The damage that President Donald Trump’s reckless excuse for foreign policy has inflicted will reverberate for decades to come. This Friday, House impeachment investigators hosted former Ukraine Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch to get her perspective on that disaster following her abrupt firing over Trump’s completely baseless attacks on her reputation. During a break in the testimony, Fox News host Chris Wallace powerfully praised Yovanovitch and her testimony, insisting that if you really pay attention to what’s going on, he sees no way to not be “moved” by the situation. Of course, that doesn’t mean that Trump and his followers will actually shift their position in the slightest.
Yovanovitch described how following decades of public service, she was abruptly dismissed for supposedly standing in the way of the plot that Trump and his cronies hatched to get Ukraine to produce dirt on the Bidens. Then-top Ukrainian prosecutor Yuri Lutsenko wanted her out of the job too — and the president freely capitulated to those whims, removing a leader in the anti-corruption side of U.S. foreign policy from the world stage.
Wallace noted:
‘I think if you are not moved, and we will have to watch what happens in the cross-examination, but if you were not moved by the testimony of Marie Yovanovitch, you don’t have a pulse. This is a woman who had served in posts for presidents of both parties for more than 30 years. Hardship posts, places like Somalia, like Tashkent, and she tells a story of being a leading fighter against corruption in Ukraine and being called out of an event at the U.S. Embassy that was to honor an anti-corruption fighter that was later killed because acid was thrown in that woman’s face, and she’s being told by the secretary general at the State Department — you’re going to have to leave, and you’re going to have to leave on the next plane.’
Watch:
Chris Wallace: “I think if you are not moved by the testimony of Marie Yovanovitch today you don’t have a pulse.” pic.twitter.com/SCgXqKG87u
— Lis Power (@LisPower1) November 15, 2019
As Wallace noted, an official who Yovanovitch spoke to about her firing — then deputy secretary of state John Sullivan — told her that she “didn’t do anything wrong, but we can’t protect you anymore” from the president’s baseless attacks on her credibility. Previous impeachment witness and former top Pompeo adviser Michael McKinley already told Congress that he resigned in part over dissatisfaction with the Trump administration’s State Department’s refusal to launch any kind of defense of Yovanovitch. State Department official Philip Reeker has also told Congress that he was developing a public defense for Yovanovitch’s reputation, but politically minded State Department officials shut that down.
Trump himself has already responded to Yovanovitch’s Friday appearance with an outlandish tweet that House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) pointed to during the hearing itself as an example of the president’s attempts at witness intimidation. Trump tried to imply that it was Yovanovitch’s personal fault that conditions deteriorated in places like Somalia — as if that makes any sense according to any conventional understanding of the situation whatsoever.
No matter Trump’s ramblings, House investigators already have a full eight witnesses slated to publicly testify this coming week.
