Marie Yovanovitch says Rudy Giuliani was Trump's 'personal dirt-digger' and corrupt Ukrainians used him to spread 'lies and half-truths' in the US

[Rogue Valley]

Marie Yovanovitch says Rudy Giuliani was Trump's 'personal dirt-digger' and corrupt Ukrainians used him to spread 'lies and half-truths' in the US

3.19.22
The former US ambassador to Ukraine said Rudy Giuliani was a "personal dirt-digger" for former President Donald Trump and worked with corrupt actors in Ukraine to bring about her unceremonious ouster in 2019.
Marie Yovanovitch testified about some of these details during Trump's first impeachment inquiry, which focused on his efforts to pressure the Ukrainian president into publicly announcing investigations targeting the Bidens while withholding vital military aid and a White House meeting.

But Yovanovitch strikes a much more candid tone in her book, "Lessons From The Edge," where she outlines how Ukraine's corrupt former top prosecutor, Yuriy Lutsenko, used Giuliani as a tool to spread disinformation in the US ahead of the 2020 election and engineered her abrupt firing in the spring of 2019. She says that Lutsenko was aware that Giuliani wanted to paint then-Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden as corrupt and sought to "undermine" his candidacy in the 2020 election. So Lutsenko "had concocted a tale of lies and half-truths to oblige Giuliani," Yovanovitch writes. "Lutsenko reshaped actions that Biden had taken to hold corrupt Ukrainians to account and twisted them into the opposite."She goes on to detail how Lutsenko falsely claimed that Biden had ordered the firing of a former Ukrainian prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, to stop him from investigating the Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings, whose board Biden's son, Hunter, worked on. In fact, the opposite was true. "Shokin was not actively investigating corruption at Burisma, or anyplace else for that matter, which was why the entire donor community had come to believe that Shokin was corrupt and needed to go," the book says. "This Orwellian construct was just one of the many ludicrous elements of the Giuliani-Lutsenko conspiracy theory."

Giuliani's and Lutsenko's other focus, the book says, was getting Yovanovitch fired from her post as Ukraine ambassador because both men had a vendetta against her — but for different reasons. Giuliani believed, wrongly, that Yovanovitch was directly responsible for denying a US visa for Shokin, whom Giuliani wanted to meet with as part of his quest to dig up dirt on the Bidens ahead of the 2020 election. And Lutsenko was upset that Yovanovitch — along with other nonpartisan US officials — had described him as a corrupt prosecutor-general working to advance his own interests ahead of Ukraine's. Yovanovitch then writes that she wasn't deterred from her work in Ukraine despite efforts by Giuliani and Lutsenko to undermine her. But she grew increasingly uneasy at the ripple effects their actions had in Washington, DC. "I knew that Lutsenko was going to try to join forces with Giuliani and that they both wanted me fired," the book says. "But I still couldn't imagine that they were going to be successful. The notion that an unscrupulous, disgruntled foreign official or even a president's personal dirt-digger could actually manipulate the US government to act against a sitting U.S. ambassador was inconceivable to me."

It's clear that Rudy Giuliani viewed himself as something like a mob Consigliere, an advisor/lawyer to Donald Trump whose job was to advance the agenda of his Mafia Boss. To that end Giuliani recruited corrupt Ukrainians such as Viktor Shokin, Yuriy Lutsenko, Lev Parnas, Igor Fruman, Kostiantyn Kulyk, Dmytro Firtash, and Russian intelligence agent Andrey Derkach. Giuliani also recruited American Trump appointees such as US EU Ambassador Gordon Sondland, US Energy Secretary Rick Perry, and U.S. Special Representative for Ukraine Kurt Volker. All of these individuals aided and abetted the Trump/Giuliani project to remove Ambassador Yovanovitch from Ukraine because she was an impediment to their plan to extort Ukraine/Zelenskyy in order to fabricate dirt on Hunter Biden.

I for one sincerely hope that Rudy Giuliani goes to prison for the rest of his miserable life.

 

[Michael Cole]

Thank you. All of us non-cult members knew this from the impeachment, as the article begins.

It will have no effect on the cult.

 

[RIP U.S. Democracy]

What happened to Marie Yovanovitch is an absolute tragedy. We need smart, dedicated civil servants with integrity like her working as ambassadors.

Trump and Giuliani destroy everything that they touch.

 

[Mr Person]

Thank you. All of us non-cult members knew this from the impeachment, as the article begins.

It will have no effect on the cult.

These people are willing to make war on the Capitol with intent to install an unelected person as Leader and are also willing to say that doing that is just having a rowdy party. The only effect news like this has is forcing some to search Fox, OANN, and Newsmax for the lies they are expected to tell about it.

 

[Jay Falcon]

What a disgrace.

 

[Subieguy]

shocking. NOT!! Rudy is such an idiot.

 

[Callen]

They won't care. They have no standards, no integrity, no sense of right and wrong. They simply don't care about anything except themselves, certainly not their country.