DAMN!..
Former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch was up front today in calling Donald Trump’s tweeting and action’s a effort to influence people speaking to Congress about things they have heard , seen or have had happened to them….
Even Trump supporters seem to uneasy with this….
Please read my ‘Note’ below….
This IS a Trump pattern of action…
Former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch responded in real time to tweets from President Trump denigrating her as she testified in a House impeachment hearing, stating that they were meant to intimidate her.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) offered Yovanovitch the chance to respond to Trump after he paused her dramatic testimony to read Trump’s tweet.
“It’s very intimidating,” Yovanovitch said. “I can’t speak to what the president is trying to do, but I think the effect is to be intimidating.”
In his tweet, Trump wrote that “everywhere” Yovanovitch went “turned bad.”
“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,” he wrote.
In her remarks, Yovanovitch, who spoke in a calm, measured tone throughout her testimony, said the president was prescribing powers to her that she did not realize she had.
Marie L. Yovanovitch recounted in powerful and personal terms on Friday the devastation and fear she felt as she was targeted first by President Trump’s allies and later by the president himself, saying she felt threatened.
Removed from her post as ambassador to Ukraine, Ms. Yovanovitch said she was bereft when she came under fire from the president’s personal attorney and eldest son last spring, but was even more stunned in September when she learned that Mr. Trump himself had disparaged her in his now-famous July 25 phone call with Ukraine’s president.
“It was a terrible moment,” she told the House Intelligence Committee on the second day of public impeachment hearings. “A person who saw me actually reading the transcript said that the color drained from my face. I think I even had a physical reaction. I think, you know, even now, words kind of fail me.”…..
I missed Amb. Yovanovitch’s opening statement when she was giving it, but I later found a 20-minute YouTube video on the PBS News Hour pages (it should also be available on any number of other sites).
See https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-yovanovitchs-full-opening-statement-on-day-2-of-impeachment-hearings
I found it extremely powerful.
For a PDF transcript, see:
https://d3i6fh83elv35t.cloudfront.net/static/2019/11/yovanovitch_hearing_statement_2019-11-15_final.pdf
See also Dan Balz’s commentary about the non-partisan career professional Civil and Foreign Service (“the Deep State”) fighting back against Trump’s campaign to hollow it out and redirect what’s left towards his own political and economic goals:
https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2019/11/15/hearings-underscore-pressure-career-officials-struggling-serve-under-trump/n3SiKpzebiVues8v4z4QRO/story.html