A 2021 federal raid on Rudy Giuliani’s home and office was spurred by suspicions that the former New York City mayor had sought the removal of the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine partly because of the prospect of a financial reward from a Ukrainian official, according to documents made public Tuesday.
The documents provide new detail on the since-concluded investigation into Giuliani’s involvement with Ukrainian figures in the run up to the 2020 presidential election. Giuliani, a longtime ally of former President Donald Trump, was not charged with a crime as a result of the inquiry.
In a search warrant application, federal agents seeking to seize Giuliani’s cell phones, laptop and other electronic devices raised the possibility that he and three other people could be charged with acting as unregistered foreign agents.
The documents, unsealed at the request of The New York Times and dating to the weeks before the raids, confirmed past news reports that federal prosecutors in Manhattan were examining whether Giuliani had gotten anything of value from Ukrainian figures in return for lobbying the Trump administration to fire then-U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch.
The search warrant application said that Giuliani had been “incentivized” to lobby for the ambassador’s removal in two ways.
First, it said, Yuriy Lutsenko, the prosecutor general in Ukraine who wanted the ambassador fired, had offered to hire Giuliani to lobby the Trump administration for help recovering Ukrainian assets he believed had been misappropriated by a U.S. investment firm.
“As discussed below, Giuliani was interested in being engaged to do that work, and proposed a retainer with a $200,000 upfront payment. Thus, it appears that Giuliani took steps to cause the firing of the Ambassador to prove to what he could achieve in order to, among other things, secure the legal representation,” the search warrant said.
Secondly, the application said, Giuliani wanted Lutsenko’s help launching an investigation that might hurt Democratic rival Joe Biden.
Both Lutsenko and Giuliani have previously denied there was anything inappropriate about their interactions.
Prosecutors noted that the proposed $200,000 retainer was never paid. Giuliani has said he also never lobbied the Trump administration on Lutsenko's behalf.
A message seeking comment was left Tuesday with Giuliani's spokesperson.
In November 2022, federal prosecutors revealed in a letter to a federal judge that Giuliani would not face criminal charges over his interactions with Ukrainian figures before the 2020 presidential election.
“Based on information currently available to the Government, criminal charges are not forthcoming,” they wrote. They said the grand jury probe that led to the seizure of Giuliani’s electronic devices had concluded.
Giuliani tweeted soon afterward that it was a “COMPLETE & TOTAL VINDICATION.”
The contours of the investigation were broadly known even before its conclusion, but details of what evidence prosecutors were acting on when they sought to search Giuliani had not been revealed.
The Times wrote to the judge in October seeking copies of the search warrants, warrant applications, supporting affidavits and other documents.
Giuliani consented to releasing the search warrant documents, according to U.S. District Judge J. Paul Oetken’s order unsealing them.
The documents contained numerous redactions, with many names and other identifying information blacked out. Trump’s name appeared in the documents more than two-dozen times, mainly pertaining to Giuliani’s alleged lobbying efforts. There was no suggestion that investigators suspected Trump of wrongdoing.
In an affidavit filed with Manhattan federal magistrates to secure search warrants, investigators wrote it appeared Giuliani had been aware of FARA registration requirements for some time and had publicly stated that he believed he was not required to register because he has never lobbied the U.S. government on behalf of his clients.
The disclosure of the search warrant documents comes amid a tangle of recent and ongoing legal challenges for the Republican ex-mayor.
Giuliani was indicted in August in Georgia on charges he acted as Trump’s chief co-conspirator in a plot to subvert Biden’s victory. He was also described as a co-conspirator but not charged in special counsel Jack Smith’s federal election interference case against Trump.
Last week, a jury in Washington, D.C. ordered Giuliani to pay $148 million in damages to two former Georgia election workers who sued him for defamation over lies he spread about them in the wake of Trump’s 2020 election loss.
