Marie Yovanovitch says she couldn't bring herself to release a statement pledging loyalty to Trump because she wanted to keep her 'integrity intact'

• A former US ambassador to Ukraine says she refused to issue a statement of loyalty to Donald Trump.
• At the time, she was on the verge of being fired following a smear campaign led by Rudy Giuliani.

Marie Yovanovitch, the former US ambassador to Ukraine, wrote in her new book that she couldn't bring herself to put out a statement pledging loyalty to President Donald Trump even as her job was on the line.

In "Lessons From the Edge," Yovanovitch detailed the internal turmoil she experienced as political forces in Trump's orbit orchestrated a smear campaign against her toward the end of her ambassadorship because she stood in the way of their efforts to dig up dirt on the Bidens ahead of the 2020 election.

As the allegations against her reached a boiling point, Yovanovitch wrote, another State Department official pushed for her to put out a statement pledging her undying loyalty to the president. But "when I tried the loyalty pledge on for size, I couldn't make it fit — not if I wanted to keep my integrity intact," she wrote.

Yovanovitch alleged that the smear campaign against her was carried out by three primary actors: former Mayor Rudy Giuliani of New York City, who was serving as Trump's personal attorney at the time; Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko, whose ouster Yovanovitch had pushed for; and the opinion columnist John Solomon, who published articles for The Hill.

Yovanovitch wrote that she did what she could to push back on Solomon's allegations against her — which suggested that she was corrupt and an Obama holdover — but they soon took on a life of their own. As a firestorm grew around her, with Trump himself tweeting out one of Solomon's articles, Yovanovitch spent hours "cycling between disbelief and despair" as she tried to get the State Department to more forcefully defend her, she wrote.

"A State Department spokesperson had denied the allegations when the articles first came out, but that wasn't cutting it as the slanders spread like wildfire," Yovanovitch wrote. She added that she conveyed to higher-ups that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo should intervene to express public support for her but that "it felt like I was on my own."

Yovanovitch wrote that she soon learned that David Hale, then the undersecretary of state for political affairs, wanted her to put out a statement "expressing loyalty to Trump." It came as a shock to Yovanovitch considering that just weeks earlier, Hale had asked her to extend her tour in Ukraine.

The book says Yovanovitch didn't think such a statement would do the trick. "Even worse, I thought such a statement was demeaning — and wrong," she wrote.

After internally debating the matter for several hours, the book says, Yovanovitch decided to tape the pledge to Trump and drove over to the US Embassy in Ukraine and met with the communications team. But she ultimately decided against it, saying that she couldn't go through with the pledge if she wanted to keep her "integrity intact."

Trump eventually fired Yovanovitch, an event that became one of the key data points in his late-2019 impeachment on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. At the center of the investigation were Trump's efforts to strong-arm the Ukrainian president into launching political investigations targeting the Bidens ahead of the 2020 election based on baseless allegations of corruption.

Yovanovitch was among more than a dozen witnesses who testified behind closed doors and in public about their knowledge of Trump's pressure campaign.

Her testimony focused on her work in Ukraine and how political forces — both in the US and Ukraine — led to her unceremonious ouster before the end of her term.

She also described feeling "shocked and devastated" upon learning the details of a July 2019 call between Trump and Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in which Trump pressured Zelenskyy to investigate the Bidens, called Yovanovitch "bad news," and said she was "going to go through some things."

While she testified, Trump lobbed attacks against Yovanovitch on Twitter in a move legal experts said amounted to witness intimidation.

When asked to respond to the attacks mid-testimony, Yovanovitch said they were "very intimidating."