Former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch sounded the alarm on Wednesday night, telling an audience at Georgetown University that the State Department is "in trouble," with leaders who lack "policy vision" and "moral clarity."Yovanovitch was ousted from her post last May, following a smear campaign orchestrated by President Trump's personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani. During the impeachment inquiry, Yovanovitch testified that she felt undermined and threatened by people who wanted her out of their way. She was removed from Kyiv at the same time Giuliani was digging for dirt in Ukraine on Trump's political rivals.Yovanovitch, who retired from the State Department last month, told the crowd that when it comes to foreign policy, the U.S. needs to be "principled, consistent, and trustworthy. To be blunt, an amoral, keep-them-guessing foreign policy that substitutes threats, fear, and confusion for trust cannot work over the long haul. At some point, the once-unthinkable will become the inevitable — that our allies who have as much right to act in their own self-interest as we do, will seek out more reliable partners whose interests might not align well with ours."These were Yovanovitch's first public remarks since leaving the State Department. She was at Georgetown to accept an award from the School of Foreign Service, and received a standing ovation from the audience.More stories from theweek.com Bipartisan group of senators to meet Ukrainian president this week Brokered convention gets close 2nd place in FiveThirtyEight's Democratic nomination forecast 8 Republicans join Democrats in vote to limit Trump's military powers in Iran

Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut said Wednesday that President Donald Trump has a "get out of jail free card" from Senate Republicans and that the President learned from the impeachment trial "that he can do anything."

In the aftermath of his recent acquittal in the Senate impeachment trial, President Donald Trump is on the payback warpath. His actions range from the disgraceful use of the Justice Department (with an eager assist from Attorney General William Barr) as a blunt instrument to protect his political allies and to target his perceived opponents to the obvious witness retaliation against Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, a former top Ukraine expert on the National Security Council, who served as a key impeachment witness, and his twin brother, Lt. Col. Yevgeny Vindman (a National Security Council attorney who did not testify).

CNN's Anderson Cooper says President Donald Trump is using his power to seek retribution after his impeachment trial.

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) said President Trump is angry after the months-long impeachment fight, leading to a string of bombshells including the removal of two key impeachment witnesses. Asked during an interview with the Bangor Daily News&...

