Fiona Hill's Testimony Was Both Nonsensical and Partisan
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff has finally gaveled to a close his presidential impeachment hearings, but they didn’t go out without a bang.
Fiona Hill, a former National Security Council official and star witness for Schiff, became a hero among Democrats and the media for taking on House Republicans during her testimony.
But, boy, did she receive a devastating comeuppance from Republican Rep. Mike Turner of Ohio.
Hill set herself up for this spectacular takedown. In her opening statement, she said, “I take great pride in the fact that I am a nonpartisan foreign policy expert.”
She also touted her experience as “the Intelligence Community’s senior expert on Russia and the former Soviet republics, including Ukraine.”
With serene self-confidence, Hill explained that her role would be to advance the congressional inquiry “toward the truth.”
“I believe that the interest of Congress and the American people is best served by allowing you to ask me your questions,” she said.
Hill then thought it necessary to make two points. First, she declared herself “an American by choice.” She was born in the same part of England as George Washington’s ancestors. Her grandfather served in the British Army in World War I and survived “being shot, shelled, and gassed before American troops intervened to end the war” and other family members later fought alongside U.S. soldiers in World War II “to defend the free world from fascism.”
The former NSC official also explained how she comes from a family of coal miners in northern England and how her father, himself a coal miner, dreamed of emigrating to America, which he admired for “its role as a beacon of hope in the world.” Hill said she “grew up poor with a very distinctive working-class accent” — an accent that would have held her back in elitist Britain, but not in egalitarian America.
OK, we got it. Hill doesn’t just love America, she’s as American as baseball, hotdogs, apple pie and Chevrolet. None of this was relevant to her testimony. Yet she wanted to make it clear that she’s every bit as American as, or perhaps even more American than, those Republicans she was about to unload on.
With her second point, she pulled back the veil. She said that “some of you on this committee appear to believe that Russia and its security services did not conduct a campaign against our country—and that perhaps, somehow, for some reason, Ukraine did.”
“This is a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves.”
In short, Hill called the Republicans on the committee stooges.
In a devastating riposte, Turner explained to Hill that his committee had conducted an exhaustive investigation into allegations of Russian interference in our 2016 elections. Every Republican member of the committee voted for its report, which stated, “In 2015, Russia began engaging in a covert influence campaign aimed at the U.S. presidential election. The Russian government, at the direction of President Vladimir Putin, sought to sow discord in American society and undermine our faith in the democratic process.”
Hill, our self-described Russian expert, was all wet.
And, contrary to Hill’s denial, Ukraine did meddle in our elections. A January 2017 Politico report revealed that “a Ukrainian-American operative who was consulting for the Democratic National Committee met with top officials in the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington in an effort to expose ties between Trump, top campaign aide Paul Manafort and Russia.”
This paid DNC consultant, Alexandra Chalupa, sought assistance from the Ukrainian embassy to dig for dirt on the 2016 Trump campaign.
Yet Hill called accounts of Ukrainian interference “fictions” that are “harmful even if they are deployed for purely domestic political purposes.”
That’s nonsense. Asking Ukraine to assist in investigating credible allegations of Ukrainian interference in our election or corruption involving a former U.S. vice president does not fall under “political purposes.” It’s called ensuring that the laws are faithfully executed. The charge that an investigation somehow endangers America is preposterous.
What does endanger U.S. national security is globalists like Hill pushing the U.S. to support Ukraine militarily and thus pushing us closer to war with a nuclear-armed Russia. In one of her dafter moments, Hill warned that Trump’s requests of Ukraine would “blow up.” Really? Ukrainian soldiers using U.S.-supplied Javelin missiles against the tanks of Russian-backed separatists is more likely to make things “blow up” and perhaps cause some blowback that could endanger the U.S., which, ironically, is Hill’s job to protect.
Let’s hope we’ve heard the last from Fiona Hill.
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