Impeachment transcript reveals fear of Trump tweets
They really are afraid of Trump and what he will do or say about them.
Kafka in Foggy Bottom: impeachment transcript reveals fear of Trump tweets
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/nov/05/impeachment-marie-yovanovitch-ukraine-transcript-reveals-fear-and-chaos-in-the-state-department
Testimony of veteran diplomat Marie Yovanovitch exposes Trump’s paralysing hold on the administration
Julian Borger in Washington Last modified on Tue 5 Nov 2019 07.22 EST
Former US ambassador to Ukraine Yovanovitch arrives for closed-door deposition on Capitol Hill in Washington Photograph: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters
What shines through the testimony of Marie Yovanovitch is her disorientation. She is a veteran diplomat at the peak of her career, and in one of the most challenging but important posts in US foreign policy. But she had no clue what was happening inside her own government.
On 24 April this year, she received a call from Carol Perez, the director general of the foreign service, speaking to her in cryptic tones as if Yovanovitch’s life was in danger if she remained at her ambassadorial post in Kyiv. She spoke as if there was a threat too awful to describe clearly on a phone line.
“She said that there was a lot of concern for me, that I needed to be on the next plane home to Washington,” Yovanovitch recalled in her testimony to the congressional committees conducting impeachment hearings. Taken aback, the ambassador to Ukraine wanted to know what the sudden panic was about. Perez just told her: “I don’t know, but this is about your security. You need to come home immediately.”
Confused and anxious, Yovanovitch flew to Washington to find a state department she no longer recognised.
A few months earlier, her superiors had been so pleased with her work in Kyiv - demonstrating support to the Ukrainian government while holding it to account for its pervasive corruption – that they pleaded with her to extend her posting by an extra year. Now, on her return to Washington, she was being asked to leave without even the dignity of hosting the annual Fourth of July reception.
The top officials were apologetic but shifty. Phil Reeker, the acting assistant secretary of state for Europe and Eurasia told Yovanovitch that Donald Trump had wanted her out of the post since the previous summer. It was the first Yovanovitch had heard about it. Why in that case had the state department tried, as recently as March, to cajole her into staying on? It did not make sense and nothing was being clearly explained. Kafka had come to Foggy Bottom.
When Yovanovitch went to see the deputy secretary of state, John Sullivan, he confirmed that she had lost the confidence of the president, again without explaining how or why. His explanation of the urgent call in the middle of the night was equally bizarre.
“They were worried that if I wasn’t physically out of Ukraine, that there would be, some sort of public either tweet or something else from the White House,” Yovanovitch testified. “And so this was to make sure that I would be treated with as much respect as possible.”
The ambassador had been evacuated not because of some outside threat, but in fear of a tweet from the president. The terrible capricious power of Trump’s Twitter outbursts, and their paralysing effect on the administration, is a striking theme of the Yovanovitch transcript.................................
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