The Played: Marie Yovanovitc

Here’s a badge of honor. Trump fired her.

She addressed the rumors associated with her recall in her opening statement to Members of Congress:

  1. She arrived in Ukraine as ambassador in August, 2016, left in May, 2019.
  2. Before she served as ambassador in Ukraine:
    1. Manafort’s resignation from Trump’s campaign and the associated release of the “black ledger.”
    2. The Embassy’s letter to the Prosecutor General about the investigation in the Anticorruption Action Center
    3. The departure from office of Prosecutor General Viktor Shulkin
  3. After she left:
    1. President Trump’s call to President Zelensky
    2. The discussion about that phone call
    3. Any discussion about delays in security assistance to Ukraine.
  4. During her tenure:
    1. She never sought to discourage the Ukrainian government from investigating or prosecuting actual corruption.
    2. She took no disloyal actions to the president and never advised embassy staff to ignore his directives.
    3. She received no direction from the Obama administration to harm the Trump campaign and would not have complied had she received such directions.
    4. She had never met Hunter Biden and had never discussed him with Joe Biden on the occasions she had met him.
    5. She had minimal contact with Giuliani and had no idea why he was attacking her. It is possible that the named individuals believed the financial ambitions were hampered by the US anti-corruption policies.
    6. The Deputy Secretary of State had informed her that her removal was not because of any wrongdoing on her part.=

Marie Yovanovitch’s parents were refugees from both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. They had fled, first to Canada, then to Connecticut. She grew up in the United S   atates speaking Russian as well as English. She studied at the Kent School, at Princeton, the National War College, and studied Russian at the Pushkin Institute. She served for thirty years in the State Department in Armenia, Kyrgystan, and Ukraine.