The former workers, Wandrea “Shaye” Moss and her mother Ruby Freeman, sued Giuliani again on Monday, alleging he continued to defame them during the trial.
At the same time, agents also served a warrant for a phone belonging to Washington lawyer Victoria Toensing, a former federal prosecutor and close ally of Giuliani and Trump. Her law firm said she was informed she was not a target of the investigation. She was not charged.
Giuliani accused federal authorities at the time of “running rough shod over the constitutional rights of anyone involved in, or legally defending" Trump.
Giuliani also sought to undermine Yovanovitch, who was pushed out on Trump’s orders. He met several times with a Ukrainian lawmaker who released edited recordings of Biden in an effort to smear him before the election.
Hunter Biden was charged by U.S. authorities in September with federal gun crimes and is scheduled to be arraigned next month on tax charges.
On Tuesday, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy declared that he was turning three Republican investigations that have already been running since January into “impeachment inquiries” on the basis of … of … well, on the basis of how McCarthy is scared sh--less that the members of his own party might come to collect on all the promises he made to get his big office.
The public could—and has—cheerfully ignored the performance art that three Republican-run committees have been executing with no obvious goal other than to allow them to send out daily fundraising requests that include the phrase “Hunter Biden’s laptop.” People expect Republicans to run pointless inquiries into the same thing over and over again. (See: Benghazi, Benghazi, Benghazi, or the other five investigations into Benghazi.) But an impeachment inquiry seems like it should have at least some tiny scrap of evidence to justify its existence.
It has apparently fallen to Rep. Jim Jordan to provide that scrap. Only what he’s trotting out for the Fox & Friends crowd has a slight problem: It’s all just a scam that blew up on Republicans four years ago.
Here’s what Jordan tried to sell on Fox & Friends as justification for an impeachment inquiry.
”[President Joe Biden] told Ukraine, ‘If you don’t fire the prosecutor, you’re not getting the money.’ That’s exactly what they accused President Trump of doing, which he didn’t do and they impeached him over that. He did it. And he did it — remember, Dec. 4, 2015, Devon Archer and Hunter Biden are meeting with the head of Burisma, Mr. Zlochevsky, and they called D.C. Now, Devon Archer says, ‘I stepped away. I don’t know who they talked to in D.C.’ Now, come on. They called D.C. And then five days later, the vice president of the United States, the current president of the United States, goes to Ukraine and starts the process into getting the prosecutor fired.”
It’s not really possible to feel sorry for Jordan, but it is possible to feel a level of astonishment over just what level of pathetic—patheticness? pathegnosity?—he is willing to reach in order to justify his actions.
To steal the opening from the last two “Spider Man” animated features: Let’s do this one more time.
All of this business about Joe Biden and Burisma goes back to May 2019 and an article that appeared in The New York Times that gave Rudy Giuliani an open mic to make a set of unchallenged claims. Trump immediately picked up those claims and leveled them at then-undeclared candidate Joe Biden. To see just how close they are to what Jordan is saying now, let’s look at what Daily Kos wrote then:
At the heart of the charge Trump is making against Biden is this: Biden’s son Hunter was on the board of an energy company called Burisma Holdings that was targeted by a Ukrainian prosecutor. This prosecutor was one of several figures whom Joe Biden railed against on a trip to Ukraine in which he complained about corruption in the country’s government, including a threat to withhold U.S. funds if Ukraine didn’t clean up its act. In the next election, the prosecutor was voted out, and Ukraine got its funds.
When that was written, on May 2, 2019, there was still some belief that Burisma might have actually benefited from the removal of that prosecutor, whose name was Viktor Shokin. However, just two weeks later, Bloomberg did something that The New York Times apparently never considered: They sent a reporter to Ukraine and checked up on Giuliani’s claims. What they discovered was that not one word held up to the slightest scrutiny.
