Acting ambassador to Ukraine William Taylor was told to step aside from his position ahead of meetings between Ukrainian officials and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. As The Wall Street Journal reports, Pompeo isn’t just sending Taylor packing so he won’t be present for any discussions—he wants Taylor out of the country early so that there’s no chance Pompeo will be photographed in the company of the highly respected diplomat who took the position in Ukraine at his urging.
Every day, Rudy Giuliani continues to make it clear that Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch was run out of office so she couldn’t interfere with efforts to extort Ukrainian officials into announcing investigations of Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton. That’s not conjecture or hearsay: That’s what Giuliani is openly saying, on camera and in print, across multiple media appearances following his last set of smear-generation efforts. “I believed that I needed Yovanovitch out of the way,” Giuliani told a journalist. “She was going to make the investigations difficult for everybody.”
Taylor—a West Point graduate, State Department veteran, and former ambassador—came back to the position from private employment, at the request of Pompeo, to step into that opening after Yovanovitch was effectively smeared, removed, and sidelined. Unfortunately for Donald Trump, Giuliani, and Pompeo, Taylor continued to believe that his obligation as acting ambassador was to the United States rather than to them. He openly questioned Giuliani’s role in pressuring Ukrainian officials, and most notably said that it was crazy to directly tie military assistance to the investigations Trump was demanding.
Questioning the extortion of an ally engaged in an ongoing hot war with Russia earned Taylor the label of “Never Trumper” from Trump. And now Snowflake Pompeo, the man who picked Taylor for his assignment, literally does not want to be seen with him. Because William Taylor is too honorable to be acceptable in Trump’s America.
The reason for all this delicacy and tiptoeing around is that Mike Pompeo is lining up a Senate run in Kansas, where he will run as an unvarnished Trump supporter who is there to carry the Trump message back to a state already devastated by Republican supply-side economic theories. Convincing all those farmers that Trump’s trade war isn’t behind the highest rate of farm bankruptcies in history, while maintaining the support of the angry masses, is going to be hard enough without being pictured standing next to a man who, gasp, genuinely tried to uphold the values of the country.
