Former National Security Advisor Fiona Hill, who testified in the impeachment inquiry into President Trump on Thursday, admitted to having worked with Christopher Steele, author of the Russia “dossier” commissioned by opposition research firm Fusion GPS and paid for by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC).

Hill was directly asked about her work with Steele, which she portrayed as a product of circumstance. “He was my counterpart when I was the director, the national intelligence officer,” Hill testified before lawmakers. “So inevitably, when I had to do liaison meetings with the U.K., he was the person I had to meet with.”

Hill said she worked with Steele from 2006 to 2009 and added that he reached out to her during the 2016 election:

That was prior to the time that I had any knowledge about the dossier. He was constantly trying to drum up business, and he had contacted me because he wanted to see if I could give him a contact to some other individual, who actually I don’t even recall now, who he could approach about some business issues.

Hill, who, according to her résumé, was once on a regional board of George Soros’ Open Society Institute, claimed to have been “shocked” to discover that Steele was responsible for the dossier.

The work of Steele, a former British spy, was ultimately used by the FBI to obtain a FISA warrant to spy on associates of the Trump campaign.

Among the salacious and unsubstantiated elements featured in the dossier is the allegation that President Trump’s hatred for former President Barack Obama is so great that during a stay in Moscow’s Ritz-Carlton Hotel, he hired a number of prostitutes to urinate on a bed that had previously been used by the Obamas.

During her testimony, Hill said she believes Steele was fed misinformation by Russians, potentially as payback for having formerly spied on them.

Hill did not acknowledge that some of the information in the Steele dossier came from Ukraine. Ukrainian legislator Serhiy Leshchenko specifically provided anti-Trump dirt to Fusion GPS.

In December of last year, a Ukrainian court ruled that Leshchenko broke the law when he released information about Manafort.

Additonally, DNC consultant Alexandra Chalupa tried to get dirt during the 2016 election on then-Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort. According to The Hill’s John Solomon, Chalupa “later tried to arrange for Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to comment on Manafort’s Russian ties on a U.S. visit during the 2016 campaign.”

But Hill denounced such talk as a “fictional” narrative. “I refuse to be part of an effort to legitimize an alternative narrative that the Ukrainian government is a U.S. adversary, and that Ukraine — not Russia — attacked us in 2016,” the former official declared.

“This is exactly what the Russian government was hoping for,” Hill added. “They would pit one side of our electorate against the others.”

Claiming that Russia wants to interfere in the 2020 presidential election, Hill said, “We are running out of time to stop them.”

Curiously, though Hill has told members of Congress that she is concerned about Ukraine’s ability to defend itself against Russia, she penned a Washington Post op-ed in 2015 in which she argued against sending weapons to Ukraine.

Democrats’ current impeachment case against President Trump is that he threatened to withhold weapons to Ukraine (weapons President Obama had refused to give them) unless they helped him investigate the business and possible criminal dealings of former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, in that European country.

Transcripts of calls between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky do not show that the American head of state ever made such a threat.

David Holmes, a State Department adviser in Kyiv, also testified on Thursday. The underpinning theme of Holmes’ testimony was that he was concerned about Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani’s “making frequent public statements pushing for Ukraine to investigate interference in the 2016 election and issues related to Burisma and the Bidens.”

“He was clearly pushing forward issues and ideas that would, you know, probably come back to haunt us and in fact,” Holmes said of Giuliani. “I think that’s where we are today.”

Representative Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, excoriated Democrats’ “pitiful legacy” of attempting to impeach the president, calling the effort the “shoddy sequel” to the “Russia hoax.

Photo of Fiona Hill: https://www.securityconference.de/en/legal-advice/ via wikimedia

Luis Miguel is a writer whose journalistic endeavors shed light on the Deep State, the immigration crisis, and the enemies of freedom. Follow his exploits on Facebook, Twitter, Bitchute, and at luisantoniomiguel.com.