By Rosalind S. Helderman and Tom Hamburger

In February, the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine — a 33-year career diplomat who had served presidents of both parties — received a blunt warning.

“Watch your back,” Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch said she was told by Ukraine’s interior minister.

The Ukrainian official relayed that a pair of Florida businessmen and a Kyiv prosecutor with whom Yovanovitch had clashed were working to oust her from the post she had held since 2016, she later told House investigators.

The trio had a powerful ally, he added: President Trump’s personal attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani.

“I thought it was exceedingly strange,” Yovanovitch said, according to a transcript of her closed-door testimony last month.

The impeachment inquiry has pulled back the curtain on a long and murky effort to engineer the ambassador’s removal — one driven by an array of figures whose motives are still not fully understood. They include a former U.S. congressman-turned-lobbyist, a then-sitting member of Congress and the two Giuliani associates, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, who have since been charged with campaign finance crimes.

Shane Harris on Post Reports: “There was a sense going in that Yovanovitch was going to be the Democrats’ witness to play the victim. And while she did that, she also went to great lengths to broaden out why this was a problem.”

Yovanovitch’s public testimony Friday is expected to showcase how what appears to have begun as the personal crusade of private individuals became intertwined with efforts to use Ukraine to benefit Trump politically.

The attacks on the ambassador — and the fact that the president capitulated to the smear effort against her — led to widespread alarm among national security officials, several told Congress in recent weeks.

Marie Yovanovitch arrives for testimony in public impeachment hearing

 “She’d been subject to a pretty ruthless, nasty defamation to basically remove her from her place,” former National Security Council adviser Fiona Hill testified in her closed-door deposition last month.

“The most obvious explanation,” Hill testified, “seemed to be business dealings of individuals who wanted to improve their investment positions inside of Ukraine” as well as an effort “to deflect away from” findings that Russia had interfered in the 2016 presidential election.

Yovanovitch has said she knows little about the pressure the administration put on Ukraine to investigate Trump’s political opponents, much of which occurred after her departure from Kyiv, but her appearance Friday offers the possibility of a compelling emotional moment in the Democrats’ impeachment hearings.

The little-known diplomat has described how she was taken aback when conservative media began to advocate her removal in March and to spread her name on social media, where the president’s son Donald Trump Jr. called her “a joker.”

And she has said she was shocked and frightened when she read a rough transcript of Trump’s call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, released in September, in which the U.S. president called her “bad news” and predicted she would “go through some things.”

‘The best of the best’

Born in Canada to parents who had fled the Soviet Union, Yovanovitch joined the Foreign Service after graduate school in 1986. Since then, she has served in seven countries, across the administrations of six American presidents, including as ambassador to Kyrgyzstan and Armenia.

In May 2016, she was named ambassador to Ukraine by President Barack Obama and, this spring, the Trump administration asked her to extend her service there into 2020.

In testimony, colleagues vouched for Yovanovitch’s professionalism and expertise.

“The best of the best, in terms of a nonpartisan career official,” Hill testified, noting that it is rare for women to reach the upper ranks of the diplomatic corps. “I just see her as epitomizing what United States diplomacy should be.”

Top State Department official George Kent added that Yovanovitch was “someone who follows very what is deemed proper and proprietary.”

In her post, Yovanovitch worked to advance U.S. interests by countering Russian aggression and backing new legal structures intended to root out long-standing corruption in Ukraine’s economy, she and others testified.

The mission earned her enemies, Kent told the House this week.

“You can’t promote principled anti-corruption action without pissing off corrupt people,” he said.

George Kent, top State Department Ukraine expert, helps Democrats debunk GOP theories

The first signs that forces were agitating to push her out came in 2017 or 2018.

It was then that veteran Foreign Service officer Catherine Croft received “multiple calls” from a prominent Republican lobbyist, former Louisiana congressman Bob Livingston, urging Yovanovitch’s firing, she told lawmakers.

At the time, Croft was detailed to the National Security Council and reported the curious calls to her superiors.

