British-born Fiona Hill used to be Donald Trump’s point person on Russia.
Hill is fluent in Russian (as is our chief international correspondent, associate solitary reporter Larry Theis), and she was lucky enough to have quit TrumpWorld only days before Trump’s now infamous July 25 friendly phone chat with obsequious (to Trump) Volodymyr Zelensky, who was a comedian before disgusted Ukrainian voters put him in office earlier this year, by a landslide.
Today, Hill testified in the House Dems’ Impeachment Inquiry, behind closed doors, but our chief Congressional correspondent, associate solitary reporter Melissa Smith, was there.
ASR Smith just texted us to tell us that Hill testified under oath, both in Russian and in English, that she is totally supportive of Adam Schiff et al’s impeachment efforts.
“There’s no way to avoid a conclusion that there was a quid pro quo in that phone call,” Hill, who is also fluent in Latin, told the Congressmembers. “Once Trump released that $400 million in military aid — that Congress had previously appropriated — to Zelensky, that meant that Zelensky would not immediately be overrun by Putin’s army and militias in Eastern Ukraine” https://www.politico.com/news/2019/10/14/trumps-russia-aide-impeachment-probe-046652 ;https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/impeachment-inquiry-10-14-2019/index.html.
We still haven’t been able to learn whether ASR Theis is being held at an undisclosed location in Syria by Bashar al-Assad’s thugs (cf. https://www.apocryphalpress.com/2019/10/13/trump-s-plan-to-partition-syria-is-thwarted-by-putin/), but Theis is unusually resilient and resourceful. Theis is always embedded overseas in whatever military or intelligence operations are being conducted by our NSA or our CIA. Theis has never practised law, but he’s a graduate of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and he’s smarter than most lawyers.