It says, perhaps not clearly enough (Then also)
Foreign Policy mag draws a different conclusion than The Hill.
In what top Democratic lawmakers called a “political hit job,” U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch has been recalled by the Trump administration two months early following political attacks by right-wing media figures and a senior Ukrainian official.
Yovanovitch, an experienced career diplomat who has served in Republican and Democratic administrations and has been ambassador to Ukraine since 2016, will leave her post later in May, two months before she was scheduled to step down. The attacks, which four current and former U.S. officials who spoke to Foreign Policy said are unfounded, drew the attention of top Democratic lawmakers, who urged U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in a private letter last month to publicly defend her.
Now, those lawmakers are bringing their concerns into the public. “The White House’s outrageous decision to recall her is a political hit job and the latest in this Administration’s campaign against career State Department personnel,” said Democratic Reps. Steny Hoyer, House majority leader, and Eliot Engel, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, in a joint statement made public Tuesday. “It’s clear that this decision was politically motivated, as allies of President Trump had joined foreign actors in lobbying for the Ambassador’s dismissal.”
Yovanovitch’s early dismissal will leave the U.S. Embassy in Kiev without a top diplomat at an important juncture in Ukraine, during the transition of newly elected President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Yovanovitch, who was outspoken about the need to crack down on corruption in the country, was thrust into the spotlight in March when Ukraine’s top prosecutor claimed, without evidence, that the ambassador had outlined a list of people he should not prosecute when he first met her. The U.S. State Department called the claim by Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko an “outright fabrication.” In April, he walked back the statement in a separate interview.
Lutsenko’s allegations about Yovanovitch came two weeks after she issued scathing remarks about Ukraine’s anti-corruption efforts and called on the authorities to fire special anti-corruption prosecutor Nazar Kholodnytsky. In wiretapped phone conversations, Kholodnytsky allegedly coached suspects on how to avoid corruption charges.
Lutsenko made his claim against Yovanovitch in an interview with Hill.TV’s John Solomon, which aired on March 20. That same day, the Hill published two further pieces based off what appears to be the same interview with Lutsenko, in which the prosecutor said he had opened a probe into alleged attempts by Ukrainian law enforcement to tip the 2016 U.S. presidential election in favor of Hillary Clinton by leaking financial ledgers with details of payments made to Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort by former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych.
Coming weeks before special counsel Robert Mueller published his report on Russian election interference in the 2016 election, Lutsenko’s allegation about Ukrainian interference was seized upon by Trump and his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, with the president tweeting out the headline to the Hill article, “John Solomon: As Russia Collusion fades, Ukrainian plot to help Clinton emerges.”
Yovanovitch then faced a slew of criticism from Fox News personalities and other right-wing media figures, who accused her of denigrating the president in private conversations. In March, Fox News host Laura Ingraham said that former Republican Rep. Pete Sessions sent a letter to Pompeo in May 2018 calling for the “expulsion” of Yovanovitch as ambassador to Ukraine “immediately.” The then-congressman said that he had evidence the ambassador had been critical of the Trump administration in private, though the current and former U.S. officials who spoke to Foreign Policy say that claim was unfounded.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/05/07...ats-diplomacy/
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