Did You Know This About Marie Yovanovitch?
One, she was appointed Ambassador to Ukraine by Obama in May 2016, six months before his presidency ended.
2. From 2008 to 2011, she was Bush’s and Obama’s ambassador to Armenia. George W. Bush removed Yovanovitch’s predecessor, Ambassador John Evans, from the Armenia post after he rightly called the Turkish Holocaust of Armenians a “Genocide.” Bush then nominated Richard Hoagland to be U.S. Ambassador to Armenia, but he refused to acknowledge the Turkish Holocaust as “Genocide” so the Senate rejected him. Yovanovitch was the next nominee for the post, and she got the message, played along, and refused to call the Medz Yeghern — the Turkish Holocaust of 1.5 million Armenians between 1915-1923 — a “Genocide.” In the words of Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ), reported by the Associated Press on June 19, 2008 when he questioned her during hearings on her nomination:
“It is a shame that career foreign service officers have to be brought before the [Senate Foreign Relations] Committee and find difficulty in acknowledging historical facts, and find difficulty in acknowledging the realities of what has been internationally recognized.… And it is amazing to me that we can talk about millions, a million and a half human beings who were slaughtered, we can talk about those who were raped, we can talk about those who were forcibly pushed out of their country, and we can have presidential acknowledgements of that, but then we cannot call it what it is.”
The Associated Press headlined it story: “Nominee Refuses to Call Killings Genocide.”
3. After the hearings on Yovanovitch, the L.A. Times reported the Executive Director of the Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA), Aram Hamparian, stated: “We were troubled by Ambassador Yovanovitch’s refusal to offer any meaningful rationale for the Administration’s ongoing complicity in Turkey’s denials, other than her tacit admission that the United States has apparently allowed a foreign nation to impose a gag rule on America’s right to speak truthfully about the Armenian genocide.”
4. Because Armenian-Americans were so upset with Yovanovitch’s testimony, and because Senate Democrats on the Foreign Relations Committee including Sen. Barack Obama felt comfortable criticizing the Bush Administration’s refusal to use the word “Genocide” to describe the Medz Yeghern, Yovanovitch’s nomination was delayed while she was forced to respond in writing to a series of written questions from the senators. Her responses further disgusted Armenian Americans. “We remain troubled by Ambassador Yovanovitch’s evasive answers, her outright non-responses, and her refusal, in her replies to Senator Obama and other Senators, to offer anything approaching a reasonable or factually supportable explanation of the reasons behind Administration’s misguided policy on the Armenian Genocide,” said Aram Hamparian, Executive Director of the ANCA. “This being said, it appears as though Ambassador Yovanovitch and her colleagues have learned from the disastrous Hoagland experience and are coming to understand that the U.S. Senate will not accept — and the Armenian American community will never allow — an Ambassador to Armenia who denies the Armenian Genocide.”
5. On October 2, 2008, towards the end of President George W. Bush’s tenure, she was asked while she was U.S. Ambassador to Armenia, what she would do if the newly elected President would change foreign policy, such as formally calling the Turkish Holocaust of Armenians a “Genocide.” The ARMINFO News Agency reported:
“Ambassador serves his president and may be recalled anytime and for any reason,” newly appointed U.S. Ambassador to Armenia Marie L. Yovanovitch said in response to ArmInfo question if her personal stand on Armenian Genocide will allow her further work at the US Department of State if the new leadership of the White House recognizes Genocide.
The decision to recall Ambassador fully depends on the president, the American diplomat said avoiding a direct answer to the question. To recall, the former Ambassador John Evans was recalled from Armenia in 2006 for his statements on recognition of Armenian Genocide.
6. Read #5 again: “The decision to recall [an] Ambassador fully depends on the president.” The words of Marie Yovanovitch.
7. It was reported in December 2013 by Harut Sassounian, Publisher of the California Courier, that WikiLeaks uncovered a confidential report by Yovanovitch titled: “Experience Engaging Diaspora Communities — Armenia.” In it she criticized the Armenian Diaspora for not supporting “the promotion of democracy, electoral reform, and civil society development in Armenia.” She critiqued that Armenian-American groups “pay close attention to Armenia’s foreign policy decisions and are quick to mobilize their supporters against the Armenian government if the Diaspora groups believe the government is not acting in Armenia’s best interests. Many groups oppose the government’s regional reconciliation efforts on the grounds that such reconciliation does not include resolution of the simmering conflict in Nagorno-Karabagh or recognition that the Ottoman Empire engaged in genocide in 1915.”
