At the heart of the House impeachment inquiry is that criticism that Trump should not have pushed Ukraine’s leaders to conduct politically motivated investigations that would benefit him to receive better treatment from the United States.
The full transcripts from McKinley and Yovanovitch offer new details on this front.
Yovanovitch said she was perplexed by the efforts of Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, to pressure Kiev to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter, as well as claims about Ukraine’s involvement in 2016 election interference.
“It’s not like we had a policy that Ukraine should not become involved in our domestic politics or, you know, somehow become involved in 2020 elections,” she said, “but clearly that is not in U.S. interests for Ukraine to start playing such a role.”
“Would you call that, to some extent, antidemocratic?” an investigator asked.
“I think that elections should be for Americans to decide,” she replied.
Yovanovitch also said that Ukrainian Minister of the Interior Arsen Avakov expressed concerns to her about Ukraine getting into U.S. politics after communicating with Giuliani about Biden and the 2016 election at the beginning of this year.
McKinley said that it was unprecedented for the State Department to be involved in digging up dirt on a president’s political opponents.
“f I can underscore, in 37 years in the Foreign Service and different parts of the globe and working on many controversial issues, working 10 years back in Washington, I had never seen that,” McKinley said in his testimony.