Rudy Giuliani stunningly admits he 'needed Yovanovitch out of the way'

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last updated 17 December 2019

Well, that wasn't subtle.

In a sweeping article in The New Yorker, focused on Ukraine's former General Prosecutor Yuriy Lutsenko, President Trump's personal lawyer and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani was pretty open about his plan to get rid of Marie Yovanovitch, the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine.

Lutsenko reportedly wasn't fond of Yovanovitch, whom he felt favored his rival, the head of Ukraine's new anti-corruption bureau. That seemingly made him a good partner for Giuliani, who was launching a campaign to get Kyiv to investigate the actions of some of Trump's domestic political rivals in Ukraine. Giuliani has widely been viewed as the leading force behind the movement to drive Yovanovitch out of her role because she was seen as an obstacle to his investigation-related plans, and he admitted as much to The New Yorker.

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Giuliani then compiled a dossier on Yovanovitch and former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, who once served on the board of a Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company at the center of corruption allegations. He went on to coordinate with journalist John Solomon, who interviewed Lutsenko for The Hill, to push the story and force out Yovanovitch. "I said, 'John, let's make this as prominent as possible,'" Giuliani told The New Yorker. Read more at The New Yorker.

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Tim is a staff writer at The Week and has contributed to Bedford and Bowery and The New York Transatlantic. He is a graduate of Occidental College and NYU's journalism school. Tim enjoys writing about baseball, Europe, and extinct megafauna. He lives in New York City.

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