If Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch was shocked by being reassigned, she must have refused to read cables, or slept through every staff briefing and ignored news coverage after every presidential election in the previous three decades or, for some reason, she may have felt she was immune to the potential of a changing of the guard when a new administration takes power.
All presidents can issue a blanket recall and request resignations of every political appointee who served under the previous administration. Some did, some didn’t. A Foreign Service officer with 30 years of service should be aware of that.
The column headline from an Associated Press story Nov. 16 in The Durango Herald would have been more accurate and more informative if it had read, “Yovanovitch shouldn’t have been shocked.”
If a sentence had been added clearly affirming a president’s authority to remove and replace any appointee at any time, it would have helped even more.
As printed, that headline exposed which way the Herald’s political petticoat blows in the whirlwinds of the impeachment frenzy.
Bob SchultzBayfield
