In his continued effort to distract from the impeachment testimony and to discredit those testifying, the president said that he had to fire former ambassador to the Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, because she refused to hang his portrait in the US Embassy. But given the mindset and memory of the president, we can all call bullshit here, and of course here’s the real story:
“She wouldn’t hang my picture in the embassy,” Trump said. “She is in charge of the embassy. She wouldn’t hang it. It took like a year and a half or two years to get the picture up.
But it appears the White House may be to blame for the delay in getting Trump’s picture hung inside the embassy in Kyiv.
In September 2017, eight months after Trump took office, the Washington Post reported that federal agencies were still waiting for the official photographs of the commander in chief from the Government Publishing Office, the printer of official portraits. The office said it was waiting for the official photo files to be supplied by the White House, which said it was “still in the process of creating the official portrait.”
“Once it’s been produced, the White House photo office will distribute it to all of the agencies and other requests,” White House spokeswoman Lindsay E. Walters said in a statement at the time.
On Halloween 2017, the White House announced it had finally produced the portrait and would begin distributing it to federal office buildings.
Corroboration? ::
“I was in charge of the US embassy in London for much of Trump’s first year,” Lewis Lukens, former deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in London, tweeted in response to Trump’s comments. “We didn’t hang his picture either. Why? It took the WH almost 15 months to get official photos sent to embassies to hang. And we were instructed not to print other photos.”
And the last word:
A source with Yovanovitch’s legal team gave NBC News a similar explanation: “The Embassy in Kyiv hung the official photographs of the President, Vice President, and Secretary of State as soon as they arrived from Washington, DC.”
No one can hang a photo that doesn’t exist.
Note to future ambassadors…hang the empty frame until the photo shows up!
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