Fox Business host Lisa Kennedy slammed President Trump for tweeting disparaging messages about former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch saying his messages made him “look like a big, dumb baby.”
The president sent messages on Twitter while Yovanovitch was testifying as part of the public impeachment hearings against the president on Friday.
“Everywhere Marie Yovanovitch went turned bad,” Trump tweeted. “She started off in Somalia, how did that go? Then fast forward to Ukraine, where the new Ukrainian President spoke unfavorably about her in my second phone call with him. It is a U.S. President’s absolute right to appoint ambassadors.
“They call it ‘serving at the pleasure of the President,'” he continued. “The U.S. now has a very strong and powerful foreign policy, much different than proceeding administrations. It is called, quite simply, America First! With all of that, however, I have done FAR more for Ukraine than O.”
….They call it “serving at the pleasure of the President.” The U.S. now has a very strong and powerful foreign policy, much different than proceeding administrations. It is called, quite simply, America First! With all of that, however, I have done FAR more for Ukraine than O.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 15, 2019
Kennedy, appearing on Fox News Friday afternoon as part of a panel on The Five, criticized Trump for his “mid-hearing” comments.
“Should the president be tweeting at her mid-hearing? No,” she said. “It makes him look like a big, dumb baby. And he makes her look like a victim, and if he had just let it go, this entire — the last two days of hearings and testimony would have been a snoozefest.”
Kennedy’s characterization echoed that of former independent counsel Ken Starr, who led the impeachment investigation into President Bill Clinton in the 1990s.
“Well, I must say that the president was not advised by counsel in deciding to do this tweet — extraordinarily poor judgment,” Starr said. “The president frequently says, ‘I follow my instincts.’ Sometimes we have to control our instincts. So, obviously, this was I think quite injurious.”
After Trump’s tweets, Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee Adam Schiff interrupted questioning of Yovanovitch to read her the tweets in real-time and asked for her reaction. The California Democrat referred to the tweets as “witness intimidation.”
“Some of us here take witness intimidation very, very seriously,” he said. “We saw today witness intimidation in real-time by the president of the United States.”
Yovanovitch echoed that sentiment, saying, “I can’t speak to what the president is trying to do, but I think the effect is to be intimidating.”
