Her hourslong testimony was a scathing rebuke of Giuliani and his work on behalf of the president — a top-to-bottom indictment of what she called a “campaign of disinformation” pushed by “individuals with questionable motives” whose “political and financial ambitions” were in jeopardy as she led an anti-corruption effort in Ukraine. She refuted an attack from the president in real time and tied him directly, through Giuliani, to the corrupt interests within Ukraine that she had been working to combat.

“How could our system fail like this? How is it that foreign corrupt interests could manipulate our government?” said Yovanovitch, who was recalled to Washington in May at Trump’s behest.

“It’s not the way I wanted my career to end,” she later told lawmakers.

During the second day of public impeachment hearings, Yovanovitch offered Democrats a human face to the fallout of Giuliani's shadow diplomacy, which ran roughshod over career diplomats and at times undercut official U.S. interests in Ukraine, an ally at war with Russia.

She also was able to speak to the origins of the central allegations in Democrats’ impeachment inquiry: that Trump abused his power by pressuring Ukrainian officials to investigate his political rivals. Yovanovitch said the effort damaged U.S. authority abroad and undermined the State Department’s anti-corruption efforts in Kyiv.



“Our Ukraine policy has been thrown into disarray, and shady interests ... have learned how little it takes to remove an American ambassador who does not give them what they want,” she told lawmakers, asserting that she was removed from her post in Kyiv simply for implementing and defending well-established U.S. policies.

Yovanovitch also refuted the specific allegations against her, many of which were being parroted by Trump’s allies and even the president’s son Donald Trump Jr. She said the claim that she sought to ignore Trump’s orders because “he was going to be impeached” was false, and the accusation that she distributed a “do not prosecute” list was a “fabrication.”

Those who felt “stymied” by the official U.S. anti-corruption policy in Ukraine, she added, “shared baseless allegations with the president and convinced him to remove his ambassador, despite the fact that the State Department fully understood that the allegations were false and the sources highly suspect.”

She implicitly criticized Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, too, telling lawmakers that the department “is being hollowed out from within at a competitive and complex time on the world stage.”

Yovanovitch addressed failed efforts at the State Department to issue a public statement supporting her after Trump forced her removal as ambassador, saying she remains “disappointed” that senior officials “have declined to acknowledge that the attacks against me and others are dangerously wrong.”

She told lawmakers there was a concern within the State Department that any statement supporting her would be undermined by a “contradicting” tweet from Trump. In fact, while Yovanovitch was testifying, Trump took to Twitter to criticize her. “Everywhere Marie Yovanovitch went turned bad,” he wrote.