Trump sounds like a 'crime boss' plotting against his own Ukraine ambassador: Morning Joe panelist

Panelists on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" were shocked by the revelations in testimony from two former high-ranking State Department officials that showed President Donald Trump "bullying" his diplomats to advance a corrupt scheme.

Former Ukraine ambassador Maria Yovanovitch told the House impeachment inquiry that she felt threatened by the president and his allies, and former senior adviser Michael McKinley quit after decades of foreign service because he believed the State Department had been corrupted by Trump's political interests.

"To say that she's 'going to go through some things,'" said host Mika Brzezinski, "I don't know how to read that any other way than he's going to shake her down as well, scare her, threaten her, do something to make her life miserable."

Contributor Elise Jordan, a former George W. Bush aide, said those two former officials painted painted an alarming picture of the administration.

"You have the president of the United States literally bullying an American diplomat posted abroad in a hardship post," Jordan said, "and this really puts into harsh focus the crisis that's happening right now at the State Department. You've got (Secretary of State) Mike Pompeo out campaigning in Kansas. There's going to be a congressional investigation, and why he keeps going to Kansas and not going abroad, and you have all of these crises happening not just in Ukraine, but around the world."

"What is happening with the State Department?" she said. "Who is running the State Department? Who is protecting the State Department employees who have vowed and have taken an oath to their country? It's certainly not Mike Pompeo right now."

Analyst Mike Barnicle agreed the revelations are damning enough as part of the impeachment inquiry, but he said the problem was even larger than commonly understood.

"It's hard to believe, but there might be a larger story than the threats to the ambassador, ambassador Yovanovitch," Barnicle said. "It would be the slow destruction of the State Department as evidence in the release of these transcripts."

Yovanovitch testified that she was warned in a 1 a.m. phone call by another State Department employee to leave Ukraine immediately out of concern for her personal safety, and Brzezinzksi was appalled.

"What in the world?" she said.

Political analyst John Heilemann said the entire situation sounded more like the Mafia than the U.S. government.

"The way in which (Trump) singles out this particular ambassador to another head of state, he sounds like not like the president of the United States, not like an even partisan president of the United States," Heilemann said, "he sounds like a crime boss."