Former ambassador says she was warned to ‘watch my back’
Diplomat swears Trump told him, ‘No quid pro quo’
(about 7 hours later)
WASHINGTON — It started with a warning to watch her back, that people were “looking to hurt” her. From there, former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch told House investigators, it escalated into a chilling campaign to fire her as President Donald Trump and his allies angled in Eastern Europe for political advantage at home.
WASHINGTON — House investigators released more transcripts Tuesday in the impeachment inquiry of President Donald Trump, including hundreds of pages of testimony from two top diplomats deeply involved in the Ukraine matter.
Testimony from Yovanovitch, released on Monday, offered a first word-for-word look at the closed-door House impeachment hearings. Inside, Democrats and Republicans are waging a pitched battle over what to make of Trump’s efforts to get Ukraine’s leaders to investigate political rival Joe Biden, Biden’s son and Democratic activities in the 2016 election.
Kurt Volker, the former special envoy to Ukraine, and Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, were involved in White House policy toward Ukraine and aware of the July 25 phone call between Trump and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy that’s central to the impeachment inquiry.
The transcript came out on the same day that four Trump administration officials defied subpoenas to testify, acting on orders from a White House that is fighting the impeachment investigation with all its might. Among those refusing to testify: John Eisenberg, the lead lawyer at the National Security Council and, by some accounts, the man who ordered a rough transcript of Trump’s phone call with Ukraine’s leader moved to a highly restricted computer system.
Sondland told investigators Trump nearly hung up on him when he asked whether the White House was withholding military aid for Ukraine as it pushed the East European ally for an investigation of Democrats, according to the diplomat’s testimony.
During nine hours of sometimes emotional testimony, Yovanovitch detailed efforts led by Rudy Giuliani and other Trump allies to push her out of her post. The career diplomat, who was recalled from her job in May on Trump’s orders, testified that a senior Ukrainian official told her that “I really needed to watch my back.”
“I want nothing. I want no quid pro quo,” Trump said, according to Sondland. “I want Zelenskiy to do the right thing.”
While the major thrust of Yovanovitch’s testimony was revealed in her opening statement, Monday’s 317-page transcript provided new details.
Sondland said Trump was in a “bad mood.” The diplomat said, “I wouldn’t say he hung up me, but it was almost like he hung up on me.”
Yovanovitch offered significant threads of information including the possibility that Trump was directly involved in a phone call with Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, and the Ukrainians dating back to January 2018. And she pushed back on Republican suggestions that she harbored opposition to Trump.
The release of the transcripts comes as investigators announced they want to hear from Trump’s chief of staff, reaching to the highest levels of the White House as they prepare to release more transcripts from the closed-door proceedings.
She had been recalled from Kyiv before the July 25 phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy that’s at the center of the impeachment inquiry. Later, she was “surprised and dismayed” by what she saw in the transcript of the call — including that Trump had called her “bad news.” He also said that “she’s going to go through some things.”
Investigators say Mick Mulvaney’s news conference last month amounted to “nothing less than a televised confession” of Trump’s efforts to have Ukraine investigate Democrats and Joe Biden as the White House was blocking military funding for the Eastern European ally.
“I was shocked,” Yovanovitch said, to see “that the president would speak about me or any ambassador in that way to a foreign counterpart.”
Trump says he did nothing wrong, and Mulvaney later walked back his remarks.
Asked about her as he left on a campaign trip on Monday, Trump had a more equivocal comment: “I’m sure she’s a very fine woman. I just don’t know much about her.”
Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., the chairman of the Intelligence committee, said the panels are releasing the word-by-word transcripts so the American public can see it all for themselves.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff said transcripts from the hearings are being released so “the American public will begin to see for themselves.” Two were released Monday, and more are coming.
“This is about more than just one call,” Schiff wrote Tuesday in an op-ed in USA Today. “We now know that the call was just one piece of a larger operation to redirect our foreign policy to benefit Donald Trump’s personal and political interests, not the national interest.”
Republicans have accused Democrats of conducting a one-sided process behind closed doors.
The White House has instructed its officials not to comply with the impeachment inquiry being led by House Democrats. It is uncertain if Mulvaney will appear.
But the transcripts show GOP lawmakers were given time for questioning, which they used to poke at different aspects of the impeachment inquiry. Some Republicans criticized the process as unfair, while others tried to redirect witnesses to their own questions about Biden’s work on Ukraine corruption issues while he was vice president.
Public hearings could begin as soon as next week in the impeachment inquiry that Trump says is illegitimate and Republicans in Congress call a sham.
