Trump, Rudy, Ukraine and Scapegoats: The Character Assassination of Public Servants
Being a U.S. diplomat is a dangerous job. It's bad enough having to duck terrorist attacks, official harassment, hostile surveillance, microwave beams and exotic microbes. During my service with the State Department, 78 colleagues were killed in the line of duty, others taken hostage, many came down with long-term health debilities from their service overseas. Many were my friends. But the most insidious of dangers is character assassination by your own government leaders. The latest victim of the Trump political hit team was our very capable ambassador to Ukraine, Masha Yovanovitch.
Masha is a three-time ambassador, a specialist in the Soviet successor states. A career Foreign Service officer, her reputation is sterling. Young officers flocked to work for her. But last May she was summarily dismissed from her job, just months shy of completing her three-year tour of duty in Kiev. Secretary Pompeo reportedly had even asked her to stay on longer. What happened?
Ambassador Yovanovitch was targeted by the Trump tinfoil hat brigade. In the far fever marshes of Trumpland, where all manner of perfervid conspiracies fester in the pox-addled brains of hyper-paranoid conservative politicians and pundits, Yovanovitch became ensnared in conspiracy scenarios that rival anything Spanish inquisitors or B-grade Hollywood writers could ever dream up. (And now she's enveloped in my own overwrought prose!)
Last April, after speaking out against a corrupt Ukrainian prosecutor who was "investigating" Trump-fabricated charges that Hillary Clinton conspired with the previous government to somehow undermine Trump during the 2016 election, the Lord Haw-Haws and Axis Sallies of Trump's defacto Ministry of Propaganda kicked in. Hannity, Ingraham, diGenova attacked Yovanovitch for demonstrating "clear anti-Trump bias" and called for her removal. Fox News agitprops howled that she was an "Obama holdover" and a "deep state" agent. In his best Churchillian English, Don Jr. tweeted, "We need more Richard Grenell’s and less of these jokers as ambassadors,” referring to Trump's lunatic-fringe ambassador to Berlin, a figure so reviled that some German politicians have demanded he be declared persona non grata and kicked out.
The other hot-dream in which the far right have tarred Yovanovitch is, of course, the Lovecraftian fantasy of the Bidens corrupting hapless Ukrainian oil tycoons and... and spreading SARS, running child sex-trafficked pizza parlors, hiding their ill-gotten gold at Area-51 and... and... huff, huff... You get the picture.
Of course, what's going on here, apart from runaway insanity, is classic Trump deflection. Scapegoat everybody and anybody in order to confuse and distract. Conjure up parallel universes of myths and fantasy to bamboozle "low information" citizens.
Ambassador Yovanovitch came up in Trump's Corleonean chat with President Zelenskiy:
TRUMP: "The former ambassador from the United States, the woman, was bad news and the people she was dealing with in the Ukraine were bad news so I just want to let you know that."
ZELENSKIY: "It was great that you were the first one, who told me that she was a bad ambassador because I agree with you 100%. Her attitude towards me was far from the best as she admired the previous President and she was on his side. She would not accept me as a new President: well enough."
TRUMP: "Well, she’s going to go through some things. I will have Mr. Giuliani give you a call and I am also going to have Attorney General Barr call and we will get to the bottom of it. I’m sure you will figure it out."
Okay. So, what's going on here? Why target a mild-mannered career government bureaucrat for humiliating eviction from her post?
A corrupt gang like Trump's cowers from truth as vampires do from sunlight. And ethical people have a way of bursting lies. While we don't know the full extent of Trump's and Giuliani's animus toward Yovanovitch - other than the maelstrom of delirium that constantly swirls in their febrile brains - it appears that they viewed her as a hindrance to their nefarious machinations to harness Ukrainian leaders to their true-life conspiracy to smear Joe Biden. Yovanovitch, after all, was an outspoken critic of corruption.
Get her out so that Trump's consigliere Giuliani could practice his dark arts unfettered, to coerce the Ukrainians to join the hit job against the president's leading political rival for 2020 - Joe Biden. After all, character assassination proved very effective in purging the FBI of red-blooded investigators of Trump's collusion with the Russians.
Not since the McCarthy era has there been such an unchallenged political assault on this country's public servants. It took a single low-key attorney, Joseph Welch, to burst McCarthy's witch hunt with a single poignant question, "Have you no sense of decency?" Who in the GOP will follow Welch's example today?
Impeachment will be broadcast on all the major networks. Stay tuned.