Impeachment Hearings: Watch Fiona Hill's Full Opening Statement

The House Intelligence Committee impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump on Thursday heard from Fiona Hill, the former National Security Council director for Europe and Russia, and David Holmes, a Foreign Service officer at the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv.

In her advance testimony, Hill said, “Right now, Russia’s security services and their proxies have geared up to repeat their interference in the 2020 election.”

“President Putin and the Russian security services operate like a Super PAC,” Hill said. “They deploy millions of dollars to weaponize our own political opposition research and false narratives.”

“We are running out of time to stop them,” she said. “In the course of this investigation, I would ask that you please not promote politically driven falsehoods that so clearly advance Russian interests.”

Ukraine “plays an important role” in U.S. national security, she said. “I refuse to be part of an effort to legitimize an alternate narrative that the Ukrainian government is a U.S. adversary, and that Ukraine — not Russia — attacked us in 2016.”

Hill, in advanced testimony Thursday, warned lawmakers against believing a “fictional narrative” that it was Ukraine and not Russia that interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

“This is a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves,” Hill said in prepared remarks. “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. It is beyond dispute, even if some of the underlying details must remain classified.”

Hill emphasized that she is a nonpartisan foreign policy expert, who has served under three different Republican and Democratic presidents and that she has “no interest in advancing the outcome of your inquiry in any particular direction, except toward the truth.”

She warned that U.S. national security has been harmed by the politicization of support for Ukraine. “The Russian government’s goal is to weaken our country -- to diminish America’s global role and to neutralize a perceived U.S. threat to Russian interests,” she said. “President Putin and the Russian security services aim to counter U.S. foreign policy objectives in Europe, including in Ukraine, where Moscow wishes to reassert political and economic dominance.”

Hill added, “I respect the work that this Congress does in carrying out its constitutional responsibilities, including in this inquiry, and I am here to help you to the best of my ability. If the President, or anyone else, impedes or subverts the national security of the United States in order to further domestic political or personal interests, that is more than worthy of your attention. But we must not let domestic politics stop us from defending ourselves against the foreign powers who truly wish us harm.”

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