It turns out that the problem with Shokin was that he wasn’t investigating Burisma, or much of anything else. In fact, as early as 2015, prosecutors in the U.K., who actually were trying to go after both Burisma and Zlochevsky, became convinced that Shokin was actively interfering with that investigation to protect Burisma. British officials didn’t just take their displeasure to the Ukrainian government, they also complained to the U.S.
It was those complaints that caused Joe Biden to include Shokin in a group of officials that the U.S. wanted removed due to suspected corruption, because eliminating corruption in the Ukrainian government was something both the U.K. and the U.S. were actively championing. In getting rid of Shokin, Biden was encouraging investigation of Burisma, but stopping it.
Where did Giuliani’s faux scandal originate? Simple. Donald Trump sent him. It took until February 2020 for Trump to confess this openly, but he admitted sending Giuliani to Ukraine on a Geraldo Rivera podcast. Trump sent Giuliani to Ukraine, not for any purpose to benefit the United States, but explicitly to talk to people who had run out of the government for being too corrupt to cook up something that could be used against Biden, who Trump saw as his biggest electoral threat.
Of course, those corrupt former officials and members of a pro-Russian faction within Ukraine had a price for giving Giuliani the story they wanted: the ouster of U.S. Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch. They wanted Yovanovitch out because she was regarded as both an effective advocate for the U.S. and a tireless fighter against corruption. Giuliani snapped up that deal. He sold Trump on the idea that Yovanovitch had said bad things about him—and that she was standing in the way of creating the narrative Giuliani was trying to create in Ukraine. Just like that, Yovanovitch was gone.
None of this is new. In fact, it’s not just four years old, but every aspect of the story has been covered again, and again, and again. Shokin’s deputy has even admitted that the prosecutor was not investigating Burisma.
Everything that Jordan was babbling about on Fox was sad, false, and ridiculous. Deplorable seems like the right word. But hey, he does seem to have convinced one person.
Tommy Tuberville says that Jim Jordan presented his impeachment “evidence” to him today and, after applying his very unbiased brilliant legal mind to the case, he has (shockingly) determined that it is overwhelming. pic.twitter.com/aQO5l0bu0p
What do you do if you're associated with one of the biggest election fraud scandals in recent memory? If you're Republican Mark Harris, you try running for office again! On this week's episode of "The Downballot," we revisit the absolutely wild story of Harris' 2018 campaign for Congress, when one of his consultants orchestrated a conspiracy to illegally collect blank absentee ballots from voters and then had his team fill them out before "casting" them. Officials wound up tossing the results of this almost-stolen election, but now Harris is back with a new bid for the House—and he won't shut up about his last race, even blaming Democrats for the debacle.
Ukraine may have saved our democracy and its own back in 2019 by resisting Donald Trump’s efforts to pressure the country’s government into announcing an investigation of Joe and Hunter Biden.
What many people don’t realize is that Rudy Giuliani had already begun pushing to get the Ukrainian government to announce such an investigation as early as January 2019, when he met in New York with Ukraine’s Prosecutor-General Yuriy Lutsenko. That’s months before Volodymyr Zelenskyy, running on an anti-corruption platform, won the April 21, 2019, presidential run-off election against incumbent Petro Poroshenko. Biden officially announced his candidacy just four days later.
I would recommend that everyone read the Ukrainegate timeline prepared by Just Security, an online forum that analyzes U.S. national security policy. It outlines the complex chain of events in the campaign to pressure Ukraine that eventually resulted in Trump’s first impeachment. And there was a a quid pro quo offered to Poroshenko—although it did not involve withholding weapons, according to the Just Security timeline.
TheWall Street Journalreported that in late Feburary 2019, Giuliani’s associates Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman met with Poroshenko to press him to initiate an investigation of Hunter Biden and a debunked theory that Ukraine had interfered in the 2016 presidential election to help Hillary Clinton. They said if Poroshenko went along he would be rewarded with a state visit to the White House. That would have been a boon to Poroshenko, who was in a tough campaign for reelection against Zelenskyy.
