Marie Yovanovitch dismissed after Trump allies said she was blocking Biden probe and bad-mouthing president, people familiar with the matter say
President Trump ordered the removal of the ambassador to Ukraine after months of complaints from allies outside the administration, including his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, that she was undermining him abroad and obstructing efforts to persuade Kyiv to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden, according to people familiar with the matter.
The recall of Marie Yovanovitch in the spring has become a key point of interest in the House impeachment inquiry. A whistleblower complaint by a CIA officer alleges the president solicited foreign interference in the 2020 elections by pressing Ukraine’s president in a July 25 call to pursue investigations, including into the activities of Mr. Biden, a Democrat who is running for president.
The complaint cites Ms. Yovanovitch’s ouster as one of a series of events that paved the way for what the whistleblower alleges was an abuse of power by the president. Mr. Trump has described the call with his Ukrainian counterpart as “perfect” and the House inquiry as a “hoax.”
State Department officials were told this spring that Ms. Yovanovitch’s removal was a priority for the president, a person familiar with the matter said. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo supported the move, an administration official said. Ms. Yovanovitch was told by State Department officials that they couldn’t shield her from attacks by the president and his allies, according to people close to her.
In an interview, Mr. Giuliani told The Wall Street Journal that in the lead-up to Ms. Yovanovitch’s removal, he reminded the president of complaints percolating among Trump supporters that she had displayed an anti-Trump bias in private conversations. In Mr. Giuliani’s view, she also had been an obstacle to efforts to push Ukraine to investigate Mr. Biden and his son Hunter.
As vice president, Mr. Biden spearheaded an international anticorruption reform push in Ukraine, which included calling for the dismissal of a prosecutor the U.S. and its allies saw as soft on corruption. He had once investigated the Ukrainian gas company where Hunter Biden served on the board at a salary of $50,000 a month, according to one official with ties to the company. Mr. Trump has accused the Bidens of corruption.
In May, Ukraine’s then-prosecutor general, Yuriy Lutsenko, said he had no evidence of wrongdoing by the Bidens.
When Ms. Yovanovitch left her post in May, the State Department said she was concluding her assignment “as planned,” and that her departure date aligned with the start of a new administration in Ukraine. She was recalled at least three months before the end of the customary three-year diplomatic tenure.
Mr. Giuliani told the Journal that when he mentioned the ambassador to the president this spring, Mr. Trump “remembered he had a problem with her earlier and thought she had been dismissed.” Mr. Giuliani said he subsequently received a call from a White House official—whom he declined to identify—asking him to list his concerns about the ambassador again.
Mr. Giuliani said he gave Mr. Pompeo a nine-page document dated March 28 that included a detailed timeline of the Bidens’ dealings in Ukraine and allegations of impropriety against Ms. Yovanovitch, including that she was “very close” to Mr. Biden.
“He called me back and he said they were going to investigate,” Mr. Giuliani said of the secretary of state, saying Mr. Pompeo asked for additional documents to back up the allegations. “The reason I gave the information to the secretary was I believed that he should know that the president’s orders to fire her were being blocked by the State Department.”
Neither the State Department nor the White House responded to requests for comment.
Andrew Bates, a Biden campaign spokesman, said Mr. Biden has professional respect for Ms. Yovanovitch but that the two aren’t close. “She became our ambassador during the final 6 months of the administration,” he said. “This is standard Rudy Giuliani: noun, verb, lie about Joe Biden. ”
When asked about Ms. Yovanovitch’s removal Thursday, Mr. Trump told reporters: “I don’t know if I recalled her or somebody recalled her but I heard very, very bad things about her for a long period of time. Not good.”
Ms. Yovanovitch couldn’t be reached for comment. She is set to testify before House lawmakers on Oct. 11 as part of the impeachment inquiry. People close to her disputed that she did anything wrong and defended her work.
“She was doing everything by the book,” said a senior Ukraine government official who interacted with her. “Everything was blessed by State Department.”
Ms. Yovanovitch remains an employee of the State Department and is a senior State Department fellow at Georgetown University.
A career diplomat, she first served as the second-ranking diplomat in Kyiv in 2001 under President George W. Bush and returned as ambassador under President Obama in 2016.
Prior to Ms. Yovanovitch’s recall from Kyiv, her relations with some senior Ukrainian officials were fraught. Ms. Yovanovitch openly criticized the office of Mr. Lutsenko, then the prosecutor general, for its poor anticorruption record. “Lutsenko hated her because she pushed for reforms, especially in the judiciary sector,” said a former Western diplomat in Ukraine.
