said, according to the indictment.
“I think we do need an inquiry because we have to get to the bottom of it,” Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland, a moderate Republican, said when asked whether he supported the impeachment investigation. “I’m not ready to say I support impeachment and the removal of the president, but I do think we should have an impeachment inquiry.”
Gordon D. Sondland, the American ambassador to the European Union, has agreed to comply with a House subpoena and testify next week, despite the State Department’s instruction to him not to appear before lawmakers, Mr. Sondland’s lawyer said Friday. He was prepared to testify on Tuesday, but the Trump administration directed him not to in the 11th hour.
Trying to keep track of all the Ukraine-related characters from this week’s impeachment news? We wrote up a helpful guide.
“Ambassador Sondland has at all times acted with integrity and in the interests of the United States,” his lawyers said in a statement Friday. “He has no agenda apart from answering the Committees’ questions fully and truthfully.”
The Impeachment Briefing is also available as a newsletter. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every weeknight.
Lawmakers have requested documents related to Ukraine, but Mr. Sondland’s attorneys said he would not be able to provide them because doing so would violate federal law and State Department regulations.
Impeachment investigators want to know more about Mr. Sondland’s role in the pressure campaign to get Ukraine to investigate one of Mr. Trump’s political rivals and other inquiries that could personally benefit the president.
Maryland’s Republican governor, Larry Hogan, is nobody’s idea of a stalwart supporter of President Trump, but his embrace of the House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry on Thursday night was not helpful to the Republican effort to delegitimize the investigation.
“I think we do need an inquiry because we have to get to the bottom of it,” Mr. Hogan, a moderate Republican, said on P.B.S.’ Firing Line. “I’m not ready to say I support impeachment and the removal of the president, but I do think we should have an impeachment inquiry.”
Along with the governors of Massachusetts and Vermont, Mr. Hogan is part of the “Never Trump” Republican gubernatorial brigade. Mr. Hogan did implore Democrats to use “a fair, objective” process, but he did not say moving forward should depend on new rules.
“I don’t see any other way to get the facts,” he said.
The indictment of two associates of Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, added new details to the narrative at the heart of the impeachment inquiry. The two men, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, helped Mr. Giuliani navigate connections in Ukraine in pursuit of evidence that would undercut the legitimacy of the special counsel’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and lift Mr. Trump against his political rivals heading into 2020.
The two men also appear to have made illegal campaign donations to Representative Pete Sessions, Republican of Texas, from whom Mr. Parnas sought support in pressing the Trump administration to remove the United States ambassador to Ukraine, Marie L. Yovanovitch. Some Trump allies believed Ms. Yovanovitch was trying impede their effort to dig up damaging information about former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his son Hunter, according to a former Ukrainian official.
Read more: Giuliani’s Ukraine Team: In Search of Influence, Dirt and Money
President Trump repeatedly pressured President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine to investigate people and issues of political concern to Mr. Trump, including former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. Here’s a timeline of events since January.
A C.I.A. officer who was once detailed to the White House filed a whistle-blower complaint on Mr. Trump’s interactions with Mr. Zelensky. Read the complaint.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced in September that the House would open a formal impeachment proceeding in response to the whistle-blower’s complaint. Here’s how the impeachment process works.
House committees have issued subpoenas to the White House, the Defense Department, the budget office and other agencies for documents related to the impeachment investigation. Here’s the evidence that has been collected so far.
