Danny maybe you meant ambassadors?
Q: Did President Barack Obama immediately fire all Bush-appointed ambassadors “the day he was elected office”?
A: No. As is the custom, Obama immediately replaced most — not all — of Bush’s politically appointed ambassadors. Obama did not remove any of the career appointees to ambassadorships.
FULL QUESTION
Subject: Ambassadors
Did President Barack Obama fire all the ambassadors who had been appointed by George W. Bush?
FULL ANSWER
The issue of ambassadors “fired” by President Barack Obama has arisen recently in the context of President Donald Trump’s abrupt removal of U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine
Marie Yovanovitch in May.
Although the State Department
announced at the time that Yovanovitch was ending her three-year assignment in Ukraine “as planned,” her term was not yet completed.
Yovanovitch emerged as one of the key witnesses in the House impeachment inquiry. In her public testimony on Nov. 15, Yovanovitch
said that Rudy Giuliani, the president’s private attorney, spread false statements about her that led to her removal as ambassador.
“Mr. Giuliani should have known those claims were suspect, coming as they reportedly did from individuals with questionable motives and with reason to believe that their political and financial ambitions would be stymied by our anti-corruption policy in Ukraine,” Yovanovitch testified. “Although, then and now, I have always understood that I served at the pleasure of the President, I still find it difficult to comprehend that foreign and private interests were able to undermine U.S. interests in this way.”
During her testimony, Trump
tweeted criticism of Yovanovitch, claiming that everywhere she has served as an ambassador, including in Somalia, “turned bad.” Trump noted: “It is a U.S. President’s absolute right to appoint ambassadors.”
In
an interview with Sean Hannity the following night, White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham said the president, in his tweet, “was telling people why he was unhappy with that ambassador, which is every president’s right.”
Grisham then added, “I’d also like to remind people that Obama fired every Bush-appointed ambassador the day he was elected office. Every president has the right to have people representing them in foreign countries that he trusts.”
That same day, Republican Rep. Mark Meadows
tweeted: “For Washington Democrats and pundits who are incredulous that @realDonaldTrump recalled an ambassador, certain that it must be evidence of a conspiracy… President Obama fired every Bush appointed ambassador upon his election.”
The same argument about Obama firing all of Bush’s appointments made its way into a
number of
Facebook memes. We received numerous questions from our readers asking about the claim as well.
Trump is right that he has the authority to remove and replace any ambassador he wishes. But his defenders are twisting the facts about Obama to make an argument that Trump’s removal of Yovanovitch was not out of the ordinary. It was.
There are two types of ambassadors appointed by presidents: career ambassadors and political ambassadors. Career ambassadors are those who make a career in the foreign service and often serve under multiple presidents of different parties. Those career ambassadors
usually make up about
70 percent of the ambassadors. Political ambassadors, on the other hand, are typically replaced with political supporters of the incoming president.
“All ambassadors by tradition present their resignations at the start of any new presidential term (either first or second),” explained retired U.S. Ambassador
Dennis Jett, a professor of international affairs at Penn State. “The resignations of the 70 percent (typically) that are career officers are almost always returned and they are allowed to stay and complete whatever is left of what is normally a 3-year tour of duty. Usually, all of those of the 30 percent that are political appointees are accepted.”
Obama was no different in that respect. Meadows’ tweet linked to a
Washington Post story from Dec. 3, 2008, which stated that the “incoming Obama administration has notified all politically-appointed ambassadors that they must vacate their posts as of Jan. 20, the day President-elect Barack Obama takes the oath of office, a State Department official said.”