Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch has retired, and now she’s free to speak her mind. The woman who was the subject of a smear campaign by Rudy Giuliani and his buddies when she was ambassador to Ukraine, who Donald Trump fired and said would “go through some things,” and who was confronted with threatening tweets sent by Trump during her House impeachment inquiry testimony has done just that—spoken her mind—in a Washington Post op-ed. “What I’d like to share with you is an answer to a question so many have asked me,” she wrote. “What do the events of the past year mean for our country’s future?”
Yovanovitch expressed optimism about the integrity of her former colleagues in foreign service, about “the next generation of diplomats,” and about how every day she witnesses regular people “reanimating the Constitution and the values it represents.” But … there’s a but, and it very much has to do with the events that thrust Yovanovitch into the public eye and the man who fired her.
“I had always thought that our institutions would forever protect us against individual transgressors,” Yovanovitch wrote. “But it turns out that our institutions need us as much as we need them; they need the American people to protect them or they will be hollowed out over time, unable to serve and protect our country.”
Still more specifically, though still very much in the voice of a woman who has spent decades measuring every word carefully, “our public servants need responsible and ethical political leadership. This administration, through acts of omission and commission, has undermined our democratic institutions, making the public question the truth and leaving public servants without the support and example of ethical behavior that they need to do their jobs and advance U.S. interests.”
It’s amazing that Yovanovitch can be this optimistic, given what she’s been through. But her optimism comes in the form of a warning, and it seems like every day, Republicans are trampling on that optimism. Yovanovitch’s former colleagues who likewise testified in the impeachment trial are worried about their futures. A United States senator stood on the Senate floor, in front of C-SPAN’s cameras, and named the alleged whistleblower. Our democratic institutions need the American people to protect them. We need to heed that warning.