There’s Something About Marie

Did You Know This About Marie Yovanovitch? An Obama holdover with anti-Trump biases of long standing.

AmSpec:

One, she was appointed ambassador to Ukraine by Obama in May 2016, six months before his presidency ended.

2. From 2008 to 2011, she was Bush’s and Obama’s ambassador to Armenia. George W. Bush removed Yovanovitch’s predecessor, Ambassador John Evans, from the Armenia post after he rightly called the Turkish Holocaust of Armenians a “genocide.” Bush then nominated Richard Hoagland to be U.S. ambassador to Armenia, but he refused to acknowledge the Turkish Holocaust as “genocide,” so the Senate rejected him. Yovanovitch was the next nominee for the post, and she got the message not to call it “genocide” but to fudge it enough to placate Armenian Americans, so she played along and refused to call the Medz Yeghern — the Turkish Holocaust of 1.5 million Armenians between 1915–23 — a “genocide.” In the words of Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), reported by the Associated Press on June 19, 2008, when he questioned her during hearings on her nomination,

It is a shame that career foreign service officers have to be brought before the [Senate Foreign Relations] Committee and find difficulty in acknowledging historical facts, and find difficulty in acknowledging the realities of what has been internationally recognized.… And it is amazing to me that we can talk about millions, a million and a half human beings who were slaughtered, we can talk about those who were raped, we can talk about those who were forcibly pushed out of their country, and we can have presidential acknowledgements of that, but then we cannot call it what it is.

The Associated Press headlined its story “Nominee Refuses to Call Killings Genocide.”

3. After the hearings on Yovanovitch, the Los Angeles Times reported the executive director of the Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA), Aram Hamparian, stated, “We were troubled by Ambassador Yovanovitch’s refusal to offer any meaningful rationale for the Administration’s ongoing complicity in Turkey’s denials, other than her tacit admission that the United States has apparently allowed a foreign nation to impose a gag rule on America’s right to speak truthfully about the Armenian genocide.”

4. Because Armenian Americans were so upset with Yovanovitch’s testimony and because Senate Democrats on the Foreign Relations Committee, including Sen. Barack Obama, felt comfortable criticizing the Bush administration’s refusal to use the word “genocide” to describe the Medz Yeghern, Yovanovitch’s nomination was delayed while she was forced to respond in writing to a series of written questions from the senators. Her responses further disgusted Armenian Americans. “We remain troubled by Ambassador Yovanovitch’s evasive answers, her outright non-responses, and her refusal, in her replies to Senator Obama and other Senators, to offer anything approaching a reasonable or factually supportable explanation of the reasons behind Administration’s misguided policy on the Armenian Genocide,” Hamparian said. “This being said, it appears as though Ambassador Yovanovitch and her colleagues have learned from the disastrous Hoagland experience and are coming to understand that the U.S. Senate will not accept — and the Armenian American community will never allow — an Ambassador to Armenia who denies the Armenian Genocide.” read more