Any woman can only be intimidated if she allows it. Where was this envoy when all of this corruption was going on in the Ukraine if her specialty was rooting out corruption?
From the above article, it looks like a lot of Americans, plus others, were getting rich in the Ukraine.
Pelosi knows that the President can’t be bought and is trying to “rough him up.”
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Marie Yovanovitch, Ex-Ukraine Envoy Ousted by Trump, Says She Feels Intimidated by Him
Sheryl Gay Stolberg
Marie Yovanovitch, former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, is sworn in to testify before a House Intelligence Committee hearing as part of the impeachment inquiry into U.S. President Donald Trump on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S., November 15, 2019.
On Sept. 25, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi initiated an impeachment inquiry against President Trump, following a whistleblower complaint over his dealings with Ukraine. The public impeachment hearing began on Nov. 13.
(Pictured) Marie Yovanovitch, former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, is sworn in to testify before a House Intelligence Committee hearing as part of the impeachment inquiry, on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, on Nov. 15.
Slideshow by photo services
Democrats said the president’s comments were clear attempts by Mr. Trump to intimidate a crucial witness in the impeachment inquiry and do the same to others who might yet come forward, arguing that they could constitute grounds for an article of impeachment against Mr. Trump.
At the White House, Mr. Trump angrily denied the charge.
“I want freedom of speech,” he told reporters, lashing out at Democrats for conducting what he called an unfair impeachment process.
“It’s considered a joke all over Washington and all over the world,” Mr. Trump said of the proceedings, claiming after hours of tweeting about it that he had only watched “a little bit” of the hearing.
Ms. Yovanovitch’s testimony capped a riveting first week of public hearings in the inquiry, as Democrats seek to make their case that Mr. Trump abused his power to enlist Ukraine’s help in discrediting his political rivals, chiefly former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. Speaker Nancy Pelosi this week called it “bribery,” echoing the language in the Constitution that describes impeachable offenses.
Ms. Yovanovitch’s testimony did not go precisely to the heart of that allegation; she was gone from Ukraine by the time of the July 25 telephone call in which Mr. Trump asked President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine to “do us a favor” and look into Mr. Biden and his son Hunter.
But Mr. Trump brought up Ms. Yovanovitch during that call, shortly after he praised a Ukrainian prosecutor who had been at odds with Ms. Yovanovitch over her efforts to root out corruption, and shortly before he asked Mr. Zelensky about the Bidens. Mr. Trump called her “bad news,” and said she was going to “go through some things,” a comment that Ms. Yovanovitch told the committee had taken her breath away when she read a reconstructed transcript of the call.
She testified that the color drained from her face and that she was, “shocked, appalled, devastated that the president of the United States would talk about any ambassador like that to a foreign head of state — and it was me. I mean, I couldn’t believe it.”
“It sounded like a threat,” Ms. Yovanovitch added.
Her experience set the stage for what happened in the crucial months that followed. In an impassioned defense of the State Department and the career Foreign Service officers who work — and sometimes give their lives — to advance the interests of the United States, Ms. Yovanovitch recounted how she became the target of a smear campaign led by Mr. Giuliani, two of his associates — Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, who have since been indicted — and the right-wing news media.
“How could our system fail like this?” she wondered aloud. “How is it that foreign corrupt interests could manipulate our government?”
Known as Masha to her friends, Ms. Yovanovitch, a Canadian immigrant whose parents fled the Soviet Union and Nazis, was known as a vigorous fighter against corruption in Ukraine. She has become a hero to her colleagues in the diplomatic corps (a hashtag #GoMasha has sprung up on Twitter), who say what happened to her did not simply damage a single person’s reputation and career, but was also a blow to American foreign policy.
Republicans argued that Ms. Yovanovitch is, essentially, irrelevant to the inquiry, because she left before the July 25 call and because ambassadors serve at the pleasure of the president, who may recall them for any reason. And they tried to prove an unsubstantiated theory that Ukrainian officials conspired with Hillary Clinton’s campaign to interfere in the 2016 election at Mr. Trump’s expense.
Ms. Yovanovitch pushed back on the assertion.
“We all know that people are critical,” she said after Steve Castor, a lawyer for the Republicans, pointed to disparaging statements that a Ukrainian official had made Mr. Trump during the campaign. “That does not mean that someone, or a government, is undermining either a campaign or interfering in elections.”
“And I would just remind you again,” she went on, “that our own U.S. intelligence community has conclusively determined that those who interfered in the election were Russian.”
Ms. Yovanovitch was recalled from Ukraine abruptly in May, two months earlier than planned. She told lawmakers that she learned she was being pulled back from the deputy secretary of state John J. Sullivan, who called her while she was hosting an “International Woman of Courage” event honoring a Ukrainian anticorruption activist who died after having acid thrown at her.
She said Mr. Sullivan relayed “words that every Foreign Service officer understands: ‘The president has lost confidence in you.’ That was a terrible thing to hear.”
Republicans, determined to avoid looking as if they were bullying Ms. Yovanovitch, gave the lone Republican woman on the committee, Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, a prominent role in questioning her. The session was tense at times, as Republicans made parliamentary points that Mr. Schiff, banging his gavel, repeatedly ruled out of order.
“I do wonder why it was necessary to smear my reputation,” Ms. Yovanovitch said at one point, addressing Representative Brad Wenstrup, Republican of Georgia. Mr. Wenstrup cut her off, saying, “Well I wasn’t asking you about that, so thank you very much, ma’am.”
Seated behind Ms. Yovanovitch, in a demonstration of support as she testified, was Grace Kennan Warnecke, the daughter of George Kennan, one of the most revered American diplomats of the last century and the architect of the containment policy that governed America’s strategy through the Cold War.
After watching the opening round of questioning, Ms. Warnecke walked out with Ms. Yovanovitch during the recess, her presence clearly intended as a sign of the widespread backing that the former ambassador has among the career Foreign Service, which was broadly disturbed by her abrupt removal in the spring.
Mr. Kennan, one of the foremost experts on the Soviet Union in the early years of the Cold War, served as ambassador to Moscow before he was expelled and his famous “long telegram” to Washington ultimately formed the basis for the policy embraced by presidents of both parties for decades to mount “strong resistance” to the Soviet Union around the world.
Peter Baker contributed reporting.
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