“He characterized Ambassador Yovanovitch as an ‘Obama holdover’ and associated with George Soros,” the wealthy liberal donor, Croft said in a written statement provided to the committee. “It was not clear to me at the time — or now — at whose direction or at whose expense Mr. Livingston was seeking the removal of Ambassador Yovanovitch.”

Livingston did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Justice Department records show Livingston is registered as a lobbyist representing companies and organizations connected to Yulia Tymoshenko, a Ukrainian politician with energy investments, who has sought to regain political power in Ukraine since she lost her job as prime minister in 2010.

Jim Slattery, a Washington lawyer who represented Tymo­shenko in the past, rejected the idea that his friend and former client would have sought the removal of Yovanovitch.

“I have no knowledge of her directing anyone to seek the removal of the ambassador and I am confident that, if she had, I would know,” he said, adding that Yovanovitch is “a competent and dedicated” diplomat who has commanded “enormous respect” across party lines.

Yovanovitch was also a topic of discussion at a small dinner for top Trump donors in a private suite of the Trump hotel in Washington attended by the president and Donald Trump Jr. on April 30, 2018.

At donor dinner, Giuliani associate said he discussed Ukraine with Trump, according to people familiar with his account

In attendance were Parnas and Fruman, who had pledged a major donation to a pro-Trump super PAC. Last month, the two men were arrested at Dulles International Airport and charged with illegally funneling foreign money into U.S. campaign contribution. .They have pleaded not guilty.

According to federal prosecutors, Parnas and Fruman had also embarked on an effort to oust Yovanovitch at the request of an unidentified Ukrainian government official.

An attorney for Parnas, Joseph A. Bondy, has denied that claim and has said Parnas was not motivated by personal business interests. A lawyer for Fruman, Matt Blanche, declined to comment.

During the 2018 dinner, Parnas has told associates, he and Fruman told Trump that Yovanovitch was unfriendly to the president’s interests, people familiar with his account have said. Parnas claimed that Trump had an immediate and visceral reaction: He declared Yovanovitch should be fired.

Ten days later, Parnas was on Capitol Hill, meeting with then-Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Tex.), according to photos he posted online. That same day, Sessions penned a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo complaining that Yovanovitch was biased against Trump, according to the indictment of Parnas and Fruman.

Sessions has said he did not “take any official action” as a result of his meeting with Parnas and sent the letter because he had come to believe Yovanovitch was bad-mouthing Trump abroad.

The letter played a significant role in spreading dissent about Yovanovitch in Washington. Giuliani has told The Post that it was Sessions who helped inspire Trump’s distrust for her.

Giuliani has said he was introduced to Parnas and Fruman by a mutual friend in the summer of 2018, and eventually collected $500,000 to advise a company Parnas started called Fraud Guarantee.

By early this year, Parnas and Fruman were also working with Giuliani on his efforts to dig up dirt on Democrats in Ukraine. They helped connect him to former Ukrainian officials who claimed their country had interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and that an investigation into former vice president Joe Biden’s son Hunter had been quashed.

Determined adversaries

In so doing, the two men linked Giuliani up with some of Yovanovitch’s most determined Ukrainian adversaries.

One was Yuri Lutsenko, who had been appointed prosecutor-general in 2016. Yovanovitch testified that she had at first hoped Lutsenko would clean up the prosecutor’s office, but that he failed to do so.

By 2018, he was openly complaining about the ambassador and clashing with an independent anti-corruption bureau, known as NABU, which was set up in the aftermath of a 2014 pro-Europe uprising and that was supported by the United States and other Western allies.

Giuliani met with Lutsenko in New York in January to discuss the possibility that Ukraine would open a new investigation into the 2016 election or Burisma, an energy company whose board of directors included Hunter Biden, The Post previously reported.

Notes from Lutsenko’s meeting with Giuliani that were turned over the State Department’s inspector general and submitted to lawmakers show that Lutsenko also discussed Yovanovitch with Giuliani, accusing her of spending “money on good public relations for NABU.”

In gambit for Trump, Giuliani engaged parade of Ukrainian prosecutors

Giuliani’s displeasure with Yovanovitch appears to have mounted when State Department officials declined to issue a visa to another Ukrainian, a former prosecutor named Viktor Shokin, who wanted to travel to the United States to meet with him.

