The former US Ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, was testifying before the US Congress impeachment probe on Friday when President Donald Trump launched an angry tirade against her on Twitter.
“Everywhere Marie 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,” Trump tweeted.
Yovanovitch was asked to respond to Trump’s tweets on live television by House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff, to which she said, “It’s very intimidating… I can’t speak to what the president is trying to do but I think the effect is to be intimidating.”
This prompted Schiff to remark, “Some of us here take witness intimidation very seriously. He later told reporters that, “it wasn’t enough that Ambassador Yovanovitch was smeared, it wasn’t enough that she was attacked, it wasn’t enough that she was recalled for no reason, now she is experiencing witness intimidation in real-time by the president of the United States.” He added that Trump’s efforts could chill witnesses like Yovanovitch and "others who may come forward,” repeating his statement that witness intimidation and obstruction of the inquiry was taken very seriously.
Trump removed Yovanovitch from her position in May. As part of her testimony, she said that she had been removed due to claims that she had tried to block Trump’s efforts to investigate Democrat rival Joe Biden, who (should he win the Democratic nomination) may run against Trump in the 2020 presidential election.
Ken Starr, who headed the impeachment inquiry against Bill Clinton, said on Fox News that Trump’s tweets showed “extraordinarily poor judgement”.
House Republicans said, however, that they did not find Yovanovitch’s testimony ‘relevant’,
On Friday, Roger Stone, a Trump associate, was found guilty of witness tampering, obstruction and of lying to Congress.
The impeachment inquiry into the allegations that Trump sought a quid-pro-quo type arrangement with Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky had already raised the charge of one impeachable offence against Trump—bribery. Friday's events could add witness intimidation to that list.
The heart of the matter is a controversial phone call between Trump and Zelensky that was held on July 25, where Trump asked his Ukrainian counterpart to do him a “favour”. The allegation against Trump is that he withheld nearly $400 million in security aid to Ukraine in exchange for evidence against his Democratic rival Joe Biden, who Trump has accused of corruption in relation to his son’s business activities in Ukraine.
The transcript of an earlier call, from April 25, was released by the White House on Friday. However, significant differences emerged between it and the official summary released earlier, suggesting that it was either edited—or the summary provided earlier had been misleading.
