Marie Yovanovitch, ousted ambassador to Ukraine, has a book deal
Former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, who testified before the House last year as part of the impeachment inquiry into President Trump, has a book deal. According to the publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, the book will be published in spring 2021.
The book will be a memoir, according to a statement by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and "will recount her long career in the U.S. foreign service, which took her from Mogadishu to Moscow to Kyiv and finally back to Washington, DC — where, to her dismay, she found a political system beset by many of the same challenges she had spent her career combating overseas."
Yovanovitch was pushed out in spring 2019 on Mr. Trump's orders after being subject to smears spearheaded by Rudy Giuliani, the president's personal attorney. According to a now-famous memo summarizing a July 25 call between Mr. Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Mr. Trump said Yovanovitch "was bad news and the people she was dealing with in the Ukraine were bad news."
The call and a whistleblower complaint concerning it were at the root of an impeachment inquiry by the House into whether Mr. Trump deliberately withheld aid from Ukraine in an attempt to get the country to announces investigations into former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter. Mr. Trump was acquitted by the Senate earlier this month after he became the third president to be impeached by the House.
In her November testimony before the House, Yovanovitch said she felt threatened when she learned what Mr. Trump said about her in the July 25 call.
"A person who saw me actually reading the transcript said that the color drained from my face," she said during her testimony. "Even now, words kind of fail me ... I was shocked and devastated that I would feature in a phone call between two heads of state in such a manner."
As she was testifying, the president tweeted an attack targeting her, saying "everywhere Yovanovitch went turned bad."
In a remarkable moment, Yovanovitch was asked to respond to the president's tweets just moments after he sent them. She said she found them "very intimidating."
Yovanovitch formally retired from the State Department at the end of January. Her retirement came shortly after the release of a recording made by an associate of Giuliani, Lev Parnas, in April 2018, Mr. Trump was heard saying "get rid of her" and "take her out."
In an op-ed published in The Washington Post earlier this month, Yovanovitch said the Trump administration "has undermined our democratic institutions" and urged Americans not to allow the U.S. "to become a country where standing up to our government is a dangerous act."