During President Donald Trump’s 57-minute long diatribe on “Fox & Friends” Friday he used Fox News’ platform to personally attack his now-former Ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch. What used to be a smear campaign of whispers started by Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani over in Kiev became an all-out character assassination across the airwaves of America.
Hardly fair for the 61-year old career foreign service diplomat who, by all accounts, had nothing but a stellar reputation and was highly-respected at the State Dept. after her 33 years of service to her country.
Friday, President Trump on national television appeared to slander Ambassador Yovanovitch.
“This ambassador that everybody says was so wonderful, she wouldn’t hang my picture in the embassy,” President Trump charged in his rambling, lie-filled rant on “Fox & Friends” – as if that were just cause to fire a dedicated public servant. “This was an Obama person, didn’t want to hang my picture in the embassy,” he continued.
“She is in charge of the embassy. She wouldn’t hang it. It took like a year and a half, two years to get the picture up,” Trump claimed.
“She’s very tough. I heard bad things,” Trump told the Fox News viewers. “There was a lot of things that she did that I didn’t like, and we’ll talk about that at some point,” he said, offering no proof.
“This was not an angel, this woman,” the president charged, against all accounts. “This was not a baby that we’re dealing with.”
As it turns out, it was all lies.
The most egregious action Ambassador Yovanovitch took, allegedly refusing to hang the portrait of the president, is now confirmed to be a lie.
“The Embassy in Kyiv hung the official photographs of the President, Vice President, and Secretary of State as soon as they arrived from Washington, DC,” MSNBC’s David Gura, quoting Yovanovitch’s legal team, reports.
Yovanovitch, also, was not “an Obama person.” She joined the U.S. Foreign Service in 1986. She was a Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama-Trump person.
Watch Trump’s tirade:
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