Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was unable to stop President Trump from ousting U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, according to impeachment witnesses and people close to the situation.
“There’s no way that Pompeo could go and save her,” a person with knowledge of Trump’s hostility toward Yovanovitch told the Washington Examiner. “That’s just not going to work.”
Yovanovitch’s abrupt recall from Kyiv in May focused criticism on Pompeo because he failed to protect her.
“He played it poorly,” Steven Pifer, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine and a friend of Yovanovitch, told the Washington Examiner. “He conceded, or was prepared to concede, a huge amount of his foreign policy authority to Rudy Giuliani … this was a situation where I think the ambassadors in the field should be backed up.”
Pompeo has avoided public disputes with Trump, whose open disagreements with then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson paved the way for Pompeo to become America’s top diplomat.
“We did have the Tillerson example,” said the person with knowledge of Trump’s animosity toward Yovanovitch. The person also has insight into how Pompeo navigated the Ukraine controversy. “[Pompeo] would argue the case,” the person said, “but he would keep that private.”
[Related: Obama-era official calls Pompeo’s failure to stand by Yovanovitch ‘an act of abject cowardice’]
A former Pompeo adviser, who resigned his State Department position, additionally criticized the top U.S. diplomat for not openly supporting Yovanovitch. “Good commanders support their troops in moments of crisis,” Michael McKinley told House investigators during his Oct. 16 deposition.
Pompeo has defenders, however, within the tight-knit community of diplomats who focused on Ukraine.
“If he had been willing to throw his body in front of Masha Yovanovitch … he might have lost his job,” John Herbst, another friend of Yovanovitch and former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, said of Pompeo. “And that would be unfortunate for those of us who care about Ukraine policy because he does have influence with the president, although not necessarily decisive influence, and his instincts are really good.”
Kurt Volker, who resigned as the lead U.S. negotiator for the war in Ukraine, testified that Pompeo encouraged him to persuade Trump that Giuliani amplified false narratives spun for him by former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko. Volker believed Pompeo was “helpless to stop” Giuliani’s freelance diplomacy.
“I’m sure he could have called Rudy Giuliani, but would Rudy Giuliani have stopped doing what he’s doing because the secretary of state calls him?” Volker testified. “I’d be surprised.”
State Department officials ignored Trump’s initial demand to recall Yovanovitch, said the person close to the situation. “The president had wanted to get rid of her a year before, when he first heard these stories, and nobody acted on it,” the person said. “And then when he was reminded that she was there because of Lutsenko and Giuliani, then I think he was fired up.”
Pompeo needed to remain on good terms with Trump, Herbst said, in light of losing John Bolton as national security adviser.
“So if you lose Pompeo too and have a cipher in that position, who’s telling the president that he’s full of crap (gently, of course)?” Herbst said. “Yeah, Pompeo knew what the game was, and he was trying to either kill it — or, at least to manage it — and he wasn’t succeeding. And he was biding his time.”