Now imagine an alternate history in which Ukraine’s top prosecutor had announced an investigation of the Bidens in March 2019. Poroshenko was pushed to the brink, but did not yield to the pressure.
Poroshenko and Trump in 2017
It would have come completely out of the blue, since there was no “perfect” phone call or whistleblower at the time. Just think about howCNN or The New York Times would have reported on the investigation. How would Biden have reacted to a nasty smear campaign against his sole surviving son, who was in a fragile state as he struggled to recover from substance abuse problems?
A New York Times story dated Feb. 26, 2019 said Biden had held a family meeting earlier that month in which there was a “consensus” that he should run for president. But at the same time, Biden acknowledged in a speech at the University of Delaware that he had been uneasy about “taking the family through what would be a very, very, very difficult campaign” against Trump. “I don’t think he’s likely to stop at anything, whomever he runs against,” Biden said.
If Ukraine had done Giuliani’s bidding, Biden might very well have decided against entering the race. At best, Biden would have entered the campaign as a weakened frontrunner, with a dark cloud hanging over his head. Either way, Democrats would have faced an even more contentious primary contest, which might have yielded a weakened candidate whom Trump would have had a better chance of defeating.
A second Trump term would have posed an undeniable threat to our democracy. As for Ukraine, Vladimir Putin’s puppet would have continued undermining NATO and done little to help Kyiv resist Russian aggression.
In Trump’s mind, Ukraine, not Russia, was his enemy.
In August 2018, polls showed that Biden was leading Trump in a head-to-head matchup, and also leading the potential Democratic primary field. Biden indicated that fall that he was strongly considering a 2020 presidential bid. Around the same time, Giuliani Partners was hired by the Boca Raton, Florida, company Fraud Guarantee, co-founded by Parnas, a Ukrainian-American businessman. Giuliani ultimately was paid $500,000 for undisclosed business and legal advice, according to Reuters.
Lev Parnas in 2020
Parnas and his associate Igor Fruman were later convicted in a campaign fraud finance case, for using funds from a foreign investor to try to influence political candidates through campaign donations. There was a $325,000 donation to the pro-Trump American First PAC from a shell company set up by Parnas and Fruman. That was enough for both men to get invited to an exclusive donors’ dinner in April 2018 with Trump at his Washington hotel, at which both men urged the president to fire U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, an anti-corruption crusader, claiming that she was unfriendly to Trump, TheWashington Postreported
Parnas and Fruman became Giuliani’s facilitators and translators as he revved up efforts to go after Biden, even though he had yet to declare his candidacy.
WAS RUDY A “USEFUL TOOL” FOR A DISINFORMATION CAMPAIGN BY RUSSIAN INTELLIGENCE?
Now there’s one big unanswered question: Was Giuliani wittingly or unwittingly acting as a “useful tool” to spread disinformation prepared by Russian intelligence aimed at derailing Biden’s presidential campaign? It’s not implausible, because U.S. Intelligence has already confirmed that Russia was spreading disinformation about Biden’s mental health.
Giuliani and Trump in 2016
The Washington Post reported in October 2020 that U.S. intelligence agencies had warned the White House in 2019 that Giuliani was the target of an influence operation by Russian intelligence and being used to feed disinformation to Trump. Giuliani did ask Ukraine to probe accusations that Ukrainian officials plotted to rig the 2016 presidential election in Hillary Clinton’s favor, by leaking evidence against Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign manager. Giuliani wanted Ukraine to investigate a mysterious Democratic National Committee server that Trump believed was hidden in Ukraine.
During the November 2019, House Intelligence Committee hearings, Fiona Hill, the former Russia expert for the National Security Council, called out House Republicans for pushing the conspiracy theory that Ukraine, not Russia, meddled in the 2016 presidential election.
“This is a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves,” Hill said.
