Asked about his future plans during an interview with the Ukrainian newspaper Zerkalo Nedeli a few days before his departure from Ukraine, Mr. Taylor said, “I am hoping that I will have a chance to keep working for the good of the U.S.-Ukrainian relations.”
Mr. Taylor’s predecessor in Kyiv, Ms. Yovanovitch, is officially still employed by the State Department, which a Fox News reporter spotted her visiting this month. She is also teaching a class, one morning per week, at Georgetown University’s Institute for the Study of Diplomacy and is scheduled to receive an award next week from the university’s School of Foreign Service for “Excellence in the Conduct of Diplomacy.”
Ms. Yovanovitch has remained in the news thanks to texts released this month suggesting that associates of Mr. Trump’s private lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani were having her watched in Kyiv. And on Friday, ABC News reported the existence of a recording of Mr. Trump, in the spring of 2018, saying “take her out,” in an apparent reference to Ms. Yovanovitch.
“Get her out tomorrow. I don’t care,” Mr. Trump says, according to the report. “Get her out tomorrow. Take her out. O.K.? Do it.”
Mr. Trump’s former top National Security Council aide for Russia, Fiona Hill, had already left the White House months before she publicly testified about “fictions” involving Ukraine promoted by Mr. Trump and his allies. This past week, as the Senate impeachment trial was opening, she returned as a senior fellow to her previous employer of many years, the Brookings Institution, a nonpartisan Washington think tank.
Ms. Hill has told friends she is declining speaking engagements, plowing through unopened mail and contemplating writing a book drawn from her past research on Russia.
Kurt D. Volker, the former United States special envoy to Ukraine, who worked with Mr. Sondland and Mr. Giuliani, in what Mr. Taylor described as a “highly irregular channel” of diplomacy to Kyiv, resigned on Sept. 27.