WASHINGTON — Fiona Hill, the former U.S. National Security Council top Russia expert, and David Holmes, who leads the political section at America’s embassy in Kyiv, testified in the congressional impeachment hearings on Nov. 21, demolishing anti-Ukrainian “fictional narratives” and providing resounding arguments for America’s continued support for Ukraine against Russian aggression.
The inquiry is gathering evidence on whether U.S. President Donald Trump withheld military aid for Ukraine approved by Congress to pressure new Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to produce political dirt against the man Trump saw as his main threat in next year’s presidential election, former Vice President Joe Biden.
Seeking foreign help for electoral advantage is a crime under American law, but Trump denies any wrongdoing and he and his allies call the proceedings a politically motivated sham.
Hill said that Trump disregarded senior advisers and instead promoted a “fictional narrative,” contrived by Moscow and repeated by his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, that Ukraine had interfered in the 2016 election to the detriment of then-presidential candidate Trump. She said the fabrication had harmed the United States.
Holmes described how Giuliani’s awkward attempts to influence Ukrainian officials collided with the U.S.embassy’s endeavors to forge good relations between the new government in Kyiv and an American president who seemed personally hostile to Ukraine and set on trading military assistance for his own political benefit.
Below, the Kyiv Post reports in detail on Hill and Holmes’ testimony, likely the last in the series of public testimonies that will inform the House of Representatives vote on whether to impeach a sitting president for only the third time in American history.
Hill’s testimony
Fiona Hill, who was born in Britain, gave evidence in the distinctive accent of the northeastern English region she hails from.
The arc of her personal journey from humble, working-class beginnings in a family of coal miners to becoming one of the U.S. government’s most respected and influential Russia experts seems like a retelling of the classic “American dream” story.
Hill told the inquiry she always had great affection for America, inspired by her father who had considered emigrating to the U.S. with his family but was unable to do so.
Hill was studying Russian in the 1980s in the Soviet Union when an American academic planted the idea of applying for a scholarship in the U.S.
That resulted in her obtaining a Ph.D. from Harvard University which established her as an expert on Russia. She became a U.S. citizen and built a career as a national security professional in both government and research.
Hill told surprised Republican members of the Intelligence Committee that they had promoted “politically driven falsehoods” by casting doubt on Russian interference in the 2016 elections.
She said: “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.
“The unfortunate truth is that Russia was the foreign power that systematically attacked our democratic institutions in 2016. And 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.”
Ukraine “bet on the wrong horse”
U.S. intelligence agencies unanimously concluded that Russia interfered massively to skew the 2016 election in Trump’s favor. Hill said there has been no evidence to support allegations of a “top-down” effort by Ukraine to meddle in the election as claimed by Trump and Giuliani.
But Hill conceded that Ukraine had “bet on the wrong horse” and tried to curry favor with Trump’s opponent Hillary Clinton, who was tipped to win, according to polls.
Hill stepped down from her job as NSC head John Bolton’s adviser just prior to the July 25 phone call when Trump asked Zelensky for the political “favor” at the heart of the impeachment inquiry.
Before she left, she was present at discussions between U.S. and Ukrainian officials at the White House, in which a deal to launch a Ukrainian investigation into Joe Biden was mentioned.
The investigations concerned the discredited Ukraine election interference narrative and another purporting that Biden used his authority as vice president under former President Barack Obama to get the Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin fired. According to the story, Biden wanted to quash a corruption investigation by Shokin into Ukrainian energy company Burisma, which had employed his son Hunter in a well-paid job requiring little work.
Despite the fact that the notoriously corrupt Shokin was not conducting an investigation of Burisma and his removal had long been demanded by Ukrainian anti-graft activists and by U.S. and other Western officials, Trump and Giuliani have gone to great efforts to keep the theory alive.
Trump’s hunt for dirt on Biden
Both Hill and Holmes said they had no doubt Trump and Giuliani wanted the Ukrainian government to help Trump’s politicized aim and that references to investigating Burisma were “code for the Bidens.”
Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, and Kurt Volker, the former U.S. special envoy to Ukraine, had testified earlier in the week that for months they believed that when Trump mentioned Burisma he was using the name generically for efforts to combat rampant corruption in Ukraine.
Referring to Sondland’s statement the previous day that he did not realize what Trump’s references “Burisma” meant, Hill said: “It is not credible to me at all that he was oblivious.”
Hill said the Ukraine interference narrative peddled by Giuliani “is a fictional narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security services themselves.”
The Democratic Party’s counsel on the committee, Daniel Goldman, asked her: “So is it your understanding then that President Trump disregarded the advice of his senior officials about this theory and instead listened to Rudy Giuliani’s views?” Hill said that appeared to be the case and warned that Giuliani had been making “explosive” and “incendiary” claims about Ukraine and “clearly pushing forward issues and ideas that would, you know, probably come back to haunt us. I think that’s where we are today.”
The three amigos ride into town
Previous witnesses in the inquiry had described how, earlier this year, three U.S. officials — Kurt Volker, Gordon Sondland and Energy Secretary Rick Perry — had worked together to persuade Zelensky to comply with Trump’s desire for the investigations.
According to Volker and Sondland’s testimonies, the trio of officials, dubbed “the three amigos,” initially thought Trump was offering a White House visit to Zelensky in return for the political “favor.”
But they later discovered Trump was withholding military aid for Ukraine until Zelensky publicly committed to investigations via an announcement on American television.
Hill told the committee she had a couple of “testy encounters” with Sondland, who had testified the previous day, because he had not kept her informed of “all the meetings he was having” with senior U.S. and Ukrainian officials.
She only realized later that Sondland had been given a “different remit” and was part of a group of high-ranking officials, including White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who were “involved in a domestic political errand, and we were being involved in national security, foreign policy — and those two things had just diverged.”
Hill said: “I was actually, to be honest, angry with him. And I hate to say it but often when women show anger it’s not fully appreciated, it’s often pushed off onto emotional issues, perhaps, or deflected on other people.”
She also talked about her former boss, ex-National Security Council head John Bolton, who left his job in September after an acrimonious falling out with Trump. Bolton is waiting for a court ruling on whether he should obey a subpoena from the Intelligence Committee to appear before it.
Hill said in her private deposition to the committee in October that Bolton described Giuliani as a grenade.
When asked why Bolton thought that, Hill said, “What he meant by this was pretty clear to me in the context of all of the statements that Mr. Giuliani was making publicly — that the investigations that he was promoting, that the storyline he was promoting, the narrative he was promoting, was going to backfire.”
Holmes’ testimony
Career diplomat David Holmes had been an expert on Afghanistan when he worked for the NSC and had served at America’s missions in Afghanistan, India, Colombia and Kosovo before arriving at the Kyiv embassy in August 2017, where he heads its political section.
He said American diplomats in Ukraine had been focused on three key policies — peace and security, economic growth and reform and anti-corruption and rule of law — until the arrival of “a cadre of officials operating with a direct channel to the White House” last March: “the three amigos” of Volker, Perry and Sondland.
Holmes said that changed the situation dramatically and the previous three priorities, as well as support for Ukraine’s resistance to Russian aggression, were overshadowed by an agenda promoted by the amigos and Giuliani.
“Sondland made clear that he had direct and frequent access to President Trump and Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney and portrayed himself as the conduit to the president and Mulvaney for this group” Holmes said.
“The three amigos” said they would take the lead on U.S. relations with the new Zelensky administration, and on April 25 the newly-appointed head of the Ukrainian SBU intelligence agency, Ivan Bakanov, told Holmes privately that he had been contacted by someone called Giuliani claiming to be an adviser to the [U.S.] vice president.
Over the coming months it became apparent to Holmes and other diplomats at the embassy that Giuliani was exerting influence over the foreign policy work of “the three amigos.”
Holmes said Giuliani also seemed to initiate attempts to undermine former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch that began with critical press reports of her and machinations to discredit her by Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko and others.
