Impeachment inquiry transcripts reveal shock and concern over Trump plot

Yovanovitch and McKinley warned plot undermined national security

Tom McCarthy in New York
@TeeMcSee
Mon 4 Nov 2019 19.53 GMT
Last modified on Mon 4 Nov 2019 21.34 GMT

Two senior American diplomats warned congressional investigators a White House plot to manufacture political dirt on Joe Biden in Ukraine had undermined US national security interests and shredded faith among foreign service personnel, according to transcripts released on Monday by committees pursuing an impeachment inquiry against Donald Trump.

One of the diplomats, former ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, described her “shock” to discover that Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal emissary who has also worked for Ukrainian and Russian interests, was attempting to destroy her reputation.

When she sought advice on how to staunch the attack, she said, she was told to tweet something nice about Trump.

The second diplomat, P Michael McKinley, described how his dawning awareness of the White House plot to attack Biden, combined with the failure of the state department to support Yovanovitch, led him to resign.

“To see the emerging information on the engagement of our missions to procure negative political information for domestic purposes,” McKinley testified, “combined with the failure I saw in the building to provide support for our professional cadre in a particularly trying time, I think the combination was a pretty good reason to decide … I had no longer a useful role to play.”

-snip-