8. On the Sean Hannity show of March 20, 2019, former U.S. Attorney Joe diGenova told his host:
“But, Sean, here’s the thing that’s really changing, now we know that there not was there a Russian collusion through Fusion GPS and through the MI-6 guy and all of that. But now, we know that Ukrainian officials deeply involved in trying to help Hillary Clinton through this and we also now know that the current United States ambassador, Marie Yovanovitch, has bad-mouth[ed] the president of the United States to Ukrainian officials and has told them not to listen or worry about Trump policy because he is going to be impeached. This woman needs to be called home to the United States for consultation.”
(Remember: Volodymyr Zelensky was not even elected Ukraine President until April 21, 2019. Yovanovitch is called home on May 6. The so-called “Whistleblower Phone Call” was July 25, 2019.)
9. Two days later, on the Laura Ingraham show of March 22, Ingraham expressed surprise that Marie Yovanovitch, an Obama holdover with known anti-Trump biases, still had not been removed as U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, even after Rep. Pete Sessions had sent an urgent letter to Mike Pompeo to do so in May 2018. Former U.S. Attorney Joe diGenova, her guest that night, reiterated:
“No, they didn’t. And, in fact, Laura, you mentioned that Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, contrary to what a lot of people thought, was still in her job. I learned this evening that the president has ordered her dismissal from her post as the United States Ambassador to Ukraine as a result of her activities there, which were complained of by Congressman Sessions. She is known and reported by people there to have badmouthed the president of United States, Donald Trump, to have told Ukrainians not to listen to him or obey his policy because he was going to be impeached. And finally her activities have caught up with her.”
10. In a Washington Times account on April 18, 2019, Edward Lozansky likewise wrote of “U.S. Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch’s bad-mouthing of the president to Ukrainian officials.”
11. On May 13, 2019, the publication New Europe reported on Yovanovitch having been recalled. In describing why she might have been recalled, they wrote inter alia: “[Yovanovitch] did, however, have a somewhat contentious tenure in Kyiv, both with the Ukrainian government and with the community of Americans and Ukrainians involved in building closer ties between the two countries.”
12. In the Whistleblower Phone Call of July 25, 2019, President Zelensky said this to President Trump about Marie Yovanovitch:
“[W]ith regard to the ambassador [of] the United States [to] Ukraine, as far as I recall her name was Ivanovich [sic]. It was great that you were the first one who told me that she was a bad ambassador because I agree with you 100 percent. Her attitude towards me was far from the best, as she admired the previous President, and she was on his side. She would not accept me as a new President well enough.”
Did you know all this about Marie Yovanovitch? Now connect the dots. So we have a long-serving State Department insider, who understood the diplomacy game enough to refuse labeling the Medz Yeghern Genocide as a “Genocide,” who was appointed by Obama to the Ukraine post, and who somehow gained a reputation there as bad-mouthing the new president, Donald Trump. She understood the rules of the game: “The decision to recall [an] Ambassador fully depends on the president.” She never was appointed to a lifetime job like a federal judgeship. President Trump had campaigned on a promise to fire Deep State and similar government staffers who have managed over the years to become an unelected policy-setting entity unto themselves. Two weeks after Zelensky’s election and ten weeks before the Whistleblower Phone Call, people in President Trump’s circles and supporters of his vision were asking publicly that she be removed. And she was removed, just as President Bush earlier had removed a thoroughly qualified ambassador to Armenia, John Evans, for being a person of conscience — thereby creating a vacancy into which the opportunistic Yovanovitch eagerly entered. Along the way, she got on the wrong side of newly elected Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, a fundamentally decent guy according to all accounts, and also had a “somewhat contentious tenure in Kyiv, both with the Ukrainian government and with the community of Americans and Ukrainians involved in building closer ties between the two countries.”
She had to be replaced, just as the United Kingdom replaced their American ambassador, Nigel Kim Darroch aka Baron Darroch of Kew, after diplomatic cables were leaked revealing his disrespect for the American President. That is how it goes. And now she wants to tug at our emotions by breaking down in tears?
Adam Schiff is presenting Yovanovitch to the American people as a star witness — as his star-chamber witness. The same Adam Schiff, was elected to represent the Congressional District that proudly boasts the largest Armenian-American population of any district in America. We may wonder whether, amid her tears, Yovanovitch finally will find a way to mouth the word “Genocide” for Schiff’s 70,000 Armenian-American constituents — assuming he even remembers who they are.