Article snippet: WASHINGTON — The State Department’s request went in early March to Marie Yovanovitch, a longtime diplomat who had served six presidents: Would she extend her term as ambassador to Ukraine, scheduled to end in August, into 2020? Less than two months later came another departmental communiqué: Get “on the next plane” to Washington. Her ambassadorship was over. How and why Yovanovitch was removed from her job has emerged as a major focus of the impeachment inquiry being conducted by House Democrats. And in nearly nine hours of testimony behind closed doors on Capitol Hill on Friday, Yovanovitch said she was told after her recall that President Trump had lost trust in her and had been seeking her ouster since summer 2018 — even though, one of her bosses told her, she had “done nothing wrong.” Her version of events added a new dimension to the tale of the campaign against her. It began with a business proposition being pursued in Ukraine by two Americans who, according to an indictment against them unsealed Thursday, wanted her gone, and who would later become partners with Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, in digging up political dirt in Ukraine for Trump. From there it became part of the effort by Giuliani to undercut the special counsel’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and push for damaging information about former Vice President Joe Biden, a possible Democratic challenger to Trump in 2020. In her prepared testimony to House inv... Link to the full article to read more