Former US envoy says she was warned she was being targeted

WASHINGTON (AP) — Laying out the anatomy of a chilling smear campaign, former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch told House investigators in a transcript released Monday that Ukrainian officials warned her in advance that Rudy Giuliani and other allies of President Donald Trump were planning to "do things, including to me" and were "looking to hurt" her.

The former envoy, who was pushed out of her job in May on Trump's orders, testified that a senior Ukrainian official told her that "I really need to watch my back." A transcript of her nine hours of testimony last month was released by the three committees leading Democrats' impeachment probe into Trump's dealings with Ukraine.

In it, the career diplomat laid out for lawmakers what amounted to a bewildering sequence of events that led to her ouster, starting with the ominous warnings from the Ukrainian officials and then various attempts to badmouth her in both Ukraine and in the U.S. press.

Yovanovitch offered new threads of information — including the potential that Trump was directly involved in a phone call with Giuliani, the president's personal lawyer, and the Ukrainians dating back to January 2018 — while pushing back on Republican questions suggesting that she harbored opposition to Trump.

She had been recalled from Kyiv before the July 25 phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy that's at the center of the impeachment inquiry but was "surprised and dismayed" by what she understood from the transcript.

Giuliani's role in Ukraine was central to Yovanovitch's testimony. She said she was aware of an interest by Giuliani and his associates in investigating Joe Biden and Burisma "with a view to finding things that could be possibly damaging to a Presidential run," as well as investigating the 2016 election and theories...