Rudy Giuliani’s Pretty Proud of Getting the Ambassador to Ukraine Fired
Credit to Author: Tim Marcin| Date: Tue, 17 Dec 2019 18:40:29 +0000
Rudy Giuliani won’t stop bragging about how he pushed out former Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, who was recalled from her post in April.
The president’s personal lawyer has repeatedly attacked Yovanovitch over the past 24 hours, in the process revealing more about what President Donald Trump knew, and when, about the efforts to force her out.
Giuliani made some of his latest admissions on two of Trump’s favorite platforms, Fox News and Twitter. The central theme of it all: Giuliani claims he worked to get Yovanovitch booted because she was corrupt ― though he offered no tangible proof for that claim ― and because she was holding up investigations he wanted.
In an interview published on Monday, Giuliani told the New York Times that he passed info along to the president “a couple of times” about how Yovanovitch had put the kibosh on efforts that could’ve helped Trump politically. Yovanovitch’s apparent smear-based ouster became a central part of her impeachment testimony to the House Intelligence Committee last month, but the new claims from Giuliani put himself and Trump right in the middle of it all.
The lawyer said he told Trump that Yovanovitch held up potential investigations into the Bidens in Ukraine by blocking visas for Ukrainian prosecutors. Giuliani also claimed, without evidence, that the ambassador had bad-mouthed Trump and had a list of people to not prosecute.
READ: Trump tried to intimidate Marie Yovanovitch as she testified about his intimidation
“I think I had pointed out to the president a couple of times, I reported to the president, what I had learned about the visa denials,” Giuliani told the Times. “I may or may not have passed along the general gossip that the embassy was considered to be a kind of out-of-control politically partisan embassy, but that was, like, general gossip; I didn’t report that as fact.”
The comments to the Times track with an interview Giuliani gave to the New Yorker where he said he worked to push out the ambassador because she would hinder efforts to gather political dirt on the Bidens in Ukraine.
“I believed that I needed Yovanovitch out of the way,” he told the magazine. “She was going to make the investigations difficult for everybody.”
READ: How Giuliani’s indicted pals tried to score a Ukrainian gas deal at Trump's DC hotel
Giuliani hasn’t backed away from his claims about Yovanovitch in the last 24 hours. In fact, he’s turned to bashing her personally. Speaking on Fox News on Monday night, he claimed the ambassador was corrupt, saying he had proof without offering it up.
"I forced her out because she's corrupt,” he said on Fox. “I came back with a document that will show unequivocally that she committed perjury… she should have been fired if the State Department weren't part of the deep state."
And then, of course, Giuliani took his attacks on Yovanovitch to Twitter. On Tuesday, he claimed he had “acquired evidence she perjured herself” before the House Intelligence Committee and promoted a baseless GOP conspiracy theory that Ukraine helped the Democrats in the 2016 election
“Yovanovitch needed to be removed for many reasons most critical she was denying visas to Ukrainians who wanted to come to U.S. and explain Dem corruption in Ukraine,” he tweeted. “She was OBSTRUCTING JUSTICE and that’s not the only thing she was doing. She at minimum enabled Ukrainian collusion.”
Cover: In this May 5, 2018, file photo, Rudy Giuliani, an attorney for President Donald Trump, speaks at the Iran Freedom Convention for Human Rights and democracy in Washington. Giuliani is categorically ruling out the possibility of a presidential interview with special counsel Robert Mueller. Giuliani told “Fox News Sunday” that an interview would happen “over my dead body.” (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik, File)
This article originally appeared on VICE US.