Giuliani was pushing allegations that Biden, while vice president to Barack Obama, pushed to get Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin dismissed, in order to avoid a corruption investigation of Ukraine’s Burisma energy company, whose board members included Hunter Biden. But Giuliani could not have come up with this conspiracy theory on his own, because it was totally baseless. It’s logical to assume that this notion was spoon fed to Giuliani, who eagerly swallowed it.
One method used by Russian intelligence operatives is to put ideas into the head of someone who is receptive to the same goal—in this case derailing Biden’s candidacy. The notion that Biden stood a good chance of defeating Trump in 2020 must have really stuck in Giuliani’s craw. It was Biden who turned “America’s mayor” into a national laughingstock in an October 2007 Democratic presidential debate.
“Rudy Giuliani. There’s only three things he mentions in a sentence — a noun, a verb, and 9/11. There’s nothing else! There’s nothing else! And I mean this sincerely. He’s genuinely not qualified to be president,” Biden said.
At the time, Giuliani was the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination. He ended up running one of the most humiliating campaigns in modern U.S. political history, raising more than $60 million and winning only one delegate before dropping out. Giuliani then vanished into the political wilderness for eight years, only to reemerge as Trump’s personal lawyer and hatchet man.
Giuliani had access to Trump, who had repeatedly expressed his willingness to get dirt on his political opponents from foreign sources. Giuliani’s international consulting practice had clients in Ukraine dating back to at least 2008, including Kyiv’s Mayor Vitali Klitschko, the former heavyweight boxing champion.
During Trump’s first impeachment trial, Giuliani put out this intriguing tweet:
...incriminating documents. It was already a fully-intact bribery/extortion case. The reason you don’t know about it is because of the cover up by the corrupt Democrats and their establishment media!
The dossier was allegedly handed to Giuliani sometime in the fall of 2018. That raises some obvious questions: Who prepared it? What were its contents? Who were the witnesses? And who gave the dossier to Giuliani?
There are many possible suspects. A month before Trump’s first impeachment trial, NBC News published a guide to the controversial figures helping Giuliani dig up dirt on the Bidens in Ukraine. The story noted that “most of them have ties to pro-Russian political figures or oligarchs.” Three names stand out in this rogues’ gallery: Andriy Derkach, a pro-Russia member of Ukraine’s parliament; Kostiantyn Kulyk, a former prosecutor; and Dmytro Firtash, a Ukrainian energy tycoon with deep ties to Russia.
Derkach studied at the FSB intelligence service academy in Moscow in the 1990s. Washington Postcolumnist Josh Rogin wrote that a top-secret CIA assessment had concluded that Putin and his top aides are “probably directing” a Russian foreign influence operation which involves Derkach, identified by U.S. intelligence as a Russian agent, who has been providing anti-Biden information to Giuliani.
Kulyk did prepare a seven-page, English-language dossier in late 2018 that accused Hunter Biden of corruption related to his service on Burisma’s board, according toThe New York Times. The dossier also made the dubious claim that U.S. diplomats covered up for crimes committed by the Bidens. Ukrainian officials said Kulyk had ties to a warlord in eastern Ukraine, accused of working for the Russian intelligence services. It’s not clear whether this was the same dossier that Giuliani was referring to in his tweet.
Firtash has been fighting extradition from Austria to the U.S. on bribery and racketeering charges. Parnas has alleged that Giuliani offered help with Firtash’s U.S. legal problems, in exchange for helping with the hunt for compromising information on the Bidens. Federal prosecutors also alleged that Parnas received a $1 million loan from a lawyer for Firtash.
Firtash was also involved in investment projects with Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort, who previously was paid millions of dollars to work as a political consultant for Ukraine’s pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych.
HOW GIULIANI PUT THE SQUEEZE ON UKRAINE BEFORE ZELENSKYY’S ELECTION
At the annual White House Hannukah party on Dec. 6, 2018, Parnas and Fruman held a private meeting with Trump and Giuliani. CNN reported that Trump tasked them to pressure the Ukrainian government to investigate the Bidens, according to associates of Parnas.
