Marie Yovanovitch says she was 'alarmed' that Rudy Giuliani managed to funnel bogus allegations against her to the FBI while trying to get her fired

• Marie Yovanovitch wrote that she was "alarmed" that Giuliani managed to funnel a packet of documents smearing her to the FBI.
• The contents of the packet, presented in a Trump Hotel folder, were "laughable" and came from "dubious sources," she wrote.

Former US ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch says in her new memoir that she wondered whether former President Donald Trump would pressure the FBI to investigate her as she prepared to testify in his first impeachment inquiry.

"The parallels with Ukraine, where patronage and politics often outweighed principle and patriotism, were uncomfortably close for comfort," she writes in "Lessons From The Edge."

Yovanovitch's concerns came after she learned that Trump allies and some government officials were circulating a packet of documents, presented in a Trump Hotel folder, full of bogus allegations against her and the Biden family.

The documents included poorly photocopied news articles from "dubious sources," Yovanovitch writes, which attempted to discredit her and the Bidens and bolster Rudy Giuliani's unsupported allegation that Yovanovitch was an Obama holdover and that the Bidens were corrupt.

"The packet was not just unprofessional, it looked like the sort of thing a slightly unhinged relative would throw together and harass the rest of the family with," she writes. "How could anyone take this seriously? I thought to myself."

Giuliani, who was Trump's personal lawyer at the time, reportedly delivered the packet to the White House in March 2019, weeks before Yovanovitch's ouster. The White House forwarded the materials to then Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who in turn forwarded the packet to the State Department inspector general, Steve Linick. Linick sent them to congressional staffers in October 2019 as the House of Representatives was in the middle of its impeachment inquiry.

The documents also made their way to the FBI. Yovanovitch writes that she was "alarmed" by this revelation," adding, "Now that the stakes were so much higher, with a possible impeachment on the horizon, I wondered whether presidential pressure could influence the FBI to investigate me."

"My lawyers reassured me that I had nothing to worry about on that front, but I couldn't fully put my fears to rest," she continues.

It appeared the recipients hadn't taken Giuliani's materials seriously. But Yovanovitch was "disappointed" that no one had publicly taken Giuliani to task or defended the government from his "corrupting influence."

When Linick forwarded the packet of documents to Congress, he attached emails from several State Department officials who criticized the contents as being part of a "fake narrative."

But Yovanovitch wasn't reassured.

Those "emails seemed like a fig leaf for a naked attempt to change the story from Trump's malfeasance back to Biden and me by reviving these discredited materials in the face of the impeachment inquiry," she writes. "Coming from the department's inspector general, it also was a sad illustration of what Giuliani and Trump had done to our government."

Yovanovitch, who was abruptly fired by Trump in April 2019 following Giuliani's concerted smear campaign against her, was one of more than a dozen witnesses who later testified in Trump's first impeachment inquiry over his efforts to withhold aid to Ukraine while pressuring Ukraine's president to investigate the Bidens.

During her hours-long public testimony, Yovanovitch recounted the how "shocked and devastated" she was when Trump excoriated her during a July 2019 phone call with Ukraine's newly inaugurated president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Referring to Yovanovitch as "the woman" in the call, Trump went on to say that she was "going to go through some things." Asked how she felt while reading a summary of the call, Yovanovitch said she felt threatened by Trump's words.

Trump also lobbed attacks at Yovanovitch on Twitter while she testified, denigrating her record as a foreign service officer and US ambassador. When lawmakers asked Yovanovitch to react to Trump's tweets mid-testimony, she said they were "very intimidating."

Trump was impeached on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress in late 2019 but later acquitted by the Republican-led Senate. He was impeached a second time on a charge of incitement of insurrection in January 2021 but acquitted by the Senate the following month, after he was out of office.