WASHINGTON, Nov 24, 2019 (BSS/AFP) – The White House’s uniformed Ukraine expert was attacked online by his own employer. The acting US ambassador to Ukraine had his credibility aggressively questioned on live television by the president’s allies.
And then those two key witnesses in President Donald Trump’s impeachment inquiry, and others like them, went back to their jobs.
The scandal engulfing Trump has created an awkward and unprecedented predicament — how diplomats and other national security professionals can carry on their work when their ultimate boss, the president, is assailing them.
Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman — a National Security Council expert who said he had told his father, a Soviet refugee, that he had nothing to fear by telling the truth — remains in his position at the White House, whose official Twitter account quoted his superior as questioning his judgment.
With Vindman enduring social media taunts over his Ukrainian ancestry, the US Army said it was providing support to ensure that the Iraq War veteran is well protected.
Bill Taylor — the acting US ambassador in Kiev, a post he also held a decade earlier — painted a damning, if dispassionate, picture that supported the key charge that Trump was strong-arming Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to dig up dirt on domestic rival Joe Biden.
Representative Jim Jordan, a staunch supporter of Trump, derisively said that he “can’t believe” that Taylor was the Democrats’ “star witness.”
Taylor then returned to Ukraine, where he again served as the face of the United States.
– No interlocutor? –
He issued a statement hailing the release of three vessels seized a year earlier by Russia, saying: “I congratulate President Zelensky and his foreign policy team for their recent accomplishments.”
The US ambassador to the European Union — Trump donor Gordon Sondland — similarly flew back to Brussels hours after he testified that Trump ordered a delay in a summit to press Zelensky to announce a probe.
A Washington-based foreign diplomat said the scandal had palpable effects on dealings with Ukraine, which is fighting Russian-backed separatists in its eastern region.
The diplomat said that there “really isn’t an American interlocutor” on Ukraine after the resignation of envoy Kurt Volker and the public dressing-down of Taylor.
Jonathan Katz, a former State Department and USAID official who has worked on Ukraine, wondered how Kiev would know whom to trust, especially after witnesses said Trump put his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, in charge of policy.
“It certainly undercuts their ability to carry out the national security duties in a way that they typically would be able to,” Katz, now a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, said of officials caught up in the scandal.
He said there was no precedent for the US president to go after career diplomats or civil servants, who are accustomed to bipartisan support.
“I am 100 percent certain that none of these people who have been testifying would think a year ago that they would be in this position,” Katz said.
“When you feel like you’re doing the best job you’re doing for the United States and you have the president acting out of his own interests and not only undermining them but using political assassination, it has a deep impact on these people’s careers and lives and families,” he added.
– Calls for reform –
In contrast to most Western democracies, the US system has the president to pick all ambassadors, meaning sweeping turnover — and long gaps in service — after each change of administration.
Amid the Ukraine scandal, Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren has promised to prioritize appointments of career diplomats and abolish the common practice by both parties of appointing donors to plum posts.
“The practice of auctioning off American diplomacy to the highest bidder must end,” she said.
The diplomats who have come under fire have also found solidarity, in the discreet way of the State Department.
Numerous diplomats on their personal social media pages shared the testimony of Marie Yovanovitch, who was removed as Ukraine’s ambassador by Trump, who told Zelensky she was “bad news.”
Yovanovitch — who was attacked by Trump in real time on Twitter as she testified — pointed to sacrifices by diplomats, including the 444-day captivity of US embassy staff in revolutionary Iran.
She also mentioned the killings of four Americans including an ambassador in Benghazi, Libya, and the mysterious sonic attacks suffered by US diplomats in Cuba and China.
“I count myself lucky to be a Foreign Service officer, fortunate to serve with the best America has to offer, blessed to serve the American people for the last 33 years,” she said.
When she went soon after her appearance to watch jazz at a Washington club, the crowd gave her a standing ovation.