There it is

 

Fiona Hill

If you were paying any attention to the impeachment hearings, you will remember the testimony of Fiona Hill.  Here's a recent interview with Ms. Hill whose life has been as interesting and incredible as her testimony was.

The Trump purges

An entire roster of public servants has been disparaged, bullied and in some cases banished for standing in Trump’s path as he sought to pressure Ukraine for political favors, or for testifying about his conduct afterward.

Many who came forward were convinced that Trump’s actions were a violation of American principles, if not the law, and they clung to a misplaced faith that matters of national security would transcend partisan politics. Instead, the impeachment saga has hardened political divisions and cast doubt on the United States’ commitment to ideals it has long professed.

[...]

But the fallout of the impeachment battle extends far beyond Trump’s political survival in a Senate trial. Tensions, exposed by impeachment, have fed Trump’s belief that he is surrounded by disloyal subordinates and have fueled animosity among congressional Republicans toward the supposed “deep state.” Today, the idea that a cadre of nonpartisan civil servants can loyally serve presidents of either party in pursuit of shared national interests — a bedrock principle of the country’s approach to foreign policy since World War II — is under attack.

[...]

Their actions have fed the view among some Republicans that impeachment is not just an isolated fight about Trump’s actions toward Ukraine but also is an extension of a broader, unfinished conflict.

[...]

The impeachment-related damage is extensive. The acting U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, William B. Taylor Jr., returned to Kyiv after his Nov. 14 testimony only to watch Trump’s lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, arrive weeks later to resume his quest for dirt on Joe Biden and his son Hunter. Giuliani’s sojourn while filming a documentary for a right-wing television network made clear to officials in Ukraine that Taylor and the U.S. Embassy had no standing with the U.S. president.

Taylor has since announced that he will step down by Jan. 2, clearing out of the Ukrainian capital on an accelerated schedule in part to spare Secretary of State Mike Pompeo — scheduled to visit Kyiv next month — from having to appear in pictures alongside a diplomat Trump branded as disloyal.

  WaPo

This is really sad. Pompeo himself is stepping down soon to run for the Senate from Kansas.

The ambassador had taken the job only after Pompeo promised him that U.S. policy would remain firmly grounded in fighting Russian aggression in eastern Ukraine, an assurance that now seems uncertain at best.

[...]

"I’ve not seen anything like this since I joined the Foreign Service,” said John Heffern, a former senior State Department official who entered the department when Ronald Reagan was president. “Our work is promoting international universal values — freedom of the press and rule of law. Considering what’s happened in the United States, it undermines our ability to project that message to our foreign counterparts.”

It seems obvious that's no longer what our country stands for - hasn't been for decades. Career diplomats are laboring under an old narrative.

Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, the top adviser on Ukraine at the National Security Council, has continued to work at the White House since testifying that he was so disturbed by Trump’s July 25 call with Zelensky that he reported his concerns to White House lawyers.

But Vindman — who was born in Ukraine, moved to the United States with his family at age 3 and earned a Purple Heart in the war in Iraq — has been taunted by Trump, cast as disloyal by the president’s allies and falsely accused of plotting with the whistleblower to undermine the president.

When Trump gets beyond the Senate "trial", Vindman will be given the boot.

Fiona Hill, the former top Russia adviser at the White House, has endured obscene phone calls to her home phone, according to people familiar with the matter, and vicious assaults from far-right media. Alex Jones, the conspiracy monger who operates the Infowars website, devoted much of his Nov. 22 broadcast to smears against Hill. “I want her ass indicted,” Jones said. “I want her indicted for perjury. Today. Indict that whore.”

For Hill, the attacks were a continuation of an astonishing level of hostility she witnessed during the two years she served in the White House. Trump loyalists drafted internal “enemies” lists, co-workers were purged, and NSC security teams logged hundreds of external threats against Hill and other officials.

[...]

Within weeks of joining the administration, [Hill] faced a wave of internal and external efforts to discredit or neutralize her.

[...]

