Nov. 21 (UPI) — A former White House expert on Russia and Europe and a U.S. diplomat for Ukraine will testify Thursday in the impeachment probe into President Donald Trump.
Fiona Hill, a former White House Europe and Russian expert, is scheduled to appear, as is David Holmes, an embassy official in Kiev who overheard a conversation between U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland and Trump about Ukraine investigating Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden.
In her opening statement, Hill disputes assertions by Trump that Ukraine may have interfered in the 2016 U.S. elections to help Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
In her private deposition to investigators last month, Hill disfuted the theory that Ukraine — not Russia — interfered in the election.
“It is fiction that the Ukrainian government was launching an effort to upend our election, upend our election to mess with our Democratic system,” Hill said then, according to a transcript of her deposition.
“Because if you’re also trying to peddle an alternative variation of whether the Ukrainians subverted our election, I don’t want to be a part of that, and I will not be part of it. We should all be greatly concerned about what the Russians intend to do in 2020.”
Hill was Trump’s top White House Russia adviser before she left the post in the summer. In her opening statement Thursday, she warns that Moscow is likely moving again to influence next year’s presidential vote.
“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,” she wrote. “This is a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves.
“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.”
The British-born Hill, who became a U.S. citizen in 2002, said she has felt a duty to cooperate with impeachment investigators.
“I believe those who have information that the Congress deems relevant have a legal and moral obligation to provide it,” she said in her statement.
Hill is expected to answer questions about her conversations with former national security adviser John Bolton about the administration’s purported pressure campaign to get Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden, who formerly worked for Ukrainian gas company Burisma.
Hill previously testified about a July 10 meeting with Ukrainian officials in which she said Sondland spoke of a deal for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to visit the White House in exchange for the Biden investigations. Sondland testified about the “quid pro quo” arrangement on Wednesday.
Holmes said in his deposition that Sondland said Trump only cared about “big stuff” like Ukraine investigating the Bidens. The EU diplomat said Wednesday he didn’t understand Trump’s interest in Burisma.
Hill and Holmes are the final two witnesses to testify in the public hearings this week.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.