President Donald Trump lashed out at impeachment witnesses with a new set of personal grievances Friday, including the false claim that Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch refused to post his official portrait in the American Embassy in Ukraine.
"This ambassador that you know, everybody says is so wonderful, she wouldn't hang my picture in the embassy. She is in charge of the embassy. She wouldn't hang it. It took a year and a half, two years to get the picture up," Trump said in a rambling hourlong call to Fox News. "She said bad things about me. She wouldn't defend me."
"This was not an angel this woman, OK?" Trump said, vowing to reveal more derogatory information about Yovanovitch at some point.
A lawyer for Yovanovitch flatly denied the claim, saying the White House dragged its feet and only sent official portraits in September 2017 _ nine months after Trump's inauguration.
"The embassy in Kyiv hung the official photographs of the president, vice president and secretary of state as soon as they arrived from Washington, D.C.," the attorney said.
Trump also asserted without evidence that diplomat David Holmes was lying about overhearing him on a cellphone conversation. The diplomat testified under oath that Trump asked Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, for an update on the investigations into Democrats.
"That was a total phony deal. That is why we call it Deep State. These are anti-Trump people," Trump said, claiming that it is impossible to hear his voice on a cellphone across a table.
Appearing more off the rails every day, Trump returned to his favorite network just hours after Democrats apparently wrapped up the impeachment hearings _ at least for now.
The public hearings amounted to a series of devastating blows from witnesses like Yovanovitch, the respected career diplomat who was ousted because she resisted his plan to bully Ukraine into launching partisan investigations into Joe Biden and Democrats.
Trump blasted House Speaker Nancy Pelosi as "nuts" and "crazy as a bedbug." He derided impeachment committee leader Rep. Adam Schiff as a criminal.
The president also sought to distance himself from his own hand-picked envoys, Sondland and Kurt Volker, both of whom offered damaging testimony that Trump directly ordered them to implement the improper Ukraine scheme.
"Volker, I don't know him. I don't know this guy, Sondland, hardly know him," Trump said.
"I had a couple conversations with (Sondland)," he said. "All of sudden he is working on this, asking about that."
Trump has repeatedly sought to dismiss close allies when they turn against him, most notably his former longtime lawyer and loyal fixer Michael Cohen, who went to prison after admitting to his role in Trump's hush-money scheme to keep two porn stars quiet about illicit affairs.
The president has yet to do the same thing to his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, even as some Republican allies have sought to shift some of the blame for the Ukraine scandal to the former New York City mayor.
"Rudy Giuliani was one of the great crime fighters of all time," Trump said. "He is a friend of mine. He is a great person, an iconic figure in this country."
Giuliani is under federal investigation for his role in a campaign finance scheme spearheaded by his associates, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman. The shady pair were also key players in Giuliani's rogue diplomatic effort to get dirt on Democrats in Ukraine.
Ominously for both Giuliani and Trump, Parnas has vowed to spill the beans about the operation, although it remains to be seen if he will testify to the impeachment committee or cooperate with prosecutors.
Trump also re-upped his belief in a discredited right-wing conspiracy theory that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 presidential election _ not Russia.
"They gave the server to CrowdStrike or whatever it's called ... and I still want to see that server," said Trump, repeating pillars of the conspiracy theory that U.S. intelligence says is false. "A lot of it had to do, they say, with Ukraine. Why did they give it to a Ukrainian company?"
That so-called "Crowdstrike" theory was a main target of impeachment witness Fiona Hill, who called it Russian propaganda designed to divide Americans ahead of the 2020 elections.
Trump insisted he was looking forward to defending himself in the friendly confines of the Republican-controlled Senate. If the House of Representatives votes to approve articles of impeachment, which seems almost certain, Trump will face a Senate trial where it takes a two-thirds majority vote to remove him from office.
Trump has said he would relish the chance to tell his side of the story.
"I want a trial," he said.
