Jacquelyn Martin/AP
- Marie Yovanovitch wrote that Rudy Giuliani “absorbed the lesson of Russian disinformation” while working for Trump.
- She wrote about how he wanted Ukraine’s president to publicly announce investigations into the Bidens ahead of the 2020 election.
- Giuliani had learned that “the allegation can be just as damaging as the action, and it’s easier, quicker, and cheaper to deploy,” Yovanovitch wrote.
Former ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch writes in her new memoir that Rudy Giuliani “completely absorbed the lesson of Russian disinformation” while working for then President Donald Trump ahead of the 2020 US election.
She’s referring in particular to his role spearheading Trump’s pressure campaign in Ukraine, during which Trump conditioned vital military aid and a White House meeting for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Zelenskyy assisting his 2020 reelection campaign.
Specifically, Trump and Giuliani wanted Zelenskyy to investigate bogus allegations of corruption against then Democratic candidate Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, surrounding the latter’s work for the Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings. Trump also told Zelenskyy in a July 2019 phone call that he wanted him to investigate the false claim that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 election.
In her memoir, “Lessons From The Edge,” Yovanovitch writes about how Giuliani embraced these false narratives and demonstrated a key objective of the type of information warfare Russia has engaged in since the Soviet-era.
“Giuliani saw Zelenskyy’s interest in meeting with Trump as an opportunity to move forward with his plan to portray Joe Biden as corrupt,” the book says. “If Ukraine’s president would announce that his government planned to investigate Biden, Trump and Giuliani could run with the narrative that Biden must be corrupt; why else would Ukraine be investigating?”
Yovanovitch goes on to write: “What was becoming clearer too was that Giuliani was focused on the announcement of an investigation rather than an actual investigation.”
“Apparently,” she continues, “he had completely absorbed the lesson of Russian disinformation: the allegation can be just as damaging as the action, and it’s easier, quicker, and cheaper to deploy.”
Trump, too, was keenly focused on the announcement of investigations into the Bidens and Burisma.
Bill Taylor, the US’s former chargé d’affaires in Ukraine, testified in Trump’s first impeachment inquiry back in 2019 that the US president wanted to put Zelenskyy in a “public box.”
When asked what he meant by that, Taylor said that Trump, through EU ambassador Gordon Sondland, “was asking for Zelenskyy to very publicly commit to these investigations. It was not sufficient to do this in private, that this needed to be a very public statement.”
Taylor was also among several witnesses, including Yovanovitch, who said that Giuliani led Trump’s pressure campaign in Ukraine and was responsible for running a shadow foreign policy channel that ran astray from US national security interests and focused on delivering aiding Trump in his domestic political reelection campaign.
In her memoir, Yovanovitch describes Giuliani as Trump’s “personal dirt-digger” and writes that corrupt Ukrainians, including former prosecutors general Yuriy Lutsenko and Viktor Shokin, used him as a tool to spread “lies and half-truths” in the US to further their own goals.
Chief among those goals was orchestrating Yovanovitch’s ouster after carrying out a months-long smear campaign against her, accusing her of corruption.
Still, the former ambassador writes, she wasn’t worried because “while I’d seen plenty of whisper campaigns and smear efforts in my many years of working in the former Soviet Union, Americans had never been among the key players driving them.”
“Perhaps that’s because anyone considering such an effort would never have gotten close enough to the seat of American power to have an impact,” she adds. “But as I was rapidly learning, where Trump’s administration was concerned, all bets were off.”
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