"Take her out": Chilling recording captures Trump threatening Ukraine Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch

One of the more disturbing aspects of Donald Trump’s plot to extort Ukraine for personal gain is the matter of former ambassador Marie Yovanovitch. According to Rudy Giuliani, the consensus was that they “needed Yovanovitch out of the way“ because she “was going to make the investigations difficult for everybody,” i.e., she wasn’t going to stand by and let the U.S. pressure Ukraine into announcing it was looking into nefarious activity by Joe Biden. Because Yovanovitch was, by all accounts, excellent at her job, booting her required Giuliani to launch a smear campaign against her, compiling a dossier of made-up offenses like that she’d bad-mouthed the president, which he turned over to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and which was later shared with the FBI. During his infamous July 25 phone call, Trump himself creepily told President Volodymyr Zelensky that Yovanovitch “was bad news” and that she was “going to go through some things”; as we learned earlier this month from the text messages of Giuliani associate Lev Parnas, certain individuals also appeared to be surveilling the then ambassador and, in the opinion of one former prosecutor, planning a “mob hit” against the public servant.