'There's a lot at stake' in Trump's re-election bid, former Ukraine ambassador Marie Yovanovitch says

Jeremy Siegel: You're listening to GBH's Morning Edition. Former President Trump is heading into next week's New Hampshire primary with strong polling after a big win in the Iowa caucuses. And that's despite the fact that he was impeached twice. The first impeachment trial, you might recall, focused on Ukraine and Trump's efforts to investigate then-candidate Joe Biden. And at the center of the trial was one person Trump's ousted Ukrainian ambassador, Marie Yovanovitch.

Adam Schiff [Previously recorded]: Getting rid of Ambassador Yovanovitch helped set the stage for an irregular channel that could pursue the two investigations that mattered so much to the president. The 2016 conspiracy theory and, most important, an investigation into the 2020 political opponent. He apparently feared most Joe Biden.

Marie Yovanovitch: The Obama administration did not ask me to help the Clinton campaign or harm the Trump campaign, nor would I have taken any such steps if they had. Partisanship of this type is not compatible with the role of a career foreign service officer.

Siegel: With the national spotlight on her, Yovanovitch testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee, detailing her experience under Trump, his administration's efforts to influence an election through foreign channels, and how she was subject to a smear campaign by Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani.

Yovanovitch: I do not understand Mr. Giuliani's motives for attacking me, nor can I offer an opinion on whether he believed the allegations he spread about me. Clearly, no one at the State Department did.

Siegel: I sat down with Ambassador Yovanovitch at the Boston Public Library last night, where she spoke candidly about that moment and her fears surrounding this presidential election. Ambassador Yovanovitch, thank you so much for joining me.

Yovanovitch: Well, thanks for having me, Jeremy.

Siegel: So I'd love to start with politics. You are now a former U.S. ambassador. You retired from the Foreign Service. When you are an ambassador, you steer away from domestic politics. Now that you're no longer in that realm, are you able to speak more freely about what's happening in the U.S.? Do you feel a freedom in what you're able to say?

Yovanovitch: Yeah, I'm worried that you're going to ask me, like, a really tricky question.

Siegel: I might be.

Yovanovitch: Yeah, now I'm a private citizen. I can say, you know, whatever I want, which is on the one hand very different, on the other hand, very freeing.

Siegel: What is at stake in this presidential election?

Yovanovitch: Well, I think there's a lot at stake. And I'll just confine it to foreign policy, which is kind of my realm. I think that Joe Biden has done a really good job of reestablishing our partnerships with allies and partners all over the world. And that is hugely important, because although we are a very great country and we can do a lot, we can't do it on our own. We rely on those partnerships to advance our interests all over the globe. And so, I think that that is something really important we need to be thinking about. We don't want to be America first and America alone. We want to be America first with the entire world.

Siegel: You were at the center of former President Trump's first impeachment trial. It's not a role that diplomats usually end up in, having the national spotlight on them. But you were sitting there. You were inside of the congressional chambers as the Senate was launching and conducting an historic impeachment inquiry into a sitting U.S. president. Having sat there and having experienced the Trump administration, what goes through your mind as you're watching him on television, on the news once again, going through this 2024 presidential primary?

Yovanovitch: Well, obviously we're all watching the polls and we saw his victory in Iowa and presume that those victories will continue to rack up. I mean, I think he is the presumptive Republican nominee. And I just recall that he used his office, his public office, the highest office in the land, to try to use it against a potential rival in the coming presidential elections in 2020, against former Vice President Joe Biden. He used that office for personal gain, and he used our foreign policy assets, our national security assets, in this case Javelins [missiles], to try to get the Ukrainian president to do his personal and political bidding. I think the American people can expect better than that.

Siegel: Why did you remain in your position under Trump when you disagreed so strongly with what he was doing?

Yovanovitch: Well, my job in Ukraine was to implement U.S. policy on Ukraine. And while I was there, from 2016 to 2019, that policy was actually a very good policy, and in some ways it was the same policy, frankly, that we'd been following before, under President Obama. And in some ways, you could say that President Trump strengthened it, because in 2018 he agreed to provide Javelins to Ukraine. So the perfect phone conversation with Zelenskyy where he talked about holding, he hinted that he would hold on to the Javelins until Zelenskyy did his bidding, that was a second allotment of of Javelins. So when I was ambassador, our policy was a policy I could get behind. I don't think there's any American that agrees with even a president that they vote for 100% of the time. And so, you know, I was focused on my job. And in my job, I thought that we were doing the right thing with regard to our national security concerns and that we were helping Ukraine. Subsequently, after I was removed from Ukraine, that's when this strange phone call happened and it became clear what President Trump was trying to do.

Siegel: You wrote about your experience in your memoir and how difficult it was, feeling like you'd be up against unstoppable forces, speaking out about what you saw happening with the Trump administration and what you said was efforts to influence domestic policy wrongly through Ukraine. Rudy Giuliani was at the center of all of that. And you wrote that, can you imagine speaking ill of the man who led New York City through the aftermath of 9/11? We've seen such a shift in who Rudy Giuliani is since then. What has it been like watching that figure who was so at the center of a very turbulent experience for you? What's that been like seeing that fold over the past few years?

Yovanovitch: Well, I think it's tragic in some ways. You know, America's mayor. I mean, he led New York City and had the attention of America in the world after 9/11. And I think it's tragic to see the path that he has chosen for himself and the things that he has done, you know, betraying our country's values.

Siegel: Marie Yovanovitch is the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine and author of the memoir "Lessons From the Edge." Will be presenting this conversation with her in two parts. Stay tuned for more on Ukraine tomorrow. This is GBH News.