For Hill, ever the Russia analyst, the ruthless nature of the harassment harked back to the Bolshevik purges of revolutionary Russia. Bannon has all but touted this connection, comparing his destructive agenda to that of Vladi­mir Lenin’s.

In 2017, Bannon and his allies compiled a list of about 50 people they wanted exiled from the National Security Council. Most of their targets drew suspicion because they had worked as civil servants in the Obama White House. Bannon’s team also scoured the targets’ social media profiles for signs of disloyalty to the Trump administration.

[...]

Key players in those 2017 purges, and several of their targets, have resurfaced in the impeachment fight.

Among the first to confront Hill when she joined the White House that year was Derek Harvey, who went to the NSC after working for Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) on the House Intelligence Committee. On one of Hill’s first days on the job, Harvey told her he could not understand why Trump had allowed her into the fold.

[...]

Harvey, who was active in generating the enemies list, returned to Nunes’s staff after being ousted by then-national security adviser H.R. McMaster in July 2017. When Hill testified behind closed doors before the committee, Harvey could be seen passing notes to members, officials said.He also approached Hill at one point, telling her that the “trolls are out again.” The gesture, intended to communicate sympathy, ignored the fact that Hill and others viewed him as contributing to the poisonous climate.

[...]

Bannon said the whistleblower was at the top of the list he and his allies created in 2017. Former White House officials said it also included a State Department official now serving as a top aide to Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.

Another early target of Trump loyalists was Stephanie Holmes, a career State Department employee assigned to the NSC who was falsely accused of leaking details of Trump’s Oval Office conversation with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.

[...]

She subsequently left her NSC job to take a post that seemingly should have shielded her from the bloodletting, moving with her husband, David, also a diplomat, to the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine.

It was [there in Kyiv] that David Holmes was in position to witness Trump’s phone call with U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland at an outdoor cafe.

[...]

Trump has intentionally fostered internal friction, sowing tension among subordinates as a management tactic, current and former White House officials said. But he also inadvertently hired advisers who are repelled by his crude behavior and isolationist instincts.

McMaster, former chief of staff John F. Kelly, former secretary of state Rex Tillerson and others all fought Trump on major aspects of his foreign policy — his disdain for the NATO alliance, his desire on a moment’s notice to pull U.S. troops out of war zones, andhis aversion to imposing sanctions on Russia. They, in turn, often hired subordinates who were similarly scornful of Trump’s positions.

And they'll all have to eventually be rooted out.

The most senior officials, such as Pompeo, and John Bolton when he was national security adviser, often relied on underlings to sound alarms or subvert Trump’s efforts to pressure Zelensky, without putting their own standing with the president at risk.

Such leadership!

Taylor, Hill and Vindman repeatedly raised objections to aspects of the shadow policy they perceived but had no meaningful power to stop it.

I had just such a boss in my last position, and I can tell you that type of boss is not respected by his subordinates. Nor deserves to be.

Former U.S. special envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker walked a treacherous tightrope,working to secure a commitment from Ukraine to pursue the investigations to clear impediments to what he regarded as the real policy: bolstering Ukraine in its war with Russian-backed separatists.

He hid his alarm at Trump’s baseless conspiracy theories about the 2016 election and the president’s loathing for the Ukrainians. Volker saw himself as facing a choice: He could accept Trump’s view of Ukraine or try to fix it.

“I tried to fix it,” he testified. Volker’s career was derailed as a result. He resigned from his diplomatic post after his role in the Ukraine episode was exposed. He was also forced to step down as executive director of the McCain Institute, a think tank whose stated mission is to advance “character-driven leadership.”

Good to know the McCain Institute doesn't suffer hypocrites. (Or at least not ones who get caught.)

Career diplomats and civil servants routinely suppress private views to execute policies set by presidents. The impeachment hearings forced a parade of witnesses to reveal their feelings about Trump on a stage with an international audience.

[...]

The stark airing of these differences “caused the president to think they are biased against him,” the official said.

[...]

In reality, none of those who testified had ever publicly opposed Trump, and many had made conscious decisions — despite misgivings — to return to government to work for him.

As several people have warned: eventually, Trump will turn on everyone.

