President Trump renewed his attack on former US Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch on Friday, accusing her of refusing to hang his official portrait in the US Embassy in Kiev for at least a year.
“This ambassador that everybody says was so wonderful, she wouldn’t hang my picture in the embassy,” Trump told “Fox & Friends” in a wide-ranging interview.
“She is in charge of the embassy. She wouldn’t hang it. It took like a year and a half, two years to get the picture up,” he added.
But a member of Yovanovitch’s legal team denied the president’s claim, telling CBS News that the embassy hung photos of Trump, Vice President Mike Pence and the secretary of state “as soon as they arrived from Washington, DC.”
Trump’s claim that Yovanovitch refused to hang his official portrait echoes similar complaints early in his tenure when the portrait was reportedly missing from thousands of government offices — until the White House released them nine months after he was sworn in.
Trump removed Yovanovitch in May, and called her “bad news” in his July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, in which he asked him to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter, sparking the impeachment proceedings.
Yovanovitch, a 33-year veteran diplomat appointed by President Barack Obama in 2016, described a smear campaign led by Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and “foreign corrupt interests in Ukraine.”
During her testimony before the House Intelligence Committee, Trump tweeted insults at the former ambassador, alleging that “everywhere Marie Yovanovitch went turned bad.”
“I have the right to change the ambassador,” Trump said Friday. “This was not a baby that we’re dealing with.”