Parnas and Giuliani in 2018
In December 2018, Parnas and Fruman arranged a Skype call between Giuliani and Shokin, the former Ukraine prosecutor general who was the source of the debunked reports that Joe Biden had him fired to stop him from investigating wrongdoing in Burisma.
Biden actually was among multiple Western officials who had urged Ukraine to dismiss Shokin from his post at the country’s top prosecutor because of his insufficient efforts to combat corruption.
Bloomberg News reported that Giuliani met for the first time with then-Ukraine Prosecutor General Yuri Lutsenko in New York on Jan. 25-26, 2019. Giuliani held another meeting with the Ukrainian prosecutor in Warsaw, Poland, in mid-February. Parnas and Fruman attended both meetings.
And then in late February we get to the quid pro quo, with Giuliani’s associates telling Poroshenko that if Ukraine announced an investigation of the Bidens, he would be rewarded with a state visit to the White House.
Yet why didn’t the Trump administration try to extort Poroshenko by withholding shipments of lethal weapons? Perhaps because there might have been a previous quid pro quo.
In March 2018, the Pentagon approved the sale of 210 Javelin anti-tank missiles to Ukraine. In early April, a Ukraine anti-corruption prosecutor froze four cases involving Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign manager, The New York Timesreported. Ukraine also announced it was halting all cooperation with the Mueller investigation. One of the cases resulted from the mysterious black ledger. In August 2016, Ukraine officials revealed the existence of a secret ledger, which appeared to detail payouts totaling $12.5 million to Manafort for his work as a consultant to Yanukovych.
But there was a catch that rendered the Javelin sale mostly symbolic. The U.S. insisted that the missiles be stored in western Ukraine, hundreds of miles from the frontlines in the eastern Donbas region, where Ukrainian forces were battling pro-Russian separatists, The Atlantic reported.
During their early 2019 meetings, Lutsenko fed some information to Giuliani, including bank records that detailed Burisma’s payments to Hunter Biden. But the records did not indicate any wrongdoing by Hunter Biden, according to a New Yorker profile of the Ukrainian prosecutor. Lutsenko told The New Yorker that he suggested to Giuliani that, if U.S. authorities opened an investigation into the Bidens’ activities in Ukraine, the prosecutor-general’s office would share any relevant information.
But Lutsenko soon realized that what seemed most important to Giuliani was to get him to announce investigations into the Bidens and into claims of Ukrainian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, according to The New Yorker. Lutsenko said he didn’t have any grounds to open such investigations under Ukrainian law. Lutsenko said he sensed that Poroshenko was worried that publicly announcing such investigations would damage Ukraine’s relations with the Democratic Party.
Ukraine had enjoyed strong bipartisan support until Trump came along. Trump’s Republican loyalists were already spouting conspiracy theories put forth by Russian intelligence that Ukraine had meddled in the 2016 election to help Clinton.
“I was near the red line, but I didn’t cross it,” Lutsenko told The New Yorker. “I was wondering what kind of game he (Giuliani) was playing. I felt like we were getting scammed.”
WE NEED A COUNTERESPIONAGE INVESTIGATION OF TRUMP, GIULIANI, MANAFORT, ET AL.
Imagine the consequences today if Poroshenko and Lutsenko had crossed that red line back in early 2019.
Instead, Giuliani and his associates were back at square one with Zelenskyy’s election. That set in motion the series of events leading to Trump’s “perfect” phone call to Zelenskyy, the arms-for-dirt extortion plot, and the president’s eventual impeachment (the first one, anyway).
The Mueller probe barely uncovered the tip of the iceberg, because its scope was limited to looking only into collusion between Russia and Trump during the 2015-2016 presidential campaign.
The DOJ should make a deal with Parnas and/or Fruman to reduce their sentences in exchange for information about whether Russian intelligence used Giuliani to interfere in the 2020 election by undermining Biden’s campaign. It is also high time that a counterespionage investigation be opened against Manafort, if it is not already under way.