Hill was cautioned by friends and colleagues in the close-knit foreign policy community to reject the NSC job. One long-standing peer has refused to speak with her since learning she had gone to work for Trump.

That's rough.

Three years into Trump’s presidency, the list of perceived enemies continues to expand, and now is composed of officials whom Trump or his own subordinates hired. The hostility they face comes not only from Trump loyalists — whether inside the administration or launching attacks from right-wing media sites — but also from a substantial swath of the Republican Party.

For decades, the GOP cast itself as the champion of the FBI, CIA, Pentagon and other national security institutions. But over the past three years, Republicans have repeatedly turned on those agencies when necessary to protect Trump’s presidency.

In their final report on the impeachment hearings, Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee focused on “unelected bureaucrats” as the true villains of the impeachment scandal.

[...]

Ultimately, they were to blame.

An aside: I wonder when we began spelling it Kyiv instead of Kiev. I've always pronounced it as Kee-ev, but I notice that the diplomats who work there pronounce it Keev.

"Here we say 'Kyiv' not 'Kiev,'" Taras Ilkiv, a Ukrainian journalist who recently wrote an article for Business Insider on the protests, explained in an email, "because 'Kiev' is the Russian word." It's simple: in Ukrainian, the word for the city is Київ, while in Russian, it reads as Киев.

So, Kee-ev is the Russian pronunciation. I suppose we've been using that term for at least as long as there was a Soviet Union. The first mention I see of changing the way we pronounce the name is in that 2014 Business Insider article. (The Russian language does not have the letter "ї".) And I'm going to speculate that some - if not most - of us older folks are going to keep on calling it Kee-ev. Personally, I'm trying to remember to use the Ukrainian word, since, after all, it's a Ukrainian city.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Some are insane; some are useful tools

[Andriy Telizhenko, a former Ukrainian diplomat who has alleged Ukraine’s government conspired with Democrats in 2016, an] associate traveling with Rudy Giuliani in Ukraine this week [Andriy Telizhenko, a former Ukrainian diplomat who has alleged Ukraine’s government conspired with Democrats in 2016 has voiced an unusual theory for why he may not be able to return to the United States: “Soros people,” he says, are working to discredit him and may block his visa.

[...]

He did not name any individually or provide proof other than to say some were writing about him online.

It was far from the first time that [George Soros, Hungarian American and a Holocaust survivor], a billionaire philanthropist and a frequent target of conspiracies about Jews controlling the world, has popped up as part of a conspiracy theory portraying Soros as using Ukraine as a playing field to undermine Trump’s campaign.

[...]

When Fiona Hill, then a National Security Council official, started hearing early in 2019 about a smear campaign against a colleague in Ukraine invoking Soros, she had a sinking feeling: She’d heard this before.

A similar conspiracy theory about Soros had been lobbed against Hill during her first year as Trump’s top adviser on Russia and Europe. That’s when Hill says a former Republican congressman from Florida tried to get the vice president’s office to get rid of her — “to have me fired for being a Soros mole in the White House,” she told Congress.

That former congressman, Connie Mack IV, now a lobbyist, confirms he met in 2017 with the vice president’s national security adviser about Hill’s “conflict of interest” stemming from what he alleged are her ties to Soros.

[...]

In an interview, Mack said he’d found a book on the internet that said that Hill had attended Soros’ wedding, although he couldn’t recall the name of the book offhand and an internet search did not turn one up. Hill’s attorney said the assertion was false

[...]

Hill said she starting getting death threats when Mack’s allegations made it to Roger Stone, a Trump associate who was convicted last month of lying to Congress, as well as the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and his far-right channel, InfoWars. In lobbying documents about Hill, Mack said he was shining “a light on the far-reaching network of George Soros in order to continually degrade his international influence.”

“There is clearly a conflict of interest,” Mack said. Orban, his client, had been working to oust a Soros-founded university from Budapest.

[...]

Lee Wolosky, Hill’s attorney, said any work Hill had done at Soros-linked entities had been promoting a “fundamentally American” interest: advancing democracy and civil society in the former Soviet Union.

