The last day of this hectic week's public impeachment hearings is about to get underway.
Former White House official Fiona Hill and David Holmes, the diplomat who overheard President Trump asking U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland if Ukraine was "going to do the investigation" on a July phone call, are set to testify Thursday in the fifth day of public impeachment hearings.
Hill, according to her prepared opening statement, is set to call out the "fictional narrative" that Ukraine, not Russia, meddled in the 2016 presidential election, an idea Trump had in mind when he pushed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to conduct investigations into 2016 on his infamous July phone call.
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"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," she will say, calling out congressional Republicans. "This is a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves."
Hill will also tell Congress that "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."
Given this prepared pushback, and given the fact that she previously revealed that former National Security Adviser John Bolton called Rudy Giuliani "a hand grenade who's going to blow everybody up," Politico notes Hill may "prove to be a colorful witness."