And above all else, we need a comprehensive investigation of Trump’s dealings with Vladimir Putin and Russian oligarchs over the decades. With the help of former Attorney General William Barr and others, Trump has been able to escape any consequences for his ties to Russia.
Our nation will never be secure until these criminals are exposed and held to account.
In her first public comments since the impeachment hearings, retired Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch told students at Georgetown University Wednesday that her former employer is currently in a shambles. “Right now, the State Department is in trouble,” she said in an acceptance speech for the Trainor Award, celebrating her decades-long work as a U.S. diplomat. “Senior leaders lack policy vision, moral clarity and leadership.”
Yovanovitch suggested the department's current emphasis on sizing up monetary contributions country by country is both shortsighted and counterproductive to the nation's long-term foreign policy goals. “It’s not about a handout for foreign friends; it’s about enlightened self-interest,” she explained. “For example, it’s hard to see how cutting funds to the World Health Organization in the middle of the coronavirus crisis keeps Americans safer.” Unfortunately, this is the type of concept that requires an explanation under the Trump-era leadership of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
Yovanovitch also said some of the current shortcomings were an outgrowth of the "hollowing out" of the department internally, in terms of expertise, institutional knowledge, and personnel. "The policy process has been replaced by the decisions emanating from the top with little discussion," Yovanovitch observed. "Vacancies at all levels go unfilled and officers are increasingly wondering whether it is safe to express concerns about policy, even behind closed doors."
The veteran diplomat also warned that America's current trajectory could leave us isolated as our allies find "more reliable partners.”
“To be blunt: An amoral, keep-'em-guessing foreign policy that substitutes threats, fear and confusion for trust cannot work over the long haul, especially in our social media-savvy, interconnected world," Yovanovitch said. "At some point, the once-unthinkable will become the soon-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, partners whose interests might not align well with ours."
As dire as her prognosis was, she still chooses to be positive about the future of U.S. diplomacy. "Some people say I'm too optimistic, and that may be, but throwing up our hands is a self-fulfilling prophecy," she said. "In these trying times, optimism is no longer a default setting for many of us—it's a choice."
What a testament to Yovanovitch’s strength of character after what Donald Trump and his henchmen put her through. Brava!
Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch has retired, and now she’s free to speak her mind. The woman who was the subject of a smear campaign by Rudy Giuliani and his buddies when she was ambassador to Ukraine, who Donald Trump fired and said would “go through some things,” and who was confronted with threatening tweets sent by Trump during her House impeachment inquiry testimony has done just that—spoken her mind—in a Washington Post op-ed. “What I’d like to share with you is an answer to a question so many have asked me,” she wrote. “What do the events of the past year mean for our country’s future?”
Yovanovitch expressed optimism about the integrity of her former colleagues in foreign service, about “the next generation of diplomats,” and about how every day she witnesses regular people “reanimating the Constitution and the values it represents.” But … there’s a but, and it very much has to do with the events that thrust Yovanovitch into the public eye and the man who fired her.
“I had always thought that our institutions would forever protect us against individual transgressors,” Yovanovitch wrote. “But it turns out that our institutions need us as much as we need them; they need the American people to protect them or they will be hollowed out over time, unable to serve and protect our country.”
Still more specifically, though still very much in the voice of a woman who has spent decades measuring every word carefully, “our public servants need responsible and ethical political leadership. This administration, through acts of omission and commission, has undermined our democratic institutions, making the public question the truth and leaving public servants without the support and example of ethical behavior that they need to do their jobs and advance U.S. interests.”