Holmes said that, in revenge for Yovanovitch pressing Lutsenko to cease what she regarded as his practices to enrich himself rather than move forward on commitments to fight corruption, Lutsenko made a series of false allegations against her, including that she was using her position in Kyiv to advance the political purposes of the Democratic Party, had given him a list of persons not to be prosecuted and had withheld $4.4 million in U.S. aid for the Prosecutor General’s Office.”
Giuliani made a number of public statements pushing for Yovanovitch’s removal and urging Ukraine to investigate a narrative he was promoting about an improper nexus between Joe Biden and his son Hunter and the firing of another notoriously corrupt former prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin.
Eventually, said Holmes, “a barrage of allegations directed at Ambassador Yovanovitch unlike anything that I have seen in my professional career” led to her removal from the ambassadorship last May.
She was replaced by William Taylor, who arrived in June as the interim chargé d’affaires. For the next month, the embassy’s main aim was to arrange a Trump-Zelensky meeting.
Holmes said Secretary of State Pompeo told Taylor they needed to “turn the president around on Ukraine”- alter his negative view of Ukraine. However, despite progress in energy reforms, commercial deals and anti-corruption actions, Trump was not offering a White House visit.
On June 27, Sondland told Taylor that Zelensky needed to make clear to Trump “that he was not standing in the way of investigations.” Holmes understood that to mean investigations into the fake Burisma/Biden narrative.
On June 28, Trump met with Russian President Vladimir Putin at an international summit in Japan, which was seen by the U.S. embassy and Ukrainian officials as a further signal of lack of support for Ukraine by the U.S. president.
Worries about the Washington visit
Holmes said the embassy then started to consider whether to slow down work for a Zelensky visit to the White House because it increasingly looked as if it wouldn’t turn out well. He said a meeting between the two presidents that “failed to send a clear and strong signal of support” would project a worse message than no visit to Washington at all.
In August, Holmes said NSC chief Bolton visited Kyiv and told the embassy that Trump had agreed to meet Zelensky during a visit both leaders were scheduled to make to the Polish capital, Warsaw, on Sept. 1. Bolton explained that lifting the hold on the security assistance would depend on Zelensky favorably impressing Trump.
However, Trump canceled his trip to Warsaw, his meeting with Zelensky did not happen and the military aid continued to be withheld.
Holmes said he heard Bolton express his frustrations to Taylor about Giuliani’s influence with the president, but Bolton said he could not do anything about it. He suggested to the Ukrainian prosecutor general that Zelensky should open a channel with U.S. Attorney General William Barr to counter Giuliani’s attempts to form his own back-channels with Zelensky’s advisers.
Holmes said that Bolton was also irritated by Sondland’s “expansive interpretation of his mandate [in Ukraine].”
With approximately $400 million in vital security aid still blocked at the end of August, Holmes said, “my clear impression was that the security assistance hold was likely intended by the president either as an expression of dissatisfaction with the Ukrainians who had not yet agreed to the Burisma-Biden investigation or as an effort to increase the pressure on them to do so.”
On Sept. 8, Ambassador Taylor shocked Holmes when he said that “they,” which he understood to be “the three amigos,” were insisting that Zelensky publicly commit to an investigation in an interview with CNN.
“This was a demand that President Zelensky personally commit on a cable news channel to a specific investigation on President Trump’s political rival.”
Further contacts that Taylor and Holmes had with Ukrainian officials indicated to them that the Zelensky administration felt it had no choice but to do the interview, however reluctantly. But in the end, the interview did not happen.
Holmes said he was shocked again when, on July 18, the embassy learned that military aid for Ukraine had been suspended on the president’s orders without any explanation.
Contrary to the normal routine, the embassy did not receive a transcript of the July 25 phone call between the two presidents, and Taylor testified that he only saw it when it was publicly released in September.
That other phone call
Holmes came to testify because Ambassador Taylor, during his testimony last week, said Holmes had overheard a cellphone conversation between Sondland and Trump that shed light on what the president wanted from Zelensky and his attitude toward Ukraine. Holmes was then subpoenaed to appear before the committee.