As vice president, Biden had pushed for the firing of Shokin, who U.S. and European officials believed was not sufficiently aggressive in pursuing corruption cases. Shokin has claimed that he was fired because his office was investigating Burisma and Biden’s son — a probe that anti-corruption activists and former officials said was actually dormant at the time.

The decision to deny Shokin a visa was made at the recommendation of career consular staff, Yovanovitch testified. Angered, Giuliani appealed the decision to the White House and senior State Department officials, she said.

Consular officials, she said, “held firm.” Shokin was forced to meet with Giuliani via Skype, rather than in person. In their conversation, Shokin claimed that Yovanovitch was “close to Biden,” Giuliani’s notes show.

Before his arrest, Parnas told The Post in September that Giuliani was upset by the episode and suggested that it contributed to Yovanovitch’s ouster. “That’s why I think the ambassador’s not there,” Parnas said.

By March, Parnas and Fruman were telling associates that Yovanovitch would soon be removed from her post, according to people who encountered them.

At an energy conference in Houston, they explained to a top official at Ukraine’s state-owned gas company that Yovanovitch stood in the way of their plans to broker gas deals in Kyiv, according to an American energy executive, Dale Perry, who spoke to the gas company executive soon afterward.

The agitation against Yovanovitch became public that same month, when conservative columnist John Solomon interviewed Lutsenko for the Hill. In the interview, Lutsenko alleged that Yovanovitch had given him a list of people he could not prosecute.

The State Department issued a statement calling the allegation an “outright fabrication.” and Lutsenko quickly recanted. Last month, he told the New York Times that his interview had been mistranslated.

Soon after The Hill column was published, Trump Jr. fanned the flames, retweeting another article calling for her removal and writing we need “less of these jokers as ambassadors.”

An abrupt ouster

In late April, Yovanovitch testified she received a call to leave Kyiv “on the next plane” to meet with top State Department officials. The department’s No. 2 official at the time, John J. Sullivan, who has since been nominated to be the U.S. ambassador to Moscow, told her she was being recalled from her job in Kyiv because the president had lost trust in her.

“Although I understand that I served at the pleasure of the president, I was nevertheless incredulous that the U.S. government chose to remove an ambassador based, as best as I can tell, on unfounded and false claims by people with clearly questionable motives,” she told the House panel last month.

Veteran diplomat Michael McKinley, a top aide to Pompeo, testified that after the rough transcript of Trump’s call with Zelensky was released in September, he urged the secretary of state to issue a public statement in support of the ambassador.

When Pompeo didn’t respond, McKinley said he emailed other senior officials proposing a “strong and immediate statement of support for Ambassador Yovanovitch’s professionalism and courage.”

A few hours later, one of the recipients of McKinley’s email, a State Department spokesman, called to say that Pompeo had rejected the idea, citing a desire to protect Yovanovitch from “undue attention,” he testified.

McKinley resigned 12 days later. He told lawmakers he had no choice.

“Since I began my career in 1982, I have served my country and every president loyally,” he said. “Under current circumstances, however, I could no longer look the other way as colleagues are denied the professional support and respect they deserve.”

Alice Crites contributed to this report.

Source: Washington Post

By Jeffrey Mervis

The top Democrat in the U.S. Senate wants the government to create a new agency that would invest an additional $100 billion over 5 years on basic research in artificial intelligence (AI). Senator Charles Schumer (D–NY) says the initiative would enable the United States to keep pace with China and Russia in a critical research arena and plug gaps in what U.S. companies are unwilling to finance.

The proposal, which Schumer outlined publicly for the first time last week in a speech to senior national security and research policymakers gathered in Washington, D.C., reflects the growing interest in AI and related fields, including a recent presidential executive order. And being the minority leader gives Schumer the chance to turn his ideas into concrete action.

