Fiona Hill, the last witness in two weeks of televised impeachment hearings, made the case against her old boss President Donald Trump better than Democrats ever have.The former National Security Council official on Thursday distilled the fog of shady dealings and competition between Trump appointees and career bureaucrat with a crystal clear condemnation of his rogue foreign policy operation in Ukraine.
And she also effectively warned that the Republican defense of the President was in danger, in itself, of becoming an extension of the 2016 Russian election scheme that is tearing American politics apart and draining public confidence in its democracy.Sponsor content by Hanoi TourismMeet the family restaurant that’s been a Hanoi staple for 148 yearsHanoi exists in a state of constant change but never forgets its roots, especially when it comes to the world-famous food scene.
Hill, a British born who also wrote a book on Vladimir Putin — was the star witness in a day of testimony that brought many of the threads of the Democratic case together and who left the Trump administration earlier this year. Using authoritative and clear language, Hill — who left the Trump administration earlier this year — spelled out her reactions to the pressure campaign unfolding before her eyes. But Hill said she only really began to understand the scandal herself while watching testimony from Trump’s ad hoc messenger to the news government in Kiev Gordon Sondaland.”He was being involved in a domestic political errand. And we were being involved in national security foreign policy. And those two things had just diverged.
The day’s testimony, from Hill andUS embassy official David Holmes who is stationed in Kiev, was a fitting coda to a dramatic week of testimony on Capitol Hill as the impeachment inquiry went under the bright lights of televised public hearings. Democrats are now meeting to decide if they have enough evidence to proceed toward writing articles of impeachment while the GOP appears to be more entrenched than ever in its defense of Trump. Hill’s comment summed up evidence that build a strong case that Trump — as Sondland put it in an overheard telephone call in July — “didn’t give a s—t” about Ukraine but wanted the vulnerable ex-Soviet state to cough up political favors.
Hill also helped the Democratic case by exposing the core of the defense of Trump built by GOP lawmakers.She slammed the “fictional” conspiracy theories that Ukraine meddled in the US election that she said were dreamed up by Moscow in another attempt to fulfill Putin’s goal of stoking political division and diminishing America’s prestige.Such claims were hyped by Republican House members who struggled to counter evidence of abuses of power by the President who demanded Ukraine’s new government investigate Joe Biden.
They also sparked the Ukraine scandal itself — since witnesses have claimed Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani put such stories in Trump’s head, leading the President to wield his authority to set foreign policy not in US interests but for his own political ends.”I refuse to be part of an effort to legitimize an alternate narrative that the Ukrainian government is a US adversary, and that Ukraine, not Russia, attacked us in 2016,” Hill said.
Hill’s testimony was a fitting coda to the televised hearings in the House Intelligence Committee as the focus now shifts to an almost certain full House vote to impeach the President.
Two weeks of dramatic hearings starring steely career officials braving the conservative media storm to tell the truth have left Trump’s anti-impeachment offensive in tatters. In recent days, testimony has built a convincing case that Trump directed an effort to force Ukraine into investigating Biden by withholding an Oval Office presidential visit and military aid.
Sondland confirmed that there was a quid pro quo asked of Ukraine in return for a White House visit. He also said that Trump, acting through Giuliani directed the scheme and that other officials including Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo were all in the loop.
Other witnesses called by Republicans, including former Ukraine envoy Kurt Volker, did not as Trump’s supporters hoped, clear the President.Days of hearings also challenged Republican claims that the case is built on hearsay, that Trump never withheld recognition from Kiev and that its new government didn’t even realize it.The ultimate effect of all the new evidence is to cast Trump’s call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on July 25, in which he asked for a “favor” in an even more sinister light.
Republicans have managed to land a few blows. They seized for instance on Sondland’s admission that Trump never told him directly to use military aid over Ukraine for political leverage — even though he said he presumed that was what was happening.Trump and supporters ignored the entirety of the evidence in recent days to seize on that moment — as if an entire court case could be undermined by a single less damning fact.
But the hearings often appeared to deepen Trump’s plight by drawing out the kind of behavior that left him danger of being only third impeached President in the first place. Such antics make Trump difficult to defend among Senate Republicans running in swing states who are in trouble because of an unpopular President.
Trump’s tweeted threats against several witnesses, including the former US Ambassador to Kiev Marie Yovanovitch, who was apparently fired to make way for the corrupt scheme to pressure Ukraine, could be folded into articles of impeachment.
Source: CNN
