Marie Yovanovitch testimony offers no impeachment evidence

Friday’s impeachment show again focused on making President Trump look bad — not on providing evidence of any impeachable offense.

Marie Yovanovitch was already the former US ambassador to Ukraine when Democrats claim Trump’s “bribery” occurred. All she could testify to was the way she was fired — which the president had every right to do, no explanation needed.

She made an excellent case that she was the victim of a smear campaign. Trump may well have been wrong to trust Rudy Giuliani on Yovanovitch’s employment, and on other Ukraine issues. But the president also had ample reason to distrust the US foreign-policy and national-security establishments — which have been hostile to him from the day he rode down the escalator.

No major foreign-policy figures joined his 2016 campaign. His top national-security expert, Gen. Mike Flynn, was sidelined soon after Inauguration Day by what Trump now likely sees as intentional FBI entrapment. His “nonpartisan” National Security Council staff was leaking like a sieve to the anti-Trump press from Day One.

And Trump also had good reason for suspicion about Ukraine’s leaders: Among other pro-Clinton interventions in the 2016 race, its officials dropped the evidence that forced out his campaign manager, Paul Manafort. If the Obama administration encouraged the Ukrainians to share that info, why shouldn’t the Trump administration encourage Kiev to apply the same standard to the Bidens?

Of course, Yovanovitch couldn’t testify about any of that, since she wasn’t in Ukraine when Democrats say Trump mounted his pressure campaign.

Similarly, she suspects Hunter Biden’s role there was improper, but she never looked into it: Her Obama-era superiors told her to plead ignorance if Hunter came up at her confirmation hearings.

That was probably the biggest piece of news from Friday’s hearing — which is par for the course for an “inquiry” that keeps failing to deliver meaningful evidence.

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