If Wednesday's hearings offered Americans a window into how U.S. diplomacy is supposed to work, Friday's hearing is likely to take a more personal turn as former Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch takes the stand. Yovanovitch is a career diplomat with three decades of experience under six different administrations, including four that were Republican, who became the focus of a smear campaign by Trump's lawyer Rudy Giuliani and his now-indicted henchmen Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman. The trio viewed Yovanovitch as a bulwark to their efforts to get Ukraine to launch investigations into the Bidens, among various other ventures.
As early as the spring of 2018, they began feeding negative information to Trump about Yovanovitch, telling Trump that she was disloyal to him. Trump ultimately ordered her to be recalled from Ukraine abruptly in May, and the circumstances surrounding her removal will likely make for gripping public testimony straight out of a spy thriller, which isn't to make light of her experience.
In closed-door testimony, Yovanovitch remembered receiving a phone call at 1 AM from a State Department colleague who warned her that "there was a lot of concern for me, that I needed to be on the next plane home to Washington." Yovanovitch said she wondered what happened, what Washington knew, and her colleague told her, "I don’t know, but this is about your security. You need to come home immediately. You need to come home on the next plane.” After tying up some loose ends the following day, Yovanovitch did as she was told, though she said she had "argued" with her colleague about it. "I told her I thought it was really unfair that she was pulling me out of post without any explanation, I mean, really none, and so summarily."
Once she was back in Washington, Yovanovitch learned that her removal had indeed been unfair—that she was not "recalled for cause," as with some other ambassadors, but rather because Trump had simply "lost confidence" in her.
But it's not the injustice of her removal or even the smear campaign that is the most gripping part of Yovanovitch's testimony. It's the fact that she, a U.S. diplomat, appears to have been put in harm's way by a U.S. president and the people acting on his behalf. Indeed, in the transcript of the July 25 call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky released by the White House itself, Trump told Zelenksy in mobster speak that Yovanovitch was "bad news" and that "she's going to go through some things."
To this day, Yovanovitch testified that she feels threatened by Trump's comment. "I didn’t know what it meant," she said during her October 11 deposition. "I was very concerned. I still am." Yet in the face of all of that, Yovanovitch summoned the courage to become one of the first career public servants to defy Trump and honor a congressional subpoena for her testimony. Nerves of steel.
Democrats would do well to dwell on Yovanovitch's personal experience, her decades of public service, and the incomprehensible fact that she was put in physical danger by the reckless actions of the self-absorbed president she was serving.
The hearing is set to begin at 9 AM on Friday.