'Never heard' of tracking of envoy, Pompeo says

“We will do everything we need to do” to evaluate what happened, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Friday. More photos at arkansasonline.com/118pompeo/.
(AP/Michael A. McCoy)
“We will do everything we need to do” to evaluate what happened, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Friday. More photos at arkansasonline.com/118pompeo/. (AP/Michael A. McCoy)

WASHINGTON -- Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Friday that he "never heard" that his top envoy to Ukraine, Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, might have been under surveillance before she was recalled to Washington.

"Until this story broke, I had, to the best of my recollection, had never heard of this at all," Pompeo told Hugh Hewitt, a conservative radio show host.

He did not offer any other details during the 11-minute interview with Hewitt except to say that he had "never met" Lev Parnas, an associate of Rudy Giuliani, President Donald Trump's personal lawyer. In text messages released this week by House Democrats, Parnas is shown to have been in communication last March with a Trump supporter and Republican congressional candidate, Robert Hyde, an ex-landscaper who claimed to have been in touch with someone in Kyiv who was conducting surveillance on Yovanovitch.

Pompeo, who was traveling in California when the documents were released, had been harshly criticized by lawmakers and current and former diplomats for not addressing the matter. The documents provided by Parnas suggested there may have been a threat to Yovanovitch shortly before she was abruptly recalled last spring.

[Gallery not loading above? Click here for more photos » arkansasonline.com/118pompeo/]

"We will do everything we need to do to evaluate whether there was something that took place there," he said in a separate radio interview with Tony Katz, an Indianapolis broadcaster. "I suspect that much of what's been reported will ultimately prove wrong, but our obligation, my obligation as secretary of state, is to make sure that we evaluate, investigate. Any time there is someone who posits that there may have been a risk to one of our officers, we'll obviously do that."

"It is always the case at the Department of State that we do everything we can to ensure that our officers, not only our ambassadors but our entire team, has the security level that's appropriate," Pompeo said.

"We do our best to make sure that no harm will come to anyone, whether that was what was going on in our embassy in Baghdad last week or the work that was going on in Kyiv up and through the spring of last year when Ambassador Yovanovitch was there, and in our embassy in Kyiv even today," he said.

The allegations, if true, are central to the impeachment inquiry into Trump, who faces a charge that he abused his presidential power by pressuring Ukraine to investigate Democratic rival Joe Biden, using military aid to the country as leverage. Trump says the inquiry is a "hoax."

At the time, Trump's allies were trying to have Yovanovitch, who was seen as a roadblock to a Biden investigation, removed from her post.

She was recalled in late May ahead of the end of her tour.

Yovanovitch returned to Washington after being told in a late-night phone call to get on the next plane home for her own safety by the director general of the Foreign Service, according to witness testimony in the impeachment inquiry.

The nature of any possible threat was not specified and remains unclear, although the Parnas documents suggest the surveillance was a prelude to some kind of action.

The newly released documents, which surfaced just as the Senate opened the impeachment trial against Trump, have prompted Ukraine to open its own investigation into whether its laws and international treaties that protect the right of diplomats had been violated.

Ukraine "cannot ignore such illegal activities" on its territory, the country's Internal Affairs Ministry said Thursday.

In the text messages with Parnas, Hyde suggested he was in touch with someone who was closely monitoring Yovanovitch. In one message he reported that she was "under heavy protection" outside Kyiv and went on to say that his "guy" there thought the security might be provided by the FSB, the Russian federal security agency.

Several days later he told Parnas that the "guys" in Ukraine were "willing to help" for a price. "Guess you can do anything in the Ukraine with money," he told Parnas.

No evidence has surfaced publicly that Hyde had contacts in Ukraine. Hyde has said he was "playing with" Parnas when he sent the messages, and Parnas has dismissed Hyde as someone who was regularly drunk. A lawyer for Parnas, Joseph Bondy, said that the text messages indicated that his client did not take part in any possible surveillance.

But Yovanovitch's lawyer, Lawrence Robbins, has described the new evidence as "disturbing" and said that he expected "appropriate authorities" to investigate.

U.S. diplomats for months have seethed over Pompeo's lack of outward support for -- or defense of -- Yovanovitch, a highly respected foreign service officer who had served as something of a mentor for other women in the State Department.

In the interview with Katz, Pompeo repeated that he had never met Parnas and said, "I've never encountered, never communicated with him." And he described the impeachment to Hewitt as "this noise here in Washington."

Information for this article was contributed by Lara Jakes of The New York Times and by Matthew Lee of The Associated Press.

A Section on 01/18/2020

Upcoming Events