Rudy Giuliani confirmed in detail to The New Yorker his role in engineering the ouster of Marie Yovanovitch as the US's ambassador to Ukraine after she refused to help him dig up political dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden and his son.

"I believed that I needed Yovanovitch out of the way," Giuliani told the magazine. "She was going to make the investigations difficult for everybody."

He also outlined his efforts to publicly smear Yovanovitch on TV and through the self-described investigative journalist John Solomon.

Giuliani's comments are a remarkable admission given that Yovanovitch's ouster is one of the central threads of the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump.

More importantly, Giuliani himself is the focus of criminal investigation related to his dealings with Yovanovitch because they may have violated foreign lobbying laws.

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Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor who's now President Donald Trump's personal lawyer, confirmed in detail to The New Yorker his role in engineering the ouster of Marie Yovanovitch as the US's ambassador to Ukraine.

Giuliani told The New Yorker's Adam Entous that he viewed Yovanovitch as an obstacle as he attempted to obtain politically damaging information about former Vice President Joe Biden and his son in Ukraine ahead of the 2020 election.

"I believed that I needed Yovanovitch out of the way," Giuliani said. "She was going to make the investigations difficult for everybody."

To that end, Giuliani compiled a dossier of conspiracy theories about the Bidens and Yovanovitch that he sent to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo earlier this year and was later shared with the FBI and The New Yorker.

Giuliani also began speaking out against Yovanovitch on news outlets like Fox News, while directing John Solomon, a self-described investigative journalist who traffics in conspiracy theories, to publish op-ed articles smearing Yovanovitch in The Hill.

"I said, 'John, let's make this as prominent as possible,'" Giuliani told The New Yorker. "'I'll go on TV. You go on TV. You do columns.'"

The former New York City mayor's comments are a remarkable admission given that Yovanovitch's ouster is one of the central threads of the impeachment inquiry into Trump. Perhaps more importantly, however, Giuliani himself is the focus of criminal investigation related to his dealings with Yovanovitch because they may have violated foreign lobbying laws.

Yovanovitch, a widely respected foreign service officer, was unceremoniously ousted in May after she refused to help Giuliani and his allies in Ukraine and the US manufacture dirt on the Bidens to hurt his chances against Trump.

She has testified at length about Trump and Giuliani's smear campaign against her leading up to her removal.

"I do not know Mr. Giuliani's motives for attacking me," she said in testimony in October. But people associated with Giuliani "may well have believed that their personal financial ambitions were stymied by our anti-corruption policy in Ukraine."

Yovanovitch was also tough on Yuriy Lutsenko, Ukraine's former prosecutor general who worked with Giuliani to try to get dirt on the Bidens.

Yovanovitch "refused to allow her embassy to be dragged into some sort of effort to concoct dirt for political purposes," a former official told The Guardian.

Yovanovitch testified that she was told by a top State Department official that the president had pushed for her removal even though the department believed she "had done nothing wrong."

She said that John Sullivan, the deputy secretary of state, told her that "this was not like other situations where he had recalled ambassadors for cause" but that Trump "had lost confidence in me and no longer wished me to serve as his ambassador."

She also said she was told that there was "a concerted campaign against me" and that "the department had been under pressure from the president to remove me since the summer of 2018."

Trump continued smearing Yovanovitch even after she was removed as the ambassador. Most notably, he told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky during a July 25 phone call that she was "bad news" and would "go through some things."

Yovanovitch testified last month that she felt threatened by Trump's remarks about her.

"I was shocked and devastated that I would feature in a phone call between two heads of state in such a manner where President Trump said that I was 'bad news' to another world leader and that I would be going through some things," she said. "It was a terrible moment."

She said she was told by a person who saw her reading the White House's memo of the call that "the color drained from my face."

"I think I even had a physical reaction," Yovanovitch said. "Even now, words fail me."