Oh Pauli, you won’t see him no more
by digby
When the president of the United States talks like a gangster, here’s how it looks to his targets. From former ambassador Marie Yovanovitch’s deposition:
Q: Also on page 4, at the top, President Trump said, “The former ambassador from the United States, the woman, was bad news and the people she was dealing with in the Ukraine were bad news, so I just want to let you know that.” Do you see that?
A: Yes.
Q: What was your reaction when you saw that?
A: Again, I hate to be repetitive, but I was shocked. I mean, I was very surprised that President Trump would—first of all, that I would feature repeatedly in a Presidential phone call, but secondly, that the President would speak about me or any ambassador in that way to a foreign counterpart.
Q: At the bottom of that same page, President Trump says, “Well, she’s going to go through some things.” What did you understand that to mean?
A: I didn’t know what it meant. I was very concerned. I still am.
Q: Did you feel threatened?
A: Yes.
He’s the most powerful thug in the world. I’d be scared too.
But consider that she’d already been treated as if there was a contract out on her:
Q: What did she say to you?
A: Well, in the first call, which happened at quarter of 10 in the evening Kyiv time,
she said that she was giving me a heads-up, that things were going wrong, kind of
off the—off the track, and she wanted to give me a heads-up. She didn’t know
what was happening, but there was a lot of nervousness on the seventh floor and
up the street.Q: What did she mean by “up the street”?
A: The White House.
…
A: She called me about an hour later, so it’s now 1 a.m. in the Ukraine.Q: And what did she say to you then?
A: She said that there was a lot of concern for me, that I needed to be on the next
plane home to Washington. And I was like, what? What happened? And she
said, I don’t know, but this is about your security. You need to come home
immediately. You need to come home on the next plane
Jesus.
These people are mobsters and all the Republicans are going to defend it as perfectly normal. If it is, the US State Department is a criminal organization.
.