President Trump should not have recalled former Ukraine Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch. That much is clear from Yovanovitch’s now-released testimony, which she gave before the House last month.
The president had no real reason to oust Yovanovitch — the rumors about her “disloyalty” were based on false information that has since been debunked. But Trump’s allies, including Rudy Giuliani and two of his henchmen, used the falsehoods as an opportunity to get rid of someone who threatened their financial endeavors in the region.
“Although I understand, everyone understands, that I served at the pleasure of the president, I was nevertheless incredulous that the U.S. government chose to remove an ambassador based, as far as I can tell, on unfounded and false claims by people with clearly questionable motives,” Yovanovitch said in her testimony, after declaring the allegation that she was or ever has been “disloyal to President Trump” a false and “fictitious” smear.
But Trump’s sycophants, including his eldest son, didn’t bother to check the facts before spreading the story and launching a vicious online campaign against Yovanovitch. When she asked Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, how she should handle the onslaught, he advised her to “go big or go home.”
“You need to, you know, tweet out there that you support the president, and that all these are lies and everything else,” she recalled in her testimony. “It was advice that I did not see how I could implement in my role as an ambassador and as a foreign service officer.”
The misinformation had gotten so out of control, however, that the State Department yanked Yovanovitch out of Ukraine because “they were worried that if I wasn’t, you know, physically out of Ukraine, that there would be, you know, some sort of public tweet or something else from the White House,” Yovanovitch said. “And so this was to make sure that I would be treated with as much respect as possible.”
Yovanovitch said that right before she returned to the United States, she spoke with Carol Perez, director general of the foreign service, who told her to catch the next flight home.
“She said that there was a lot of concern for me, that I needed to be on the next plane home to Washington,” Yovanovitch said. “And I was like, what? What happened? And she said, I don’t know, but this is about your security. You need to come home immediately. You need to come home on the next plane.”
After Yovanovitch returned to the U.S., the Trump administration continued to treat her disgracefully. Instead of standing up for Yovanovitch after the allegations against her were proven false, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo pulled a statement of support for the former ambassador, according to a top State Department aide Michael McKinley, who recently resigned from the department in protest of what had occurred.
As president, Trump is well within his rights to appoint and recall whomever he pleases. But that he should do so without reliable, legitimate information, as in the case of Yovanovitch, suggests a recklessness and a willingness to let his personal interests get in the way of his responsibilities.
