Former ambassador says she was warned to 'watch my back'

It started with a warning to watch her back, that people were "looking to hurt" her. From there, former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch told House investigators, it escalated into a chilling campaign to fire her as President Donald Trump and his allies angled in Eastern Europe for political advantage at home.

Testimony from Yovanovitch, released Monday, offered a first word-for-word look at the closed-door House impeachment hearings. Inside, Democrats and Republicans are waging a pitched battle over what to make of Trump's efforts to get Ukraine's leaders to investigate political rival Joe Biden, Biden's son and Democratic activities in the 2016 election.

The transcript came out on the same day that four Trump administration officials defied subpoenas to testify, acting on orders from a White House that is fighting the impeachment investigation with all its might. Among those refusing to testify: John Eisenberg, the lead lawyer at the National Security Council and, by some accounts, the man who ordered a rough transcript of Trump's phone call with Ukraine's leader moved to a highly restricted computer system.

During nine hours of sometimes emotional testimony, Yovanovitch detailed efforts led by Rudy Giuliani and other Trump allies to push her out of her post.

The career diplomat, who was recalled from her job in May on Trump's orders, testified that a senior Ukrainian official told her that "I really needed to watch my back." While the major thrust of Yovanovitch's testimony was revealed in her opening statement, Monday's 317-page transcript provided new details.

Yovanovitch offered significant threads of information including the possibility that Trump was directly involved in a phone call with Giuliani, the president's personal lawyer, and the Ukrainians dating back to January 2018. And she pushed back on Republican suggestions that she harbored opposition to Trump.

She had been recalled from Kyiv before the July 25 phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy that's at the center of the impeachment inquiry.

Later, she was "surprised and dismayed" by what she saw in the transcript of the call including that Trump had called her "bad news." He also said that "she's going to go through some things." "I was shocked," Yovanovitch said, to see "that the president would speak about me or any ambassador in that way to a foreign counterpart."
Asked about her as he left on a campaign trip Monday, Trump had a more equivocal comment: "I'm sure she's a very fine woman. I just don't know much about her."
However, asked directly if Giuliani was promoting investigations on Burisma and Biden, Yovanovitch said, "It wasn't entirely clear to me what was going on." More directly, she drew a link between Giuliani and two businessmen -- Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, who have been indicted in the U.S. on charges stemming from campaign donations -- as part of the campaign to oust her. She understood they were looking to expand their business interests in Ukraine "and that they needed a better ambassador to sort of facilitate their business' efforts here."
Yovanovitch said was told by Ukrainian officials last November or December that Giuliani was in touch with Ukraine's former top prosecutor, Yuriy Lutsenko, "and that they had plans, and that they were going to, you know, do things, including to me."