Judicial Watch: Obama’s Ukraine Ambassador May Have Conducted Illegal Surveillance on Trump Associates

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Oct 14, 2019

The non-partisan organization, Judicial Watch is conducting an investigation into the behavior of ousted U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, who they believe quite possibly abused her authority to unlawfully spy on President Donald Trump’s associates while in her position.

Yovanovitch reportedly made a list of prominent individuals closely tied to Trump for monitoring on social media platforms and in other ways. The state department’s Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs received the request from the embassy staff in the Ukraine, who was later informed that the request was illegal.

“This is not an obscure rule, everyone in public diplomacy or public affairs knows they can’t make lists and monitor U.S. citizens unless there is a major national security reason,” a senior state department official claimed, according to Judicial Watch.

Yovanovitch is a long-tenured bureaucrat who served as the U.S. ambassador for Kyrgyzstan and Armenia before being appointed to her post by former President Barack Obama in 2016. She was removed from her position as Ambassador in May, but still lingers around the State Department in a different role.

Judicial Watch is issuing a public records request under the Freedom of Information Act to obtain “any and all records regarding, concerning, or related to the monitoring of any U.S.-based journalist, reporter, or media commentator by any employee or office of the Department of State between January 1, 2019 and the present.”

Yovanovitch testified to a joint House of Representatives subcommittee last week for over nine hours, where she made the contention that she lost her job due to her fight against corruption in the region. Some of her testimony was conveniently leaked to the press, as Democrats use the fake news media to build their narrative against the President.

“The harm will come when bad actors in countries beyond Ukraine see how easy it is to use fiction and innuendo to manipulate our system,” Yovanovitch said. “In such circumstances, the only interests that will be served are those of our strategic adversaries, like Russia, that spread chaos and attack the institutions and norms that the US helped create and which we have benefited from for the last 75 years.”

House Freedom Caucus member Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) pointed out the ridiculousness of the Democrat-led probe, which is taking place behind closed doors with the public having very limited knowledge of the nascent impeachment inquiry against the President.

“For goodness sake, now we’ve got almost 20 hours of testimony from two ambassadors, and the American people don’t know what happened in those closed-door sessions, other than what the majority has selectively cherry-picked and leaked out,” said Jordan, who serves as the leading Republican on the House Oversight and Reform Committee.

Judicial Watch hopes that their requests for information will shine some light on the proceedings, and perhaps expose another corrupt deep state actor working against the President in Yovanovitch.

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