This first round of transcripts of witness testimony released by the House raised eyebrows for a number of reasons. No one thought it would be GOOD for the Trump administration, but what former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, and former top State Department aide Ambassador Michael McKinley had some truly haunting things to say.
According to Yovanovitch, she was told by her bosses to return home out of concerns for her own security. Worse, the threats to her safety came not from Ukraine, but from people in her own country and government. The Washington Post reports:
She said she spoke at 1 a.m. Ukraine time with Director General of the Foreign Service Carol Perez, who told her to catch the next flight home.
“She said that there was a lot of concern for me, that I needed to be on the next plane home to Washington,” Yovanovitch said. “And I was like, what? What happened? And she said, 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.”
Then, Nicolle Wallace teased out the part of Ambassador McKinley's testimony that directly contradicted what Mike Pompeo said on "This Week" to George Stephanopoulos, showing Pompeo for the blatant liar that he is.
WALLACE: Mike Pompeo was revealed as a big fat liar....He is found in this sworn testimony from Ambassador McKinley to have lied when he was asked about whether or not he heard from advisers asking him to go out on a limb and protect and defend Yovanovitch. So from the McKinley transcripts..."Morgan reached out to me by phone and told me that the secretary had decided it was better not to release the statement at this time and that it would be, in part, to protect Yovanovitch, not to draw any attention to her."
So he doesn't want to draw any attention to her by defending her from the president he serves, whose endorsement he might need when he runs for Senate.
"How many conversations did you have with the secretary about this matter?" McKinley says "Three, probably. And the subsequent ones were in the context of, because if I can remind, I presented my resignation on Monday, September 30th. So it wasn't very long after the initial conversation. And in presenting my resignation, I made clear that I was looking to leave the Department. I wasn't looking to create any news story out of it but that he should be aware that, of course, part of the reason people were very aware that I was concerned about what I saw as the lack of public support for Department employees."
Three times McKinley said he went to Pompeo, three times. Here's what Pompeo said. Watch.
POMPEO: You know, from the time that Ambassador Yovanovitch departed Ukraine till the time that he came to tell me that he was departing, I never heard him say a single thing about his concerns with respect to the decision.
STEPHANOPOULOS: So you were never asked --
POMPEO: Not once, George, did Ambassador McKinley say something to me during that entire time period.
WALLACE: Ron Klain?
KLAIN: Well, I mean "not once" turns out to be true, because it was three times. You just have to be more clever about this, Nicolle. Look, I mean this whole thing, you read the McKinley transcript and you read the Yovanovitch transcript it looks like American foreign policy has become a cross between the Three Stooges and the Godfather. It's an amazing mix of venal, violent corruption, and complete and utter incompetence.
Hahaha, I mean, that's funny, Ron Klain, I honestly did laugh, but based on Yovanovitch's transcript, it sounds a lot more like The Godfather than the Three Stooges. It's truly terrifying that patriots doing their jobs are being threatened by the most powerful people in this government, and lying to the faces of millions of Americans about it as if we don't have ways of holding them accountable.
We do still have ways of holding them accountable, right?
