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.

But just in case that wasn’t enough evidence that Trump abused the power of the presidency, we now have a recording that appears to feature the president telling his Ukraine henchmen to get rid of Yovanovitch, per ABC News:

“Get rid of her!” is what the voice that appears to be President Trump’s is heard saying. “Get her out tomorrow. I don’t care. Get her out tomorrow. Take her out. Okay? Do it.” On the recording it appears the two Giuliani associates [Parnas and Igor Fruman] are telling President Trump that the U.S. ambassador has been bad-mouthing him, which leads directly to the apparent remarks by the president. The recording was made by Fruman, according to sources familiar with the tape. “Every president in our history has had the right to place people who support his agenda and his policies within his administration,” White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham said.

During the conversation several of the participants can be heard laughing with the president. At another point the recording appears to capture Trump praising his new choice of secretary of state, saying emphatically: “Pompeo is the best.” But the most striking moment comes when Parnas and the president discuss the dismissal of his ambassador to Ukraine. Parnas appears to say: “The biggest problem there, I think where we need to start is we gotta get rid of the ambassador. She’s still left over from the Clinton administration,” Parnas can be heard telling Trump. “She’s basically walking around telling everybody, ‘Wait, he’s gonna get impeached, just wait.’” (Yovanovitch actually had served in the State Department since the Reagan administration.) It was not until a year later that Yovanovitch was recalled from her position—in April 2019. She said the decision was based on “unfounded and false claims by people with clearly questionable motives” that she was disloyal to Trump.

Sources familiar with the recording told ABC News that it was made during a dinner at the Trump International Hotel in Washington on April 30, 2018. While the identities of the other participants are unclear, in an earlier portion of the recording where video is seen, Donald Trump Jr. appears to be posing for pictures as part of a larger super PAC gathering that took place the night of the more intimate dinner. During her congressional testimony last year, Yovanovitch told House lawmakers that she received a call from the State Department telling her “there were concerns about my security.”

Trump, as is his wont, has claimed that he doesn’t know Parnas at all despite reams of evidence to the contrary. Parnas, who has pleaded not guilty to making illegal campaign donations, told Rachel Maddow earlier this month that Trump “knew exactly what was going on” in Ukraine and “was aware of all my movements.” When Parnas’s records were given to House investigators, Joseph A. Bondy, Parnas’s attorney, tweeted that the information was shared with the Intelligence Committee “despite every stumbling block placed in our path.”

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— New evidence suggests disturbing scheme by Trump’s Ukraine goons against Marie Yovanovitch
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