Trump said his envoy to Ukraine "would go through some things". She has already done it.

WASHINGTON – President Trump's comments about Marie L. Yovanovitch, his former ambassador to Ukraine, were disturbing. In a telephone conversation that triggered a political crisis for Mr Trump, he told Volodymyr Zelensky, President of Ukraine, that she was "bad news".

"She will go through some things," he added.

In fact, she has already gone through a lot of things. In recent months, Yovanovitch, a 33-year veteran of the State Department, has been vilified by the right-wing media, denounced by the president's eldest son as a "joker," described by the president as a democratic stooge. . the president's personal attorney, then suddenly recalled Kiev in May, several months before the scheduled date.

Her so-called sin, never supported by any concrete evidence, was that she was disloyal to Mr. Trump, denigrating him behind his back. His friends, who say that his professionalism and diplomatic service history make this very unlikely, have another theory: it has turned into collateral damage through the efforts of Mr. Trump and his personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, aimed at damaging the reputation of the former vice president. President Joseph R. Biden Jr., perhaps the most important Democratic rival of Mr. Trump in 2020.

Among the strikes that seem to have been directed against her: a former Ukrainian prosecutor asserted in an interview with the New York Times that Ms. Yovanovitch had prevented her team from obtaining visas in the United States to communicate detrimental information about Mr. Biden and his son Hunter at the FBI

According to their former colleagues, Mr. Trump and his allies targeted Ms. Yovanovitch and pointed out how very suspicious they were of government professionals in their careers, leading the president to bypass the usual procedures and staff while entrusting certain aspects of foreign policy to Mr Giuliani. and others.

Although largely unknown to the outside world, Yovanovitch has become a sort of heroine for the State Department's career staff, as well as a cautionary tale for many American diplomats and national security officials. For them, it symbolizes an atmosphere in which dissenting opinions, even insistent on established procedures, can mark them as strangers, excluded from meetings, excluded from decision-making processes and finally publicly dismissed as enemies of the administration. .

At a news briefing in New York on Thursday, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declined to answer questions raised by reporters about why Ms. Yovanovitch had been recalled to Washington.

The American Academy of Diplomacy responded by demanding that the state department protect Yovanovich from retaliation, calling the "threatening tone" of Trump's remarks about him "very troubling." The American Foreign Service Association, which represents state department employees, urged that the US diplomatic corps "not be dragged into partisan political battles".

A graduate in residence at Georgetown University, Ms. Yovanovitch has not responded to interview requests.

Although the abrupt end of his post as ambassador was widely perceived as a punishment, a former colleague said that he was perhaps motivated by a real concern for her and that officials from the department of The state had decided that it was safer to take her home.

Nevertheless, the level of suspicion and paranoia in foreign policy and national security agencies, already high since Trump's arrival, has only increased since Ms. Yovanovitch's saga.

"It's more than crazy: it's ugly, it's threatening," said Daniel Fried, a former Ambassador and State Department official for 40 years, who has long dealt with Russian and Ukrainian issues and who is removed at the beginning of the Trump administration. "Masha Yovanovich is known as a straight, disciplined, professional arrow."

"If you eliminate Masha Yovanovich, you send the message to each ambassador that we will not support you," he said.

Ms. Yovanovitch was born in Canada, moved to Connecticut at the age of 3 and became a naturalized American citizen at age 18. During a testimony before Congress, she stated that her father had fled the Soviet Union and then the Nazis. his mother grew up "stateless" in Germany. She said that this context gave her a special empathy for those who had endured poverty, war and displacement.

She grew up in Russian, graduated from Princeton and joined the state department six years later. His specialty was Eurasia.

President George W. Bush has appointed his ambassador to Kyrgyzstan and Armenia. In 2016, President Barack Obama appointed his ambassador to Ukraine. It strongly condemned corruption in the Ukrainian government and advocated various reforms, including the lifting of immunity enjoyed by lawmakers accused of crimes.

John E. Herbst, a former ambassador to Ukraine, described him as a highly skilled and meticulous diplomat, who would never share his personal political views with foreign officials – nor even with his diplomatic colleagues. She took care not to overstep her authority, he said.

"Masha is someone who is always very attentive to propriety and instructions, and by nature, careful," he said. "She is uniformly held in high esteem."

The campaign against it by Trump's allies began more than a year ago, with a letter from Pete Sessions, a Republican MP from Texas at the time, who had lost his bid for reelection in November. He wrote to Mr. Pompeo that Ms. Yovanovitch should be fired for repeatedly expressing "disdain" for the current government.

Then, this spring, Joseph E. DiGenova, a former federal prosecutor and Trump's ally, told Fox News that the ambassador had denigrated Trump to the Ukrainian authorities, telling them "not to listen to or obey him. his policy because he was going to be indicted. "

Two days later, Donald Trump Jr. posted a link on social media to a conservative website that described her as an anti-Trump Obama loyalist. Mr. Trump was trying to fire him for a year. He added that his father's administration should have "less of these jokes as ambassadors".

At about the same time, Lev Parnas, an American of Ukrainian descent who worked with Mr. Giuliani, told members of Republican circles in Washington tape recordings of conversations in which Ms. Yovanovitch allegedly despised the president, according to his interlocutors. . The existence of these records has not been proven.

His problems increased as Mr. Giuliani put pressure on the Ukrainian government to open an investigation into whether Mr. Biden, as vice-president, had expelled a senior prosecutor in order to end to an investigation that could have involved Mr. Biden's son. Hunter.

There was no evidence that Mr. Biden was actually trying to protect his son; In fact, many Western leaders regarded Ukraine's highest prosecutor as corrupt and pressured the Ukrainian leader to be fired.

But a former Ukrainian prosecutor, Kostiantyn H. Kulyk, told the New York Times during an interview in April that Ms. Yovanovitch had thwarted her efforts to meet with the F.B.I. to provide him with damaging information about the Bidens by refusing him a visa.