Presidents have the authority to nominate and remove ambassadors. But some senior officials at the White House and State Department say they had been unaware of the president’s displeasure with Ms. Yovanovitch and surprised by her removal.
Mr. Giuliani’s role in pressing for the ambassador’s ouster is unusual given that he holds no formal government role. The president’s critics contend that, in his capacity representing the president’s personal interests as his attorney, he has exercised undue influence over administration policy and personnel.
Mr. Giuliani isn’t the only figure outside the administration to have expressed concerns about the ambassador. As early as the spring of 2018, Pete Sessions, at the time a GOP congressman from Texas, sent a letter to Mr. Pompeo asking for her removal, saying he had been told Ms. Yovanovitch was displaying a bias against the president in private conversations.
Mr. Sessions told the Journal he didn’t follow up on the matter and didn’t hear until months later about Mr. Trump’s interest in replacing her. He declined to say where his information about the ambassador came from but said his letter was in line with a broader concern among members of Congress that the administration wasn’t moving swiftly enough to put new ambassadors in place.
In a March 2019 interview with a columnist at The Hill, Mr. Lutsenko complained that the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv was obstructing corruption investigations, including by providing a “do not prosecute” list and restricting Ukrainian access to the U.S. Mr. Lutsenko’s claim is mentioned in the whistleblower complaint.
The U.S. State Department at the time called the untouchables list claim an “outright fabrication.” Mr. Lutsenko later retracted the allegation about the list and said had no evidence of Biden wrongdoing. He was dismissed in August.
In early 2019, Mr. Lutsenko met twice with Mr. Giuliani, who around the same time stepped up his quest to collect information he could use to persuade Ukraine to open an investigation into the Bidens. The men met in New York in January and in Warsaw in February.
Mr. Lutsenko couldn’t be reached for comment. Mr. Giuliani said he brought concerns about the ambassador to the president in the weeks following his meetings with Mr. Lutsenko. “It would have been a dereliction of my duty if I didn’t,” he said. He accused Ms. Yovanovitch of blocking his efforts to push Ukraine to investigate the Bidens: “I think she covered it up.”
The president’s supporters kept up criticism of Ms. Yovanovitch. In a March 22 interview on Fox News, Joe diGenova, a lawyer close to the president, accused Ms. Yovanovitch, without providing evidence, of having “bad-mouthed” Mr. Trump to Ukrainian officials and having told them “not to listen or worry about Trump policy because he’s going to be impeached.”
Mr. diGenova declined to comment. In the Fox interview, Mr. diGenova added: “The president has ordered her dismissal from her post.” The same month, Donald Trump Jr. , the president’s son, referred to the ambassador in a Twitter message as a “joker.”
After Volodymyr Zelensky won the Ukrainian presidency on April 21, State Department officials told their Ukrainian counterparts that they favored continuity at the embassy in Kyiv, rather than inserting a new ambassador, according to people familiar with the matter.
Instead, Ms. Yovanovitch was recalled about two weeks after the election. The State Department hasn’t named a successor.
In the July 25 call, Mr. Trump described Ms. Yovanovitch to Mr. Zelensky as “bad news.” Mr. Zelensky responded: ”It was great that you were the first one who told me that she was a bad ambassador because I agree with you 100%.”
Pompeo Acknowledges He Was on Trump-Zelensky Phone Call
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo confirmed for the first time Wednesday that he listened in on the phone call between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that prompted a House impeachment inquiry.
In early May, a packet of materials was received by Mr. Pompeo’s office at the State Department, according to an account given Wednesday to House and Senate committee members by the State Department inspector general and later described by Democratic lawmakers. The inspector general told Congress he had information relevant to the impeachment investigation. The inspector general didn’t respond to requests for comment.
It contained several folders marked “Trump Hotel” containing notes and newspaper clippings Democratic lawmakers said were designed to smear Ms. Yovanovitch, packaged in an envelope marked “White House,” according to documents viewed by the Journal.
“It is a package of propaganda and disinformation and conspiracy theories,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin (D., Md.).
The nine-page document Mr. Giuliani said he gave to Mr. Pompeo dated March 28 was part of that packet, according to a person who saw the packet.
Elvira Nabiullina has earned an unusual degree of freedom to buttress an economy buffeted by sanctions
After Russia’s central-bank chief, Elvira Nabiullina, moved to shut down a large lender last year for allegedly falsifying accounts, the nation’s top prosecutor’s office issued an order to leave the bank alone.