Jeremy Siegel: You're listening to GBH's Morning Edition. A government shutdown has been averted thanks to a last minute spending plan in Congress. But Republicans are still holding up another round of funding for Ukraine as they demand an increase in border security. For foreign policy experts, that's a terrifying proposition.

Marie Yovanovitch: I think it's a test not only for Ukraine, but for the entire free world. Because if Russia wins in Ukraine, Russia will keep on going.

Siegel: That's Marie Yovanovitch, who served as ambassador to Ukraine from 2016 to 2019 and has firsthand experience with Russian aggression under Vladimir Putin. I sat down with Yovanovitch at the Boston Public Library, where we spoke about her fears for the region as we approach 2024 the potential of another Trump administration, and what a loss in funding for Ukraine would mean.

Yovanovitch: I think it's, of course, crucially important for us to support Ukraine, and we have been spending a lot of money and we're talking about spending a lot more money on Ukraine. But that money, actually 90% of it stays right here in the United States, creating jobs for American citizens and bolstering our economy. Secondly, that money as big as that amount is, we're talking about $61 billion on the table right now. As much as that money is, it is only 10%, maybe even less, of our annual defense budget, not even our budget, of our annual defense budget. And that is money well spent.

Siegel: At the same time as the war in Ukraine. There's also the war in Gaza, Israel's war with Hamas, which has not only been competing for national attention and competing for funding from the U.S., but also, I imagine, must be a strain on the State Department. Given your years of experience in diplomacy from the American side, is it exhausting for U.S. officials? I mean, I see Secretary of State Antony Blinken getting off of planes, at press conferences, at negotiations every day. That must be tiring.

Yovanovitch: I don't want to speak for him. But I'll just say from my perspective, it is tiring. But it's also invigorating because the work we do matters. The work we do saves lives. It makes a difference in people's life every day, in other ways as well. And so, you know, which would you rather do? Kind of a humdrum job that you're not really excited about? Or a job that you find intellectually and otherwise stimulating and can really make a difference for the United States and for other countries around the globe?

Siegel: How does that strain, though, affect the attention of the State Department and also funding domestically for both of these wars? I mean, not to speak of them in a competitive kind of way, but they do both draw attention in different directions.

Yovanovitch: Yeah, they do. But, you know, usually, the State Department, the Department of Defense, the CIA, other foreign affairs agencies and national security agencies, we divide up the world geographically. And so the people who are working on the Middle East are generally different than the people who are working on European affairs. I'm not saying that as you go up the food chain to, you know, the president, the secretary of state and others — obviously they deal with the entire world. But maybe they don't deal with every single detail on the implementation of every single thing. So, you know, there's a distribution of responsibilities.

Siegel: I want to talk a little bit more about what is actually happening inside of Ukraine, because you spent so many years there working for the U.S. as a diplomat. You've met President Zelenskyy. You wrote about it in your memoir. What's he like?

Yovanovitch: So, Zelenskyy, I knew him as a as a comedian, as a candidate. I didn't work with him as president. But when I first met him, he was very focused on the fact that I needed to understand that he was a businessman. Yes, he was a comedian. Yes, he was an actor. But his real talents lay in business. He had created a multimedia empire and, you know, provided content for the entire Russian-speaking world. And that company is worth millions. And he got it, you know, he earned that money, and he is very proud of that and remains very proud of it. And so I think just like President Ronald Reagan, who, of course, famously was an actor before he became governor of California and then president, I think Zelenskyy has used that background in communications, that ability to, you know, get everybody onside. To the great benefit of Ukraine.

Siegel: You worked under the administration of former President Trump, whose policy was America First. How does that differ from what we've seen under President Biden?

Yovanovitch: Russia has made it very clear that they hope former President Trump will be president again, because I think they anticipate that our assistance for Ukraine would stop. If you look at what President Putin has written, if you look at what he has said, he has said that he wants to consolidate historically Russian lands, is what he calls it, historically Russian lands. And if you look at a map over the centuries, that's a lot of Europe, right? If that were to happen, that he gets a victory in Ukraine, it would be because the free world has not supported Ukraine. That we are not standing up for our values. We're not standing up for our partners. We're not even standing up for our own interests. And so why wouldn't he do what he wants to do? Because he would have understood that there is no punishment for that. There is no cost to breaking the rules of international discourse between nations. Moreover, it's not just Putin who will understand that. Other countries will as well. And so while I'm not a China expert, I think the road to sorting out the China-Taiwan issue drives straight through Ukraine.

Siegel: Before I let you go, I briefly wanted to ask about your family because you have firsthand experience with an aggressive Russia. Your parents fled from the USSR. They fled from the Nazi terror. How does that influence your approach to foreign policy and how you're making sense of this situation?

Yovanovitch: Well, I think that, you know, I'm an optimist. I think most Americans are optimists. We want to believe the best in people, but we also need to be realists. And we also need to understand that terrible things do happen and we need to stand up against it. Because if Russia has its way, the brutal ways that Russia is dealing with the Ukrainian people under occupation, the brutal ways that its dealing with its own population, will become normalized. And we will see that around the world. We can't stand for that.

Siegel: Former U.S. Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, thank you so much for joining me.

Yovanovitch: Thanks a lot, Jeremy.

Siegel: Marie Yovanovitch is the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine. This was part two of my conversation with her. You can find yesterday's interview where we spoke about her experience at the center of former President Trump's first impeachment trial at GBHnews.org. You're listening to GBH's Morning Edition.