Associated Press
- Marie Yovanovitch said she cried “twenty Kleenexes worth of tears” after Trump abruptly fired her.
- In her new memoir, the former US ambassador to Ukraine said she felt “hurt and anger” after being fired.
- Yovanovitch also wondered how the State Department “would survive the betrayals of the Pompeo years.”
Former US ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch’s new memoir offers vivid new details about the shock, devastation, and anger she felt when she was told then President Donald Trump had lost confidence in her following a politically motivated smear campaign against her.
In “Lessons From The Edge,” Yovanovitch recounts the months-long smear campaign. Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani worked with corrupt Ukrainian interests to discredit Yovanovitch’s anti-corruption work in Ukraine and paint her as an Obama administration holdover trying to undermine Trump’s presidency.
When John Sullivan, then the deputy secretary of state, finally informed Yovanovitch in late April 2019 that she was being recalled from Ukraine three months before her tour was scheduled to end, she broke down. She knew that, as an ambassador, she served at the pleasure of the president. But she also knew she couldn’t be fired from the State Department without cause, “and Sullivan had repeatedly stated there was no cause,” Yovanovitch wrote.
“It’s embarrassing to admit, but I was crying throughout the conversation,” she continues in “Edge.” “I had spent the past three months compartmentalizing, pretending that the baseless attacks didn’t really matter — that everyone would eventually see them for what they were and everything would return to normal.”
“But Sullivan was telling me that principle would not prevail,” Yovanovitch continued. “The compartments collapsed, leaving only hurt and anger. And tears. Not the elegant tears you see in the movies, either. These were pouring-down-your-cheeks tears, hot and angry tears, with mascara leaving black channels on my face.”
Yovanovitch writes that she cried “at least twenty Kleenexes worth of tears” and had “red-rimmed eyes and a swollen nose.”
The former ambassador also describes the reaction of other State Department and US embassy staffers, including those who were tasked with delivering the news of her firing and those who reacted to it after she informed them she’d been let go.
Yovanovitch’s staff assistant, Ewan MacDougall, was one of the people “closest” to the ambassador and managed many of her day-to-day tasks. When she conveyed to him that she’d been fired, “he bent his six-foot frame so that his head almost rested on his knees, and he wept,” the book says.
Yovanovitch, for her part, was permitted to fly back to Kyiv after being abruptly recalled so that she could pack up her things and travel back to the US with her mother, who had stayed with her while she did her tour in Ukraine.
In her memoir, she also reflects on then Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s stewardship of the State Department and his failure to protect her from Trump and Giuliani’s smear campaign.
“I wondered to myself how the department had come to such a state,” Yovanovitch wrote. “I found myself wondering too how it would survive the betrayals of the Pompeo years.”
And she wondered whether Trump and Giuliani’s actions would raise questions from lawmakers and other government officials about how a sitting ambassador was removed because she stood in the way of a domestic political errand.
Indeed, Yovanovitch became one of more than a dozen witnesses who would later testify to Congress in Trump’s first impeachment inquiry about his efforts to strongarm the Ukrainian president into launching political investigations targeting the Bidens while withholding vital military aid and a White House meeting.
Trump was impeached in late 2019 on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. He was acquitted by the Republican-controlled Senate in February 2020.
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