It’s amazing that Yovanovitch can be this optimistic, given what she’s been through. But her optimism comes in the form of a warning, and it seems like every day, Republicans are trampling on that optimism. Yovanovitch’s former colleagues who likewise testified in the impeachment trial are worried about their futures. A United States senator stood on the Senate floor, in front of C-SPAN’s cameras, and named the alleged whistleblower. Our democratic institutions need the American people to protect them. We need to heed that warning.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was backed into a rather uncomfortable corner during an interview with Mary Louise Kelly on NPR’s Morning Edition. Although Pompeo wanted to stick to the topic of Iran, Kelly pivoted to the Ukraine scandal and specifically wanted to know how he responded to criticism from State Department personnel who resigned after Pompeo failed to back U.S. Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch while she was being targeted by nefarious characters outside the U.S. government while she was doing her assigned work combatting corruption in Ukraine. Time and time again, Pompeo insisted he’d defended all State Department personnel. A blatant lie, one he struggled to defend.
Listen to or read the exchange below and keep in mind that Mike Pompeo has never uttered one word in support of Ambassador Yovanovitch or any of the other dedicated, career diplomats who refused to participate in the corrupt plans of Donald Trump and his enablers, like Mike Pompeo.
MARY LOUISE KELLY: People who work for you in your department, people who have resigned from this department under your leadership, saying you should stand up for the diplomats who work here.”
MIKE POMPEO: I...I...I don’t know— I don’t know who these unnamed sources are you’re referring to. I can tell you this—
MARY LOUISE KELLY: These are not unnamed sources. This is your senior advisor Michael McKinley, a career foreign service officer with four decades experience who testified under oath that he resigned in part due to the failure of the State Department to offer support for foreign service employees caught up in the impeachment inquiry on Ukraine.
MIKE POMPEO: I’m not going to comment on things that Mr. McKinley may have said. I’ll say only this. I have defended every State Department official. We’ve built a great team. The team that works here is doing amazing work around the world—
MARY LOUISE KELLY: Sir, respectfully, where have you defended Marie Yovanovitch?
MIKE POMPEO: I’ve defended every single person on this team. I’ve done what’s right for every single person on this team.
MARY LOUISE KELLY: Can you point me toward your remarks where you have defended Marie Yovanovitch?
MIKE POMPEO: I’ve said all I’m going to say today. Thank you.
The audio of the Pompeo NPR interview is available below, but there is ample new evidence today about the Ukraine scandal and Mike Pompeo’s involvement. ABC News obtained a taped conversation reportedly of Donald Trump with Lev Parnas, Igor Fruman, Rudy Giuliani, and others. The conversation took place on April 30, 2018, in a suite at Trump’s D.C. hotel, where the gang was having a private dinner where they discussed the Ukraine scheme. Trump can be heard demanding Yovanovitch’s ouster, saying "Get her out tomorrow. I don't care. Get her out tomorrow. Take her out. Okay? Do it."
Lev Parnas recalled this dinner conversation during an interview with MSNBC. After all, dining with a U.S. president in a private suite in his private hotel would be rather memorable, no?
"We all, there was a silence in the room. He responded to him, said Mr. President, we can't do that right now because [Secretary of State Mike] Pompeo hasn't been confirmed yet, that Pompeo is not confirmed yet and we don't have -- this is when [former Secretary of State Rex] Tillerson was gone, but Pompeo was confirmed, so they go, wait until -- so several conversations he mentioned it again."
This new recording, which backs up what Parnas claimed, is all the more reason Mike Pompeo should testify before the Senate during the impeachment trial. The conversation took place the very same week Mike Pompeo was sworn in, which means he was aware of and/or participated in the scheme from the minute he walked through the doors of the State Department.
Either way you slice it, Mike Pompeo has been earning a reputation as a liar, which is a rather untenable position for the secretary of state to be in while they are representing the United States around the world. The American people, and most especially our foreign service officers, deserve someone of the highest ethical and moral standards in the role.
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Mike Pompeo — who refused a House subpoena — would be a top witness for Democrats in the impeachment trial.He is not set to testify, but he spoke to @NPRKelly. She asked the secretary of state if he would defend Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch: pic.twitter.com/1YoGWOSdqb
