Takeaways from Day 2 of House impeachment public hearings

Day Two of public hearings in the House impeachment inquiry of President Donald Trump featured a career diplomat with a soft voice and a powerful story.

Marie Yovanovitch said she felt threatened by the president as she detailed the story of being abruptly recalled from her post as U.S. ambassador to Ukraine. Then the president attacked her with a tweet, which she said was intimidating.

Some key takeaways from Yovanovitch’s testimony:

Political is personal

This was no staid, bureaucratic tale told by a distant and removed narrator.

Turn Up Your Support

MPR News helps you turn down the noise and build shared understanding. Turn up your support for this public resource and keep trusted journalism accessible to all.

Yovanovitch’s account was, instead, deeply personal, layered with outrage over having been “kneecapped” by lies and her abrupt recall in a 1 a.m. phone call from a country she said was vital to U.S. interests.

After a “smear campaign” she said involved Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and was amplified by cable news hosts and the president’s oldest son, Donald, Jr., she was directed in April 2019 to come back to Washington on the next plane because she no longer had the confidence of the president.

“I remain disappointed that the (State) Department’s leadership and others have declined to acknowledge that the attacks against me and others are dangerously wrong,” Yovanovitch said.

She said professional public servants serve U.S. interests regardless of who occupies the White House, and she invoked the diplomats who were killed in the 2012 Benghazi attacks, tortured in captivity in Iran, and injured in mysterious attacks in Cuba.

“We honor these individuals. They represent each one of you here — and every American. These courageous individuals were attacked because they symbolized America,” she said.

‘Very intimidating’

While Republicans said Yovanovitch was in effect peripheral to the impeachment inquiry, she drew direct connections to the president.

Yovanovitch left no doubt that she interpreted some of the Trump’s cryptic comments about her — “she’s going to go through some things,” among them — in the most chilling way.

“It didn’t sound good,” she said. “It sounded like a threat.”

The effect of the president’s comments, she said, “is very intimidating” — not just for her, but for others who might be inclined to publicly attack corruption.

To which Democrat Adam Schiff, the chairman of the House intelligence committee, responded, “Well, I want to let you know, Ambassador, that some of us here take witness intimidation very, very seriously.”

Stefanik’s star rises

As members of the House questioned the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Republicans were working to highlight another woman in the room: Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York.

Conservative outlets seized on a moment in which Schiff refused to allow Republican Rep. Devin Nunes to yield his time to Stefanik early in the hearing. But the attempt came during a portion of the hearing when rules explicitly stated that only Schiff, Nunes and committee lawyers were permitted to question Yovanovitch.

When Stefanik’s allotted time did come up, she used it criticize Schiff and read news clips recounting his promise that the whistleblower would be allowed to testify before the committee. Republicans, led by Trump, celebrated Stefanik, the only Republican woman on the committee.

Trump smears the witness

He would be too busy to watch, said the White House.

He’d tune into an opening statement delivered by Nunes, the top Republican on the panel, but spend the rest of the day “working hard for the American people,” Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham said.

Instead, Trump responded to the hearing in real time, castigating Yovanovitch by tweet as she testified about her poor treatment by Trump and his administration.

“Everywhere Marie Yovanovitch went turned bad,” tweeted Trump, pointing to the time she spent in war-torn Somalia and in Ukraine, where Trump said “the new Ukrainian President spoke unfavorably about her.”

He also defended his decision to pull her from her post, arguing the U.S. president has an “absolute right to appoint ambassadors” who serve “at the pleasure of the President.”

Schiff read Trump’s tweet to Yovanovitch and suggested it was part of a campaign of “witness intimidation.”

Yovanovitch described the president’s attacks as “very intimidating.”

‘Thank you for service’

They thanked her for her “tremendous” public service. They said Georgetown University was lucky to have her. One even seemed to suggest she shouldn’t have to spend her day with them in the first place.

During hours of questioning, Republicans went out of their way to avoid impugning Yovanovitch’s character and mostly steered clear of challenging her decades-long career in diplomacy.

Rep. Brad Wenstrup appeared to commiserate with her exit from Ukraine by saying that, as an Army reserve surgeon summoned one 2005 afternoon to Iraq, “I understand that shocking feeling that can come with some abrupt change like that.”

The points Republicans did look to score generally centered on several themes: getting her to concede that a president can indeed have the ambassador that he chooses — a fact she acknowledged even while adding, “What I do wonder is why it was necessary to smear my reputation.”

And they sought to highlight the key events and discussions she was not part of.

Were you involved, Nunes asked at one point, in the July 25 phone call between Trump and Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelenskiy or in the preparations for it? Yovanovitch replied she wasn’t.

How about, he asked, the deliberations over the “pause” in military aid to Ukraine as the U.S. reviewed the new president’s “commitment to corruption reforms”? Was she involved in that?

“For the delay?” she asked.

“For the pause,” Nunes pointedly replied.

“No,” Yovanovitch conceded, “I was not.”