How the smear campaign against Yovanovitch snowballed

In the months before she was unceremoniously removed from her job as the ambassador of Ukraine, Yovanovitch watched as a smear campaign to discredit her unfolded. What exactly happened to damage her reputation to the point where she was told that for her own safety, she needed to be on the “next plane” back to the US?

As early as the spring of 2018, former Rep. Pete Sessions — who had received donations from two Giuliani associates who appeared to dislike Yovanovitch — wrote a letter to Pompeo suggesting that she was disloyal to Trump and demanded her dismissal. But the allegations against Yovanovitch really began to spiral in March of the following year, after John Solomon, a reporter who was then working for The Hill but has since left and become a Fox News contributor, published an interview with Yuriy Lutsenko, who was at the time Ukraine’s top prosecutor, where Lutsenko alleged that Yovanovitch had given him a “do not prosecute list.” According to ProPublica, one of Giuliani’s associates was instrumental in setting up the interview with Solomon.

A month afterward, Lutsenko retracted his claims, and the State Department dismissed the “do not prosecute” list as an “outright fabrication.” But by then, the criticism of Yovanovitch had taken on a life of their own. In a Fox News interview, a Trump ally accused Yovanovitch of having “bad-mouthed Trump” to Ukrainians. Just a few days later, Donald Trump Jr. tweeted a link to an article describing the allegations against Yovanovitch. And by the end of April, she was being told by her boss that while she had done nothing wrong, the president wanted her gone.

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