President Donald Trump isn’t just getting off the hook for this one, no matter how intensely he flails. This Friday, former Ukraine Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch was slated to testify to Congress against Trump, and in a copy of her prepared remarks obtained by The Washington Post, she shares that she was fired at the direct urging of Trump himself. She also roped in Trump’s already in the hot seat personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, suggesting that some of his “contacts… may well have believed that their personal financial ambitions were stymied by our anti-corruption policy in Ukraine.” In other words, she suggests the president’s inner circles contain criminals.
She’d been fired after Trump “lost confidence in her,” in The Post‘s description, which came after “months” of criticism from Giuliani, who alleged everything from that she was “badmouthing” the president to that she was blocking Trump team attempts to investigate supposed but only baselessly alleged Biden corruption.
Yovanovitch has bluntly denied all of these allegations are true, and she calls them “unfounded and false claims by people with clearly questionable motives.”
Her stance has been proven right by recent developments. This week, a pair of Giuliani’s associates named Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman were arrested on charges of orchestrating a scheme to violate federal campaign finance laws, which included stunning details like the transfer of at least $1 million from a unidentified Russian businessperson to U.S. political candidates. That scheme also included them urging then-Congressman Pete Sessions to push for Yovanovitch to be fired, which they pushed for at the apparent request of a so far unnamed Ukrainian politician.
