Ukraine envoy testimony on campaign draws fire from Trump

Bloomberg

The former US ambassador to Ukraine faced down the president she still serves with a scathing account of how Donald Trump was played by corrupt actors eager to get her fired and expose American policy to political manipulation.
Less than an hour after ambassador Marie Yovanovitch began testimony before the House impeachment inquiry, Trump weighed in with a tweet that assailed her three decades of service in the US diplomatic corps and singled out her time in one of the world’s most difficult posts. “Everywhere Marie Yovanovitch went turned bad. She started off in Somalia, how did that go?” Trump said. “It is a US President’s absolute right to appoint ambassadors.”
It was a moment of high drama in the impeachment inquiry, as Democrats sought to portray Yovanovitch as the first casualty of a campaign by Trump, his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and Giuliani’s associates to clear her out of the way and achieve their own
political ends: an investigation of Trump’s 2020 political opponent and unsubstantiated claims that Ukraine boosted Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Over the course of six hours, Yovanovitch proved to be a tough witness for Republican lawmakers, who argued that the president has the right to appoint — or recall — his ambassadors as he sees fit. They questioned why she hadn’t sounded the alarm more loudly about Ukrainian officials who criticised Trump in 2016 or a Ukrainian company’s decision to put former Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter on its board.
“You admitted in your opening statement that you do not have any first-hand knowledge of the issues that we are looking into,” said Representative Devin Nunes, the top Republican on the panel.
“I am not exactly sure what the ambassador is doing here today.” He called the hearing an embarrassing show trial.
She detailed how Ukrainians with a history of corrupt behaviour appeared to have persuaded Giuliani — and by extension the president himself — to oust her.
The result, she said, was a dangerous lesson to US adversaries and to the State Department’s rank-and-file, who saw themselves falling victim to corrupt outsiders because their own leadership at the department and the White House wouldn’t — or were afraid to — defend them.
“How could our system fail like this?” Yovanovitch said. “How is it that foreign corrupt interest could manipulate our government?”
Democrats argued that the envoy’s ouster was the start of an ultimately ineffective effort by Trump and Giuliani to persuade Ukraine’s new government to open up an investigation into the Bidens. That effort is at the heart of the debate over whether the president sought to use American aid to leverage domestic political benefits heading into the 2020 election — and whether he should be removed from office.