Fiona Hill calls allegation Ukraine meddled in 2016 a 'fictional narrative': impeachment latest

David Holmes and Fiona Hill, two central witnesses to the pressure campaign in Ukraine, testified publicly Thursday in the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump.

Hill, a former National Security Council official, previously testified about national security adviser John Bolton's concerns about the pressure campaign. Holmes, a State Department official in the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv, overheard Trump ask U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland about “investigations” on a call.

Fiona Hill, the former National Security Council senior director for Europe and Russia, told lawmakers in her opening statement that it was a mistake to think that Ukraine and not Russia had interfered with the 2016 election, as President Donald Trump and some congressional Republicans have suggested.

“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,” Hill said. “This is a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves. 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.”

Hill compared the Russian interference under President Vladimir Putin to a political-action committee in the United States funded by millions of dollars.

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These fictions are harmful even if they are deployed for purely domestic political purposes.