[...]

Mack said he made that case to Vice President Mike Pence’s national security adviser at the time, Andrea Thompson.

[...]

In 2017, Mack’s client was Viktor Orban, Hungary’s nationalist prime minister who has vilified Soros as part of his bid to stifle dissent.

  NBC

Viktor Orban - "nationalist" is bowdlerizing it.

Hill, in her testimony, compared the smear campaign to “the new Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”

[...]

A successful campaign to oust Marie Yovanovitch as the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine by Trump's personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, and two now-indicted associates was galvanized by accusations that Yovanovitch protected Soros’ efforts. Those accusations originated in an opinion article by John Solomon in the “The Hill,” which, according to documents given to Congress, he coordinated with one of the indicted Giuliani associates and with two pro-Trump lawyers, Victoria Toensing and Joe diGenova.

Solomon got booted out of that job and is now a Fox News commentator.

Last month, as the impeachment probe unfolded, diGenova told Fox News that Soros “wants to run Ukraine” and “controls a very large part” of the U.S. diplomatic corps, along with FBI agents in Ukraine and elsewhere. Giuliani falsely told The Washington Post in September that Yovanovitch was “now working for Soros.” In fact, she is still a U.S. government employee.

I don't think the two would be mutually exclusive in Rudy's telling.

Giuliani also told CNN that month that an anti-corruption nonprofit in Ukraine that took funding from a Soros philanthropy had fabricated evidence against former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort. He later told Fox News’ Sean Hannity that the Ukrainians had “brought me substantial evidence of Ukrainian collusion with Hillary Clinton, the D.N.C., George Soros, George Soros' company.”

[...]

And last month, a photo that purportedly showed the whistleblower who outed Trump’s call with the Ukrainian leader went viral, tweeted out by Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa. It turned out to be a photo of Soros’ son.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Thank you, Steve Castor

The Republicans' hair-brained and seemingly always constipated counsel at the impeachment hearings brought this out of Fiona Hill:

As an aside, I'm going to give Vox the benefit of the doubt about the captions.  I'll assume they've added them for deaf people, and not for yokels who can't understand a Geordie accent, although....

Do not mess with Fiona Hill

The woman is formidable.  And, Nunes and his seriously incompetent counsel were totally plowed over by the woman.  In fact, Counselor Castor 's questions led her to give testimony that favored the Democrats.  Pitiful.  Several of her Republican interrogators got bowled over.  Until they finally quit questioning her and just started giving speeches.

She finally had to ask the chair if she could say something.

This is what she said:

Here's another gem - from Gym...

I kept wanting Holmes to say, "Ask Taylor."

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:

UPDATE:

Hoo boy, Sondland still getting hit with fallout

"Inappropriate"

Alarm bells went off at the National Security Council when the White House's top Europe official was told that Giuliani was pushing the incoming Ukrainian administration to shake up the leadership of state-owned energy giant Naftogaz, the sources said. The official, Fiona Hill, learned then about the involvement of Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, two Giuliani associates who were helping with the Naftogaz pressure and also with trying to find dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter.

Hill quickly briefed then-national security adviser John Bolton about what she'd been told, the individuals with knowledge of the meeting said.

The revelation significantly moves up the timeline of when the White House learned that Trump's allies had engaged with the incoming Ukrainian administration and were acting in ways that unnerved the Ukrainians — even before President Volodymyr Zelenskiy had been sworn in. Biden had entered the presidential race barely three weeks earlier.

In a White House meeting the week of May 20, Hill was also told that the ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, a major Republican donor tapped by Trump for the coveted post in Brussels, was giving Zelenskiy unsolicited advice on who should be elevated to influential posts in his new administration, the individuals said. One of them said it struck the Ukrainians as "inappropriate."

  NBC

A bit of a sticky wicket for Mr. Sondland.  He'll be called back in.

