"A Perfect Little Conspiracy Theory"

“A Perfect Little Conspiracy Theory”: The Sudden Recall of the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Might’ve Been the Beginning of the End for Trump
When the Trump administration abruptly recalled Ambassador Masha Yovanovitch in May, something didn’t sit right on Capitol Hill. “Her firing was one of the first signs that something was amiss,” a congressional aide said.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/09/masha-yovanovitch-us-ambassador-to-ukraine-donald-trump

When Masha Yovanovitch, the United States ambassador to Ukraine, was abruptly recalled in May, two months early, the official word coming out of Foggy Bottom was that her departure was “as planned” and timed to the presidential transition in the country. But within the diplomatic community, Yovanovitch’s quick exit didn’t sit right. After all, a veteran diplomat with decades of experience is exactly who the State Department would traditionally want to interface with a fledgling foreign government amid transition. At the time, as I reported, the sense on Capitol Hill was that Yovanovitch had been caught up in a convoluted conspiracy web spun up by Rudy Giuliani and right-wing media that had captured the president’s attention. Democrats bashed it as a “political hit job.”


In retrospect, Yovanovitch’s departure might have been the first portent of Donald Trump’s demise. “Her firing was one of the first signs that something was amiss,” a congressional aide involved in the investigation told me Thursday. “Certainly the investigation that’s now in full swing, one of its origins was when Ambassador Yovanovitch was recalled, for reasons that we thought could be inappropriate.” Questions have swirled for months, but the extent to which Yovanovitch captured the president’s imagination wasn’t clear until last week, when the White House released a rough readout of the July 25 phone call between Trump and the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, that laid bare his dislike for the diplomat. “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,” Trump said, according to the transcript. He went on to add, “She’s going to go through some things.”

Even before the current scandal fully erupted, Trump’s attack on Yovanovitch left diplomats stunned and baffled. “The American ambassador, almost everywhere on Earth, is the most untouchable person. You can call out a local official for corruption. You can say tough things because you are untouchable, because of the power of our country,” a former ambassador told me. “It’s hard to overstate the meaning of the president or the secretary undercutting an American ambassador this way.”

Then, last Thursday, the reasons for her firing became clearer. The whistle-blower, now at the center of the House’s unfolding impeachment inquiry, wrote in their complaint that according to “several U.S. officials,” Yovanovitch was recalled because of her ensnarement in Trumpworld’s bizarre counter-collusion narrative. “She was low-hanging fruit for the president and his inner circle.

They know she did nothing wrong,” a second congressional source told me. “She just served their purpose at the time because she was appointed under Obama, so it was a perfect little conspiracy theory.”

<<snip>>