In her opening statement to impeachment investigators, former National Security Council official Fiona Hill excoriates Republicans for indulging in unsubstantiated conspiracy theories about Ukrainian interference in the 2016 presidential election — the same ones President Donald Trump tried to leverage the Ukrainian government into investigating.
“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 says in her Thursday statement. “This is a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves.”
She adds, “I refuse to be part of an effort to legitimize an alternative narrative that the Ukrainian government is a US adversary, and that Ukraine—not Russia—attacked us in 2016.”
The US intelligence community’s consensus conclusion is that Russia interfered in the 2016 on Trump’s behalf. That conclusion was further bolstered by the work of Special Counsel Robert Mueller. But Trump, in an apparent effort to undercut the notion that he received help from a foreign adversary, has repeatedly tried to draw Russia’s role into question, and recently has embraced a conspiracy theory that the hacks of Democratic targets during the campaign were not the work of Russia, but were an “inside job.”