Schumer wants to create a new national science tech fund that would pour $100 billion into “fundamental research related to AI and some other cutting-edge areas.” His list includes quantum computing, 5G networks, robotics, cybersecurity, and biotechnology. The money would fuel research at U.S. universities, companies, and other federal agencies, he explained, as well as paying for “testbed facilities” to carry out work needed to transform discoveries into potential commercial products.

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The plan has been circulating in private for several months among tech industry executives and a handful of academic leaders, but it is far from complete. “This is just a discussion draft,” Schumer acknowledged.

Although planners have yet to settle on a proposed structure for the effort, Schumer suggested the new fund would be “a subsidiary” of the National Science Foundation (NSF) with links to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) within the Department of Defense (DOD). The fund would have its own board of directors.

Schumer delivered his remarks at a symposium sponsored by the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, a bipartisan body created last year by Congress. The choice of venue suggests the Senate minority leader hopes to move forward on legislation, despite a Congress currently both preoccupied and sharply divided over the pending impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump.

“This should not be a partisan issue. This is about the future of America,” Schumer asserted, saying the country’s security and economic prosperity depend on making such a major investment. And he asked the politically well-connected audience to help him sell the proposal.

“This idea has support from some people very close to the president and very close to [Senate Majority Leader] Mitch McConnell [R],” Schumer declared. “But thus far they have been unable to get their [principals’] full-throated support. Anyone here who has any relationship with those people or people near them should be pushing this.”

Jason Matheny, a member of the commission that hosted Schumer, doesn’t have that kind of political clout. But under former President Barack Obama, he led a DARPA-like research agency that serves the U.S. intelligence community, and he is now founding director of the Center for Security and Emerging Technology at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. Although Matheny is withholding judgment on the specifics of Schumer’s plan until more details emerge, he thinks the idea has merit.

“Federal funding on R&D as a percentage of GDP [gross domestic product] is at a 60-year low and needs to be increased across all disciplines,” he notes. And although Schumer’s list of potential funding targets “sounds very much like the standard list of emerging technologies” that have drawn interest in Washington, D.C., Matheny says the lawmaker “may see AI as an enabling technology to accelerate work being done in all of these areas.”

Schumer’s comments suggest he also wants to plow money into elements—such as improving AI security and safety provisions, setting international standards, and creating metrics—that are essential for advancing the field but unlikely to benefit a particular company and thus, attract corporate support. Sources familiar with the proposal say the plan is fueled by Schumer’s long-standing concerns about China’s increased technological prowess, including its avowed goal of becoming a world leader in AI by 2025. The $100 billion figure, they speculate, is designed to make the point that business as usual isn’t enough to keep the United States ahead of the rest of the world in AI.

“The feeling is that we have to be willing to go very big,” says one veteran science lobbyist who requested anonymity. Schumer’s proposal also highlights his conviction that a new funding mechanism—the proposed tech fund—is needed to deal with the emerging challenges facing the country, adds a congressional staffer who follows the issue. And there is a precedent for that kind of thinking: In the late 1950s, U.S. officials created both DARPA and NASA in response to the Soviet Union launching its Sputnik satellite.

It’s not that federal agencies have been ignoring AI. Last month, the Department of Energy said it plans to ask Congress for $3 billion to $4 billion over the next decade for AI research that would enhance a similarly sized investment already underway in exascale supercomputing. NSF officials estimate the agency has been spending roughly that amount each year for the past decade on research to improve AI algorithms and software.

In February, Trump also issued an executive order telling NSF, DOD, and several other federal agencies to funnel more of their current investment in high-performance computing into “AI-related applications.” The order also requires federal agencies to develop an “action plan to protect the U.S. advantage in AI technology.” But it doesn’t call for any new spending.

Schumer’s office declined to provide additional information beyond a transcript of his remarks. But a spokesperson promised that “we’ll have additional information to provide in the coming weeks.”

Source: Science Mag

By Nicholas Riccardi and Hannah Fingerhut | Associated Press

WASHINGTON — In a sharply divided country, here’s something many Americans agree on: It’s hard to know what’s a true and honest fact.

A new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and USAFacts finds that regardless of political belief, many Americans say they have a hard time figuring out if information is true. Nearly two-thirds of Americans say they often come across one-sided information and about 6 in 10 say they regularly see conflicting reports about the same set of facts from different sources.