Hill learned of Zelenskiy's concerns from former U.S. diplomat Amos Hochstein, now a member of Naftogaz's supervisory board. Hochstein had just returned from a pre-inauguration meeting with Zelenskiy and his advisers in Kyiv in which they discussed Giuliani's and Sondland's overtures and how to inoculate Ukraine from getting dragged into domestic U.S. politics.

Add another name to the list of witnesses.

The White House meeting also offers some of the first indications of what led Hill to conclude that Giuliani and Sondland were part of a squad running a "shadow Ukraine policy," as she later would testify to Congress.

Sondland and Energy Secretary Rick Perry also backed an effort to change the membership of Naftogaz's supervisory board, NBC News previously reported. The board includes four international members and three Ukrainian nationals. A person close to Sondland said he and Perry merely wanted changes to the governance and structure of Naftogaz's board needed to secure Western investment in Ukraine's energy industry.

"Merely".

Zelenskiy's May 7 Kyiv meeting with Hochstein and top aides in which he voiced dismay about Giuliani and Sondland included Andriy Kobolev, Naftogaz's CEO. It took place the day after the State Department announced then-Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch was returning home ahead of schedule.

[...]

Yovanovitch's abrupt recall months ahead of schedule left no doubt for Zelenskiy and his aides that Giuliani's agenda had Trump's full backing and that his government would have to somehow address the demands for investigations and changes at Naftogaz, individuals familiar with the matter said.

[...]

"The message was clear: 'You better listen to us. If we tell you to investigate Biden, you better do it. Look at what happened to (Yovanovitch),'" said one individual familiar with the outlook of Zelenskiy's office at the time. "They saw that Giuliani went after her — and he won."

[...]

Zelenskiy, thrust into a precarious position by the impeachment proceedings against a president who still controls U.S. policy toward Ukraine, has publicly insisted his administration did not feel pressured.

But Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., who visited Zelenskiy last month aiming to persuade him not to get dragged into the U.S. political fracas, said the young Ukrainian president simply can't afford to acknowledge publicly what was evident during his trip to Kyiv.

Not until 2021 at least.

Fiona Hill testimony today

Fiona Hill, a former special assistant to the president, on Monday is set to testify that [ Ambassador to the European Union Gordon] Sondland and [Rudy] Giuliani went around the National Security Council and official White House protocol to speak directly with Trump about Ukraine, NBC reported last week.

Hill’s attorney, Lee Wolosky, confirmed that his client had received a subpoena and intended to answer questioning from members beginning at 10 a.m. She is the first former White House official to agree to cooperate with the House’s impeachment inquiry.

Hill will also reportedly testify that she strenuously objected to the removal of former ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, but that her input was disregarded, according to The New York Times.

[...]

Sondland himself is set to testify Thursday and will reportedly say that a text message in which he said there was “no quid pro quo” conditioning military aid to Ukraine on an investigation of former Vice President Joe Biden’s family was dictated by Trump himself and that Sondland was uncertain of its accuracy.

  The Hill

UPDATE:

Hearing schedule

I agree.  The public has a need and a right to hear everything in these impeachment interviews that isn't classified.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Fiona Hill is scheduled to testify

Fiona Hill, President Donald Trump's former top Russia adviser, will explain to Congress when she testifies next week that she was unaware of some aspects of the escalating Ukraine scandal, according to a source close with Hill who spoke to her Thursday.

Hill has been subpoenaed and is working with her lawyer on logistics.

She officially departed her role in August, though she had handed over most of her responsibilities in July, but was involved as Rudy Giuliani was making public pronouncements about Ukraine.

[...]

Hill departed the National Security Council in July about a week before Trump's call with Zelensky that triggered a whistleblower report and has set off an impeachment inquiry in the House.

[...]

Hill, a former Brookings scholar and skeptic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, oversaw rocky Washington-Moscow ties while she held her role.

Hill's decision to serve on Trump's NSC was viewed as an intriguing move at the start of the administration.

A critical biographer of Putin, Hill's views sometimes seemed at odds with Trump's own desire to improve relations with the strongman leader who Trump, as a candidate, often spoke of admiringly.

  CNN

I'm surprised she lasted as long as she did.  He must not have known anything about her when they put her on the team.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE: