Marie Yovanovitch, who was ousted from her post as U.S. ambassador to Ukraine after a smear campaign by Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, has signed a book deal, it was announced Friday.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt said it had acquired a memoir by Yovanovich, a key witness and figure in the House inquiry that led to President Donald Trump's impeachment.
"The as-yet-untitled memoir will recount her long career in the U.S. foreign service, which took her from Mogadishu to Moscow to Kyiv and finally back to Washington, D.C. — where, to her dismay, she found a political system beset by many of the same challenges she had spent her career combating overseas," the publisher said in a press release.
The book, which is scheduled to be published in the spring of 2021, will also "deliver pointed reflections on the issues confronting America today, and thoughts on how we can shore up our democracy," the publisher said.
The financial terms were not disclosed, but two people familiar with the deal told the Associated Press that the agreement was worth seven figures,
Yovanovitch, who'd been a foreign service officer for 33 years, retired from the State Department last month.
She testified before the House Intelligence Committee's impeachment inquiry that her reputation had been smeared by Giuliani, who'd seized on disinformation from Ukrainian officials that she had been badmouthing the president and blocking corruption investigations into former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden.
She and several of her colleagues denied all the allegations under oath, and her colleagues have testified that she was the victim of disinformation tactics that had been used on U.S. officials for years.
Giuliani told the New Yorker in December that he "believed that I needed Yovanovitch out of the way" because he thought she would hinder his efforts to get Ukraine to investigate the Bidens.
"She was going to make the investigations difficult for everybody," he said.
Former U.S. special envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker testified that he believed Giuliani was being misled by corrupt Ukrainian officials who loathed Yovanovitch for her anti-corruption stance.
Trump abruptly recalled Yovanovitch from her post in April 2019. He told Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy in the July 25, 2019 phone call that was at the center of the impeachment case that Yovanovitch was "bad news" and was going to "go through some things."
