On Friday’s broadcast of Fox News Channel’s special coverage of the House Intelligence Committees so-called impeachment inquiry public hearings, “Fox News Sunday” anchor Chris Wallace called former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch testimony “very powerful.”
Wallace said, “I think that if you are not moved, and we’ll have to see what happens in cross-examination, by the testimony of Marie Yovanovitch today, you don’t have a pulse. This is a woman who had served in seven posts for presidents of both parties for more than 30 years. In hardship posts, places like Somalia, like Tashkent, and she tells a story of being a leading fighter against corruption in Ukraine, being called out of a meeting that was an event at the U.S. embassy to honor an anti-corruption fighter that was later killed, because acid was thrown at that woman’s face. She’s being told by the Secretary-General of the State Department, you’re going to have to leave on the next plane, and we’re worried about your security, our ability to protect you and your reputation. When she gets back, she’s told by the Deputy Secretary of State John Solomon, who was just appointed by President Trump to be the Ambassador to Russia, that you didn’t do anything wrong, but we can’t protect you anymore, because the president is going to attack you.”
He continued, “We went into the details of the smear campaign that came from Rudy Giuliani, and some of his cohorts that was repeated in some outlets of right-wing media that she says is completely untrue. That she was bad-mouthing the president, that she was putting together a list of protected people. She says none of that was true. Perhaps Republicans will have evidence of that, but we’ll see, so far there has been no such evidence presented. Most importantly, I agree with Bret here. The really dramatic moment is that this wasn’t just testimony about the past, this played out in real-time with the president attacking her. He said every place that she served went bad. Adam Schiff said, do you see this as an effort to intimidate you and other witnesses, and she said I feel that is quite intimidating. That does raise the possibility of witness intimidation as new charge here. We’ll have to wait and see what happens when the Republicans start to question her, but it seems to me that this has been very powerful testimony so far on the part of Marie Yovanovitch.”
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