She closed it anyway.
In her five years in office, Ms. Nabiullina has closed hundreds of weak banks, stymied the exodus of Russian wealth abroad and transformed monetary policy to bring inflation to record lows. That has earned her an unusual amount of freedom to make tough decisions, even if that means treading on powerful interests.
.. As President Vladimir Putin bids to return Russia to great-power status, challenging the U.S. and Europe from Syria to Ukraine, it’s her job to shore up the economy against volatile oil markets and sanctions. Russia’s ability to continue its quest rests in large part on whether Ms. Nabiullina can keep the financial system stable.
Ms. Nabiullina has earned public praise from
Mr. Putin, who rarely commends subordinates, as well as from abroad. Last year at the Kremlin, Mr. Putin told her that “under your leadership, the central bank has done a great deal to stabilize the economic situation.” Managers at big investment funds, from
Pacific Investment Management Co. to Pictet Asset Management, call Ms. Nabiullina one of the world’s most skilled central bankers.
Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, lauded her in May for setting “standards of quality for macroeconomic policy.”
.. In 2006, the central-bank official responsible for revamping the system, Andrey Kozlov, was shot dead in his car. Russian financier Alexey Frankel, whose banking license Mr. Kozlov had revoked earlier that year, was later convicted of organizing the killing.
.. She has earned a reputation for bookishness, personal honesty and fixation on detail
.. Industry veterans said that before Ms. Nabiullina took over, banking licenses were mostly used as mechanisms to funnel money abroad and process insider deals.
.. “We used to open a newspaper in the morning and look at the banking deals and said—that’s capital flight, and that’s asset stripping,” said Sergey Khotimskiy, co-founder of one of Russia’s largest private banks, Sovcombank. “The dodgy enrichment schemes were obvious to everyone.”
.. When she took over the institution, banks and companies were moving $5 billion out of the country every month, and inflation topped 7%.She shut down 70 banks in her first year.
.. Ms. Nabiullina stopped a longstanding policy of spending billions of dollars from the country’s reserves to try to prop up the ruble. In December 2014, with the ruble continuing to fall, the central bank nearly doubled its key lending rate to 17% at an emergency late-night meeting.
.. The rate increase restored calm to markets but strangled the country’s consumer-fueled growth. The country’s emerging middle class, which had become used to foreign vacations and European cars, is still feeling the effects of the ruble’s collapse.
.. Since she took office, she has halved the number of Russian banks, shutting down about 440 lenders. She has reduced capital outflows by about 50% to $2.5 billion a month.
.. Many of the banks she closed had been considered untouchable, analysts said. Some, such as Promsviazbank, counted lawmakers and state-company executives among its shareholders and held money for national oil companies and the Orthodox Church.
.. Others, like Bank Sovetskiy, had served political objectives, providing banking services in Crimea, the Ukrainian region the Kremlin annexed in 2014.
.. When the central bank took over Yugra last June following repeated warnings, it said it found a $600 million deficit in its balance sheet masked with bad loans. Just hours before the bankrupt bank’s license was due to expire, the prosecutor’s office ordered a halt to the closure, calling the bank “a financially stable credit organization.” Ms. Nabiullina rejected the order.
.. “It was a test of will, and she won,” said banking analyst Mr. Lukashuk.
.. In January, inflation hit a record low for the post-Soviet period of 2.2%, a result of Ms. Nabiullina’s decision to keep interest rates high after the Crimea sanctions. Some tycoons have urged a faster reduction.
.. Still, she has struggled to regulate Russia’s lesser, underperforming state-owned banks, whose executives often treat them as fiefs, analysts said. These banks are kept afloat by constant injections of state funds, which the executives have funneled into unrelated assets ranging from supermarkets to railroad cars.
.. Almost a trillion rubles of public capital, about $16 billion at today’s rate, went to just three state-owned banks—
VTB,
Gazprombank and
Rosselkhozbank—
in the first four years of Ms. Nabiullina’s central-bank term, according to Fitch Ratings. All are still saddled with bad debts or illiquid assets.
.. Her modest economic forecasts have consistently lagged behind Mr. Putin’s goals, which she said can only be achieved through deep, unpopular changes to the system.
Even if the price of oil rose to $100, from around $65 today, she said, “it’s very unlikely that our economy can grow above 1.5% to 2%” a year.