AKIPRESS.COM - President Trump reportedly ordered the removal of U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch after his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani complained that she was an obstacle to investigations into former Vice President Joe Biden and his son.
Giuliani told The Wall Street Journal he reminded Trump earlier this year of the complaints surrounding Yovanovitch from himself and others—including her having an anti-Trump bias and her being a barrier to the Biden investigations happening in Ukraine. Giuliani claimed Trump thought she had already been dismissed from her role. Giuliani said he received a subsequent call from a White House official asking him to repeat his concerns about Yovanovitch after speaking with Trump. Yovanovitch then left her post in May, at least three months earlier than expected. Giuliani also told the newspaper he gave Secretary of State Mike Pompeo a nine-page document containing allegations that Yovanovitch was “very close” to Biden. According to Giuliani, Pompeo called him back and assured him the department would investigate. “The reason I gave the information to the secretary was I believed that he should know that the president’s orders to fire her were being blocked by the State Department,” he said. The White House, State Department, and Yovanovitch have not commented publicly on the matter. The former ambassador is slated to testify before Congress on Oct. 11.
Yovanovitch, a State Department employee for 33 years who also led U.S. embassies in Kyrgyzstan and Armenia, is well known in diplomatic circles for her measured demeanor and diligence in representing both Republican and Democratic administrations, former colleagues said, Time reports.
“The former ambassador from the United States, the woman, was bad news,” Trump told Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky during a July 25 call, according to a partial transcript released by the White House. “She’s going to go through some things.”
Yovanovitch, 60, was raised in a household that helped prepare her for a career in international relations. Born in Canada to immigrant parents — her father from the former Soviet Union and her mother from Germany — she grew up speaking Russian at home. The family moved to Connecticut when she was a young child, and she later became a U.S. citizen.
From 2001 to 2004, she worked as the U.S. deputy chief of mission in Ukraine, as second-in-charge to Herbst, before being named ambassador to Kyrgyzstan, then to Armenia. She returned to Ukraine after President Barack Obama nominated her to be U.S. ambassador in 2016.
She arrived in Kyiv two years after Russia’s forced annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula and its continuing military intervention. As an envoy, Yovanovitch sought to reassure Ukrainian officials of U.S. support, while pushing them to root out widespread corruption .