Rudy Giuliani is talking again — and what he’s saying may dig the Trump impeachment hole even deeper.
Marie Yovanovitch, the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine recalled by President Trump last spring, is at the heart of what Politico calls “the latest in [Giuliani’s] string of incendiary public statements that the president himself has amplified despite facing imminent impeachment over the matter.”
Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, wrote in a tweet on Tuesday, that ““Yovanovitch needed to be removed for many reasons most critical she was denying visas to Ukrainians who wanted to come to US and explain Dem corruption in Ukraine.”
In Trump-like all caps, Giuliani claimed that Yovanovitch was “OBSTRUCTING JUSTICE.”
In an interview with the New York Times, Giuliani credited himself with calling the president’s attention to the then-ambassador’s actions that “frustrated efforts that could be politically helpful” to Trump’s bid for re-election next year.
“They included investigations involving former Vice President Joseph R. Biden,” the Times says, and Ukrainians who disseminated documents that supposedly damaged Trump’s 2016 campaign — a widely debunked conspiracy theory. The U.S. intelligence community and special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation found something entirely different: that Russia interfered to help Trump in 2016.
In the Times interview, Giuliani claimed Yovanovitch blocked U.S. visas for Ukrainian prosecutors who reputedly had evidence “damaging” to Biden, one of Trump’s top Democratic opponents in the 2020 election.
In a New Yorker article published on Monday, Giuliani said he needed Yovanovitch “out of the way,” because she was making things “difficult for everybody.”
Last April, within weeks after Giuliani relayed his views about Yovanovitch to Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, she was recalled as ambassador and told that the president had “lost faith in her.”
All this would appear to hand House Democrats more evidence to support Trump’s impeachment, one day before the full House votes on it.
“The circumstances of Ms. Yovanovitch’s ouster after a smear campaign engineered in part by Mr. Giuliani were documented during testimony to the House Intelligence Committee, where she was a key witness in impeachment proceedings against Mr. Trump,” the Times says.
“No impeachment investigators of either party have questioned Yovanovitch’s integrity, despite the continuing attacks by Giuliani,” Politico says, noting Yovanovitch’s 33 years with the U.S. Foreign Service. Although she lost her job as Ukraine ambassador, she remains on the State Department payroll.
Impeachment testimony and other evidence show that Giuliani’s claims “were either unsubstantiated or were taken out of context,” Politico says.
“In the [Times] interview, he portrayed himself as personally involved in the effort to derail a career diplomat around the time he was considering business arrangements with some of the Ukrainians [who were] funneling information to him.”
“Trump invited Giuliani to the White House last week, just days after Giuliani returned from a trip to Kyiv and began reviving allegations against Yovanovitch and Trump’s political adversaries,” Politico says, noting that Trump has also retweeted some of Giuliani’s allegations about Yovanovitch.
Giuliani refused to comment on what he told Trump about his most recent trip to Ukraine. He told the Times he has spoken to “several” members of Congress about his findings, but he would not identify them, explaining, “It’s all very confidential.”