“It is difficult to get facts. You have to read between the lines. You have to have a lot of common sense,” said Leah Williams, 29, of Modesto, California. A Republican, Williams says she relies on like-minded friends and family to help sort through conflicting information. “There are wolves in sheep’s clothing everywhere.”

The poll found that 47% of Americans believe it’s difficult to know if the information they encounter is true, compared with 31% who find it easy to do so. When deciding whether something is factual, there is widespread consensus on the importance of transparency in how the information was gathered and if it is based on data. While Democrats and Republicans alike frequently find the process challenging, USAFacts founder Steve Ballmer said he’s still optimistic about the poll’s findings.

“Americans want to know the facts,” said Ballmer, the former chief executive at Microsoft. “Facts (are) a driver of decision making, of common discussion and common dialog.”

But as a president with a history of making false statements and repeating debunked conspiracy theories faces public hearings this week in only the fourth impeachment inquiry in the nation’s history, the poll finds that differing political beliefs led Americans down different paths as they try to determine what’s an unquestionable fact.

Democrats are more likely to say they rely on scientists and academics, while Republicans are more likely to trust what they hear from President Donald Trump.

“When I hear him on Fox News — that’s where I get all my information,” said Al Corra, a 48-year-old Republican from Midland, Texas. Trump, he said, is the easiest way to cut through an otherwise confusing information environment.

Republicans are more likely than Democrats to put a great deal of trust in the president’s statements, 40% to 5%. Overall, a majority of Americans (61%) have little to no trust in information about the government when it comes from Trump.

Corra said he distrusts academics as too “liberal” and he’s not alone in that regard among Republicans. More Democrats than Republicans say they consider something to be factual if it’s been verified by scientists — 72% versus 40% — as well as academics — 57% versus 30%.

Scott Austin, a Democrat from Aurora, Colorado, says he generally trusts scientists, but checks their affiliations carefully because he believes fraudulent information abounds. “If I see something that some scientist from Stanford says, I’ll believe that because it’s Stanford,” he said.

Austin, a 52-year-old Army veteran, says he has to ping-pong from website to website to try to verify facts and has found himself increasingly skeptical of government information. Like 54% of Americans, he believes the president has a lot of sway over the information distributed by the government, and that’s made him increasingly skeptical given his lack of trust in what Trump says to be true.

“I never had a problem trusting the government under Democratic or Republican administrations — until this administration,” Austin said.

Close to half of Americans — 45% — also think members of Congress have a lot of influence on information that comes from the government, while just 3 in 10 say the same of federal agency employees.

Ballmer said it’s actually those federal employees who should be trusted most to deliver facts in which the country can be confident.

“These people don’t change with administrations,” he said. “They publish the data as they collect it. I might add that computer systems are nonpartisan. They rake in data and they put it out. And that’s what’s happening at these government agencies.”

When it comes to assessing whether information is factual, at least three-quarters of Americans think it’s very important for it to be accurate, and that sources provide all relevant information and explain the way that information was gathered. Smaller majorities say the information should include opposing viewpoints and be devoid of opinion.

About 6 in 10 say they are very likely to consider information factual if it is based on data.

Many Americans say they rely on government websites, as well as news sources and social media, to get information. In total, 54% say they get information about the government from social media at least once a day, 52% say that about local TV news, 50% from national TV news networks and 47% from cable news. About 6 in 10 also say they have used government websites to look up information.Lynn Joseph, a retired artist in Las Vegas, tries to ferret information out on the internet, but is skeptical of just about all sources nowadays. “Do I trust anybody? No,” she said. “My philosophy is everybody’s guilty until proven innocent.”

Joseph, a Republican, is among the modest group of Trump supporters who don’t trust the accuracy of his statements. Overall, about a third of those who approve of the president say they trust information they get from him about the government only a moderate amount, and roughly another quarter say they have little to no trust.

“I’m a Trump supporter, but I know about him,” she said. “He speaks before he should.”

Riccardi reported from Denver, Colorado.

Source: Mercury News