Fiona Hill opener

A former top national security adviser to President Trump told Republicans in the House
impeachment inquiry Thursday morning to stop advancing a “fictional narrative” that Ukraine
interfered in the 2016 U.S. elections rather than Russia.

“Based on questions and statements I have heard, 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,” said Fiona Hill,
who until July was the Deputy Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Europe and
Russia on the National Security Council.

“The unfortunate truth is that Russia was the foreign power that systematically attacked our
democratic institutions in 2016. This is the public conclusion of our intelligence agencies,
confirmed in bipartisan Congressional reports. It is beyond dispute, even if some of the
underlying details must remain classified,” Hill said in her opening statement to the House
Intelligence Committee, in the fifth day of public hearings in the impeachment inquiry.

Hill, who testified alongside State Department counselor David Holmes, told the committee
that the Russians have succeeded in what they set out to do in 2016, and are going to do it
again in the 2020 election.

“Our nation is being torn apart. Truth is questioned. Our highly professional and expert career
foreign service is being undermined,” she said. “President Putin and the Russian security
services operate like a Super PAC. They deploy millions of dollars to weaponize our own
political opposition research and false narratives. When we are consumed by partisan rancor,
we cannot combat these external forces as they seek to divide us against each another,
degrade our institutions, and destroy the faith of the American people in our democracy.”

Hill called herself a “nonpartisan foreign policy expert” and did not mention the Republican or
Democratic party when discussing the “false narrative,” but Republicans have pushed hard on
this angle and Democrats have not.

“In the course of this investigation, I would ask that you please not promote politically driven
falsehoods that so clearly advance Russian interests,” Hill told the committee.

Republicans rely largely on a handful of articles when discussing the role of Ukrainian officials in
the 2016 election, starting with a Politico article in January 2017 and then also including
interviews with Ukrainian officials this past spring by John Solomon in The Hill.

But even the 2017 Politico article – which reported that the Ukrainian ambassador to the U.S.
and some embassy staff had passed on incriminating information about Trump adviser Paul
Manafort to a Democratic operative – noted that this was “far less concerted or centrally
directed than Russia’s alleged hacking and dissemination of Democratic email” in 2016.

Other witnesses before the impeachment hearings have emphasized the difference between
Russia’s organized actions and those of a few Ukrainian officials, which included writing a
critical op-ed, in even more stark terms.

“Those elements ... don’t seem to me to be the Ukrainian plan or a plot by the Ukrainian
government to work against President Trump,” former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie
Yovanovitch said last Friday. “They’re isolated incidents.”

Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, a National Security Council staffer, told the committee Tuesday
that the Ukraine story is “a Russian narrative that President Putin has promoted.”

And Kurt Volker, former special envoy to Ukraine, called the Ukraine story — as well as
allegations that former Vice President Biden acted improperly in pressuring Ukraine to fire a
corrupt prosecutor — “conspiracy theories.”

“The allegations against the [former] Vice President [Biden] are self-serving and not credible,”
Volker said Tuesday. “Raising 2016 elections, or Vice President Biden, or these things I consider
to be conspiracy theories circulated by the Ukrainians … they’re not things we should be
pursuing.”