* Attorney general to go before House judiciary committee * Democrats warn of ‘a crisis in the rule of law in America’William Barr, the US attorney general, has agreed to testify before a congressional committee over alleged political interference at the justice department, Democrats said, as they warned of “a crisis in the rule of law in America”.Washington is reeling from aftershocks of the department’s unusual decision to overrule career prosecutors and seek a lighter prison sentence for the political operative Roger Stone, a longtime friend of the US president. The entire prosecution team resigned in protest.On Wednesday, Democrats on the House judiciary committee wrote to Barr confirming that he had agreed to testify at a hearing on 31 March. Chairman Jerry Nadler wrote in the letter that the attorney general should expect to be asked about recent steps that “raise grave questions” over his leadership of the justice department.These include, Nadler said, “the decision to overrule your career prosecutors and significantly reduce the recommended sentence for Roger Stone, who has been convicted for lying under oath, at the apparent request of the president – a decision that led to all four prosecutors handling the case to withdraw from the proceedings in protest”.Stone, 67, a political operative and self-described dirty trickster, was convicted last November of lying to Congress, witness tampering and impeding the investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. On Monday, prosecutors requested that he serve seven to nine years behind bars. But Trump issued a late-night objection via Twitter, stating: “Cannot allow this miscarriage of justice!”Hours later, a new memo from the justice department cut the proposed sentence, offering Stone’s “advanced age, health, personal circumstances and lack of criminal history” as mitigating circumstances. Media reports suggested Barr had personally intervened.All four lawyers that prosecuted Stone abruptly quit the case, with one leaving the justice department altogether. On Wednesday, the White House insisted that Trump had not meddled, but on Twitter the president brazenly praised Barr for “taking charge of a case that was totally out of control and perhaps should not have even been brought”.Later, speaking to reporters at the White House, Trump thanked justice department officials for trimming the sentencing recommendation. He declined to say whether he would pardon Stone. “They treated Roger Stone very badly,” he said.But Chuck Schumer, the Democrat minority leader in the Senate, sounded the alarm about an unprecedented threat to the independence of the legal system.“We are witnessing a crisis in the rule of law in America – unlike one we have ever seen before,” Schumer said in a speech on the Senate floor. “It is a crisis of President Trump’s making. But it was enabled and emboldened by every Senate Republican who was too afraid to stand up to him and say the simple word ‘no’, when the vast majority of them knew that that was the right thing to do.”Trump was acquitted by the Republican majority in the Senate in his impeachment trial last week and immediately began a purge of officials who testified about his efforts to pressure Ukraine to investigate a political rival – fuelling Democrats’ fears that he would feel further emboldened, unleashed and able to act with impunity.Two days after his acquittal, Schumer noted, Trump retaliated by firing members of his administration who testified in the impeachment inquiry, including Lt Col Alexander Vindman and Ambassador Gordon Sondland. He even dismissed Vindman’s brother. “How vindictive, how petty, how nasty,” Schumer said.On Tuesday Trump withdrew the nomination of Jessie Liu, a former US attorney in Washington whose office prosecuted Stone, for a new post in the treasury department. But it was the Stone case that prompted Schumer to call for an emergency Senate judiciary committee hearing, where Barr would potentially be obliged to testify, and an investigation by the department’s inspector general, an external watchdog.“The president is claiming that rigging the rules is perfectly legitimate – he claims an ‘absolute right’ to order the justice department to do anything he wants,” he said. “And the president has as his attorney general an enabler – and that’s a kind word – who actually supports this view.”Schumer added: “We are seeing the behavior of a man who has contempt for the rule of law beginning to try out the new, unrestrained power conferred on him by 52 Republican senators … Left to his own devices, President Trump would turn America into a banana republic, where the dictator can do whatever he wants and the justice department is the president’s law firm, not a defender of the rule of law.”The sentiments were echoed by Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state who was defeated by Trump in the 2016 presidential election. She tweeted: “Trump is using the powers of the presidency like a tyrant – now, to reward accomplices and go after witnesses who dared to speak against him. This should concern and anger us all.” Eric Holder, who served as Barack Obama’s attorney general, wrote on Twitter: “Do not underestimate the danger of this situation. This affects the rule of law and respect for it. Unprecedented.”Yet most Senate Republicans, all but one of whom voted in Trump’s favour in the impeachment trial, again held the line. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina told reporters: “I’m not disturbed about it at all. If you read the reports, this action began on Monday night before the president’s tweets, so I’ve got to take them at their word.”However, Senator Susan Collins of Maine, who had claimed Trump would learn his “lesson” from impeachment, struck a note of dissent. “The president should not have gotten involved,” she told the Reuters news agency.Stone is scheduled to be sentenced by the US district judge Amy Berman Jackson on 20 February. Jackson on Wednesday declined to grant Stone’s request for a new trial.Barr last year cleared the president of obstruction of justice even when the special counsel Robert Mueller had pointedly declined to do so after the Russia investigation.

In the week since his acquittal on impeachment charges, a fully emboldened President Donald Trump is demonstrating his determination to assert an iron grip on government, pushing his Justice Department to ease up on a longtime friend while using the levers of presidential powers to exact payback on real and perceived foes. Trump has told confidants in recent days that he felt both vindicated and strengthened by his acquittal in the Senate, believing Republicans have rallied around him in unprecedented fashion while voters were turned off by the political process, according to four White House officials and Republicans close to the West Wing who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about private conversations. Since then, Trump and his aides have moved with haste to clear his administration of those he sees as insufficiently loyal, reaching all the way back to the time of former special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

President Trump was discussing the recent ouster from the White House National Security Council of Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, an impeachment witness against him, when a reporter asked the president if more staff departures are to come.

"Oh sure, absolutely," the president replied. "There always are."

Since his acquittal last ...