Government Officials Are Living in Fear of Trump’s Tweets

Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch could tell the knives were out for her, even if she couldn’t figure out why. From her posting in Ukraine, she began to get wind of people undermining her in private, she told House investigators in a deposition last month. Then, in March 2019, Donald Trump Jr. tweeted that “jokers” like her needed to be fired.

Yovanovitch, a career Foreign Service officer, reached out to her contacts stateside, including her boss at the State Department and the National Security Council’s top Ukraine expert. They all expressed “total support,” she said. She then asked the State Department to back her publicly, worrying that otherwise she simply couldn’t represent the U.S. government credibly. A State Department official ran the request up to Secretary Mike Pompeo, and the answer came back: No