If you didn’t notice how perfectly Dr. Fiona Hill brought the Emma Peel to the House Intelligence Committee on Thursday, I feel sorry for you in your youth. Not that David Holmes, her fellow witness, wasn’t dealing, too, but Dr. Hill, with her clipped Geordie accent and her severe testifying mien, did not come to the hearing to play. She began by telling the committee that her opening statement would be short, probably to give her as much time as possible for disemboweling the Republican talking points and the people promulgating them. She did not waste a second of it.

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 campaign against our country and that perhaps somehow for some reason Ukraine did. This is a fictional narrative that is being perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves. 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. I refuse to be part of an effort to legitimize an alternate narrative that the Ukrainian government is an adversary and Ukraine, not Russia, attacked us in 2016. These fictions are harmful even if for purely domestic political purposes.

Dr. Hill was clear that the Russian ratfcking predated even the Trump campaign, although her testimony made it clear that the Volga bagmen were more than happy to find a useful tool in the shed. Moreover, she linked the Russian ratfcking of the 2016 election to the ongoing Russian ratfcking of the 2020 election, of which the president*'s insistence on his ridiculous conspiracy theory is unmistakably a part. (Why, says the interested mind. Why would he do that?) Dr. Fiona Hill is, as she said with no little pride, an American by choice. She appears to be a patriot by nature.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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