Former Top State Dept. Aide Tells Impeachment Investigators He Quit Over Ukraine
Michael McKinley, who resigned as a senior adviser to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, testified that he quit because career diplomats had been sidelined on Ukraine.
By Michael D. Shear and Nicholas Fandos
Oct. 16, 2019
Updated 2:44 p.m. ET
A former top aide to Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state, told impeachment investigators on Wednesday that he resigned because he was upset that the Trump administration had wrestled Ukraine policy away from career diplomats, according to three people familiar with his closed-door deposition to the House Intelligence Committee.
In several hours of continuing testimony, Michael McKinley, who until last week was a senior adviser to Mr. Pompeo, described his mounting frustration with how politicized the State Department had become under President Trump, saying that the last straw for him was the ouster of Marie L. Yovanovitch, the former ambassador to Ukraine whom Mr. Trump ordered removed.
Mr. McKinley’s testimony was the latest in a string of accounts given by top career diplomats and administration officials to impeachment investigators about how experts were sidelined as the president pursued his own agenda on Ukraine, including in a July telephone call when Mr. Trump asked President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and other Democrats.
Taken together, the interviews have corroborated many aspects of the intelligence whistle-blower complaint that prompted the impeachment inquiry, which alleged that Mr. Trump abused his power to enlist a foreign government for his own political gain.
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