Last Friday, three House committees hit Secretary of State Mike Pompeo with a subpoena requiring that he hand over a stack of documents and appear before the committees to testify. Those committees also let Pompeo know that they would also be seeking depositions of five other current or former State Department employees, including former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie “Masha” Yovanovitch, Kurt Volker, and U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland.
The documents demanded by the House had all been subject to a previous subpoena, which Pompeo paid all the courtesy of other Trump officials by dismissing it out of hand. But the letter made it clear that this time, “The subpoenaed documents shall be part of the impeachment inquiry and shared among the Committees.”
That invocation of impeachment authority makes it much harder for Pompeo to simply feed that letter to the circular file. So on Tuesday morning he responded in the most ridiculous way possible—with a letter claiming that the House was picking on State Department officials by asking them to testify. “I am concerned with aspects of your letter that can be understood only as an attempt to intimidate, bully, and treat improperly the distinguished professionals of the Department of State.”
How should those distinguished professionals be treated? On Monday it became known that Mike Pompeo was present when Donald Trump called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Let’s check in on that call …
Trump: The former ambassador from the United States, the woman, was bad
news and the people she was dealing with in the Ukraine were bad news so I just want to let you know that. The other thing, there's a lot of talk about Biden's son …
Pompeo calls asking Ambassador Yovanovitch to testify “bullying.” But somehow it doesn’t seem that Pompeo was looking out for “the woman” when it was Trump insulting her to a foreign official. Or when Rudy Giuliani accused Yovanovitch of being “part of the collusion” and said she was “working for Soros.” Pompeo did not come to her defense in May, when Giuliani and Trump put her in the middle of their attempts to generate a scandal. In fact, it was Pompeo who recalled her from her position months ahead of schedule.
Tell us again, Mike: Who is the bully?
There are good reasons to think that Pompeo doesn’t want Yovanovitch to appear before Congress, not because members are “intimidating” her, but because she’s already been intimidated, humiliated, and forced out of a career spanning decades by a series of conspiracy theories compounded in the Trump White House.
Yovanovitch had the experience, the background, and the connections to deal with Ukraine. She had the deep understanding necessary to cut through the corruption that really did exist in the government there and defend the United States’ interests against pro-Russian forces inside and outside Ukraine. But Yovanovitch was also the focus of the increasingly wild-eyed Giuliani, who made her part of an elaborate series of conspiracies necessary to hold up the yarn he was spinning, not just about Biden, but also about secret connections between Ukraine and the campaign of Hillary Clinton.
In the complaint from the whistleblower, the real bullying of the former ambassador comes into sharp focus. Yovanovitch was recalled because she was in the way of Giuliani. He couldn’t sell his lies so long as she was there to refute them. As multiple sources made clear, “She was low-hanging fruit for the president and his inner circle. They know she did nothing wrong.”
And Pompeo certainly knows that he doesn’t want to have her talking to Congress—no matter what outlandish claims he has to make to prevent it.