The most confusing question at the core of the Trump-Ukraine scandal has very little to do with the abuse of power argument at the center of the Democrats’ impeachment case.
It is this: Why did Rudy Giuliani push so hard for President Trump to fire Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch?
Trump’s motivation seems simple enough. Giuliani’s cronies, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, told the president at an April 2018 dinner that Yovanovitch disliked Trump and wouldn’t advance his interests. Trump, who famously dislikes anyone who dislikes him, immediately suggested firing her. All he needed was cover, which Giuliani and company gave him by smearing her all across the highest echelons of the U.S. government.
But why did Giuliani want Yovanovitch gone so badly? Contrary to the debunked claims of former top prosecutor Yuri Lutsenko, Yovanovitch absolutely was a hawk on corruption. Giuliani was selling a lie, and presumably, he knew that. His attempts now to explain himself are raising more questions than answers.
“I believed that I needed Yovanovitch out of the way,” Giuliani told the New Yorker earlier this week. “She was going to make the investigations difficult for everybody.”
But seeing as Lutsenko’s fabled “Do Not Prosecute” list was likely an outright fabrication, we know that Yovanovitch wasn’t impeding the Ukrainian government from investigating. So that renders Giuliani’s Tuesday morning defense all the more baffling.
Yovanovitch needed to be removed for many reasons most critical she was denying visas to Ukrainians who wanted to come to US and explain Dem corruption in Ukraine. She was OBSTRUCTING JUSTICE and that’s not the only thing she was doing. She at minimum enabled Ukrainian collusion.
— Rudy Giuliani (@RudyGiuliani) December 17, 2019
As Slate’s Will Saletan points out, the official House Republican impeachment report uses Yovanovitch’s visa denials to Giuliani allies in Ukraine as evidence that the Trump administration “actively worked to stop potential impropriety.”
Republicans also note that Yovanovitch took affirmative steps, such as taping videos expressing support for Trump. She also sought advice from the president’s chosen ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, to show her allegiance to the administration.
So Giuliani wanted her gone, but it doesn’t seem like it was because Yovanovitch, a corruption hawk and career diplomat, was either jeopardizing Trump’s standing or hindering corruption investigations — not even the politicized investigation into the Bidens and Burisma Holdings.
Giuliani must have been acting with motivations independent of Trump when he schemed to push out Yovanovitch. What were they?
