On Friday, Marie Yovanovitch, the former United States ambassador to Ukraine who was brutally dismissed in May, was alarmist.
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had a bad week. One after another, on Wednesday 13 and Friday 15 November, experienced diplomats deplored in the House of Representatives his deafening silences in the Ukrainian affair, which led to the opening of an impeachment procedure against Donald Trump. .
Publicly heard Friday after the charge d'affaires in Kiev William Taylor, and the head in Washington of the Europe-Eurasia zone, George Kent, two days earlier, Marie L. Yovanovitch was alarmist. The former United States ambassador to Ukraine was brutally fired in May following a destabilization campaign led by President Rudy Giuliani's personal attorney. This campaign had not provoked any public reaction from the State Department.
"It's way beyond my lot and that of two or three people. When the professionals of diplomacy are denigrated and weakened, the institution is just as much. It will soon create real damage, if it is not already the case », she said, before deploring the confusion that reigns, according to her, in American diplomacy, the large number of vacant positions and the exodus of seasoned diplomats.
Crisis of confidence
The former ambassador's critics echoed a significant series of forums, reflecting a latent sling and a veritable crisis of confidence, as evidenced by foreign interlocutors of American diplomats. In the review Foreign AffairsFormer State Department number two, William Burns, did not embarrass himself with scribbled phrases in October to denounce "A new McCarthyism".
In question, an obsession of loyalty to the president and an absence of "Spine" which led, according to him, Mike Pompeo to let Donald Trump publicly stigmatize Marie L. Yovanovitch, targeted for months by conservative media, and to remain unmoved when the President denounces uniformly "Unelected radical bureaucrats".
During the July 25 telephone conversation with his Ukrainian counterpart, Volodymyr Zelensky, whose revelation was at the root of the whole affair, Donald Trump had been threatening the diplomat, though already away from his post. "Things are going to happen to him"he had assured. Exasperated, a close adviser to Secretary of State Michael McKinley, appointed a year ago, finally resigned on October 10 after having urged, in vain, Mike Pompeo to come out of his silence. When questioned, he denied having been alerted by his entourage. He had already been slow to acknowledge having attended the July conversation.