In public, some Republicans say the president’s actions toward Ukraine, though not ideal, are certainly not impeachable.
The release of more transcripts comes as the Trump administration resumes its stonewalling of the inquiry. Two more White House officials, an energy adviser and a budget official, declined to appear Tuesday before investigators, even after one received a subpoena.
Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, the top Republican on the Oversight committee, defended Yovanovitch’s ouster as clearly within the president’s prerogative.
Most of those who have testified before the House panel are from the ranks of the State Department, including recalled U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovonavitch, whose testimony was released Monday. Diplomats have testified to the mounting concerns in the State Department over Trump’s interest in having a foreign ally investigate Biden.
“President Trump has the authority to name who he wants in any ambassador position. That’s a call solely for the president of the United States as the commander in chief,” Jordan said.
Volker and Sondland both testified they were disappointed after briefing Trump at the White House upon their return from Zelenskiy’s inauguration in May as a new leader of the young democracy vowing to fight corruption.
Yovanovitch was recalled from Kyiv as Giuliani pressed Ukrainian officials to investigate baseless corruption allegations against Biden and his son Hunter, who was involved with Burisma, a gas company there.
That pivotal May 23 meeting raised red flags when Trump told them to work with Rudy Giuliani, his personal attorney, on Ukraine issues.
Giuliani’s role in Ukraine was central to Yovanovitch’s testimony. She said she was aware of an interest by the Trump lawyer and his associates in investigating Biden and Burisma “with a view to finding things that could be possibly damaging to a presidential run,” as well as investigating the 2016 election and theories that it was Ukraine, and not Russia, that interfered.
Text messages from the two men, along with another diplomat, William Taylor, who also testified in the impeachment inquiry, revealed in striking detail the administration’s actions toward Ukraine.
However, asked directly if Giuliani was promoting investigations on Burisma and Biden, Yovanovitch said, “It wasn’t entirely clear to me what was going on.”
More directly, she drew a link between Giuliani and two businessmen -- Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, who have been indicted in the U.S. on charges stemming from campaign donations -- as part of the campaign to oust her. She understood they were looking to expand their business interests in Ukraine “and that they needed a better ambassador to sort of facilitate their business’ efforts here.”
Yovanovitch said was told by Ukrainian officials last November or December that Giuliani was in touch with Ukraine’s former top prosecutor, Yuriy Lutsenko, “and that they had plans, and that they were going to, you know, do things, including to me.”
She said she was told Lutsenko “was looking to hurt me in the U.S.”
The diplomat said she sought advice from Gordon Sondland, Trump’s ambassador to the European Union, after an article appeared in The Hill newspaper about Giuliani’s complaints against her. Sondland told her, “’You need to go big or go home,” advising her to “tweet out there that you support the president.”
Yovanovitch said she felt she could not follow that advice as a nonpartisan government official.
The former envoy stressed to investigators that she was not disloyal to the president. She answered “no” when asked point blank if she’d ever “badmouthed” Trump in Ukraine, and said she felt U.S. policy in Ukraine “actually got stronger” because of Trump’s decision to provide lethal assistance to the country — military aid that later was held up by the White House as it pushed for investigations into Trump’s political foes.
Long hours into her testimony, Yovanovitch was asked why she was such “a thorn in their side” that Giuliani and others wanted her fired.
“Honestly,” she said, “it’s a mystery to me.”
Yovanovitch, still employed by the State Department, is in a fellowship at Georgetown University.
She told the investigators that the campaign against her, which included an article that was retweeted by Donald Trump Jr., undermined her ability to serve as a credible ambassador and she wanted Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to issue a statement defending her. But no statement was issued.
The impeachment panels also released testimony Monday from Michael McKinley, a former senior adviser to Pompeo.
McKinley, a 37-year career diplomat, testified that he decided to resign from his post as a senior adviser to Pompeo after his repeated efforts to get the State Department to issue a statement of support for Yovanovitch after the transcript of the Trump-Zelenskiy phone call was released. “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,” he said.
McKinley said he was already concerned about politicization at the State Department, and that the refusal to publicly back Yovanovitch convinced him it was time to leave.
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Associated Press writers Eric Tucker, Matthew Daly, Alan Fram, Ben Fox, Padmananda Rama and Matthew Lee contributed to this report
Associated Press writers Eric Tucker, Colleen Long, Matthew Daly, Alan Fram, Ben Fox, Padmananda Rama and Matthew Lee contributed to this report
Copyright 2019 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Copyright 2019 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
