I spoke to a good bureaucrat on Tuesday, who was nothing like the several bad bureaucrats who snitched to Adam Schiff last month. My man, a retired soldier in the Army’s special forces, helped me register for Medicare. He was courteous and knowledgeable, and thrilled to talk up serving his country. He insisted it was his honor to serve other Americans – a feeling 100% absent in Marie Yovanovitch, who insisted her service should be honored.
The former ambassador to Ukraine is the reason most independent voters have lost interest in impeachment. Adam Schiff thought Yovanovitch was a convincing “character witness” to evoke sympathy as an unjustly fired career diplomat. However, she arrived at the hearing with a ginger Afro and dreams of an excuse-filled pity party. Her animus toward Mayor Giuliani and President Trump revealed a real Deep State queen of hearts with an unbecoming narrative: all ways must be my way!
In red-state America, she personifies Washington’s elites. Marie Louise “Masha” Yovanovitch was born in Canada and grew up speaking Russian. She attended a US prep school (Kent), majored in Russian studies at Princeton, and studied at the Pushkin Institute in Moscow. Her first job ever was a US foreign service assignment to Ottawa in 1986. Foreign-born and snobby-educated with no real world job experience: she might as well have been Prince Andrew.
She was George Bush’s second choice as ambassador to Armenia in 2008, after John Evans was recalled for using “genocide” to describe Medz Yeghern (Turkish Holocaust of 1.5 million Armenians). The Senate rejected Bush’s first replacement for refusing to admit the genocide; so, Yovanovitch appeased Bush by avoiding the term and appeased Democrats by saying a foreign nation had imposed a gag rule on speaking truthfully about the matter.
Her Washington two-step is not remarkable, but her 2008 explanation is. When asked by AMINFO what an ambassador should do if a newly elected president changed foreign policy, Yovanovitch was crystal clear: “An ambassador serves [her] president and may be recalled any time for any reason. The decision to recall an ambassador fully depends on the president.” Hmm – did Yovanovitch honor those words after 2016? No way, no how!
In May 2018, Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX) wrote Secretary of State Pompeo, urging the recall of Yovanovitch from Ukraine for disloyalty. In March 2019, former US Attorney Joe diGenova reported she had “told the Ukrainians not to listen to [Trump] because he was going to be impeached” (source: Fox News). This means knowledge of her insubordination existed well before Zelensky’s election in April, her recall in May, and the Quid Pro Quo phone call in July.
Plus, Zelensky told Trump in July that Yovanovitch “was a bad ambassador [who] admired the previous president [and] would not accept me as President” – confirmation of what had already been reported in the US and Ukraine by the Washington Times (April) and New Europe (May). With her history of bad-mouthing, it would have been diplomatic malpractice to retain her: resentment of both Trump and Zelensky served neither country’s interest.
Yovanovitch is a partisan and no patriot. She sold her soul to become an ambassador and then proclaimed her virtue upon being fired, once pledged to serve “her president” and then bad-mouthed Trump, and was angered by insiders bad-mouthing her for bad-mouthing Trump and Zelensky. In fly-over America, most folks believe her un-exceptional career should end in infamy as just another public employee whose disloyalty undid her.