Sondland did not mention the phone conversation when he gave his first deposition to the committee in October, but he admitted during his testimony on Nov. 20 that it had happened while he was sitting opposite Holmes at a Kyiv restaurant on July 26, the day after Trump spoke with Zelensky.
Just before they went to the restaurant, Sondland had met with a key Zelensky adviser but had excluded Holmes from the meeting.
Holmes said that although the phone was not on speaker, he could still hear Trump speaking so loudly that “when the president came on, [Sondland] sort of winced and held the phone away from his ear like this,” he said, mimicking the gesture with his hand.
Holmes said Sondland told Trump that “Zelensky loves your ass.”
Trump then asked: “So he’s going to do the investigation?” Sondland replied: “He’s going do it. …..President Zelensky will do anything you ask him to.”
Holmes said that after the call finished he asked Sondland to tell him about “Trump’s candid views on Ukraine” and asked him if it was true that he did not care about Ukraine.
Sondland agreed that Trump “did not give a shit about Ukraine” and only cared about “big stuff.” Holmes noted that Ukraine’s war against Russia was “big stuff,” but Sondland said Trump placed importance on matters that benefited him “like the Biden investigation that Giuliani was pushing.”
In his testimony the previous day, Sondland confirmed most of the points made by Holmes, although he said Trump had talked about an investigation into Burisma, not the Bidens.
Sondland said he was not aware that, at the time of the July 25 call, Trump had directly asked Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden.
Sondland said he believed military aid had been blocked to pressure Ukraine, although he claimed Trump had never told him that during the many personal calls he had with the president.
Eloquent calls for American support of Ukraine
Holmes told the committee why he believed American support for Ukraine was essential, saying: “Today [Nov.21] marks exactly six years since throngs of pro-Western Ukrainians spontaneously gathered on Kyiv’s Independence Square to launch what became known as the Revolution of Dignity.”
The Russian occupation of Crimea followed, but despite that, Holmes said, Ukrainians have rebuilt a shattered economy, adhered to a peace process “and moved economically and socially closer to the West — toward our way of life.”
Holmes said that $1.5 billion in security assistance for Ukraine voted through with bipartisan Congressional support since the start of the conflict with Moscow in 2014 had provided “crucial material and moral support to Ukraine in its defensive war with Russia and has helped Ukraine build its armed forces virtually from scratch into, arguably, the most capable and battle-hardened land force in Europe.”
“Ukrainians want to hear clear and unambiguous reaffirmation that our long-standing bipartisan policy of strong support for Ukraine remains unchanged and that we fully back it at the highest levels. Now is not the time to retreat from our relationship with Ukraine but rather to double down on it,” he said.
“As we sit here today, Ukrainians are fighting a hot war on Ukrainian territory against Russian aggression… At a time of shifting allegiances and rising competitors in the world, we have no better friends than Ukraine — a scrappy, unbowed, determined and, above all, dignified people who are standing up against Russian authoritarianism and aggression. They deserve better.”
Nov. 21 was the last scheduled day of public hearings, although the House Intelligence Committee could arrange more if deemed necessary.
Inquiry chairman Adam Schiff said it was clear Trump had abused his power and tried to bribe another nation [Ukraine], adding that the actions were far graver than those of President Richard M. Nixon during the Watergate scandal in the 1970s.
Schiff said, “What we’re talking about here is the withholding… of military aid to an ally at war.”
There was nothing to indicate that the hearings had changed the minds of any Republican politicians, most of whom maintained that, as Ukraine had not provided the investigations and political dirt, Trump could not be blamed for anything.
However, one Republican member of the Intelligence Committee, Representative Will Hurd, admitted the Trump administration “undermined our national security and undercut Ukraine.” But he said it was not enough to warrant impeachment. “An impeachable offense should be compelling, overwhelmingly clear and unambiguous. And it’s not something to be rushed or taken lightly. I have not heard evidence proving the president committed bribery or extortion.”
The committee adjourned for next week’s Thanksgiving holiday and will then lay its findings before the House. Lawmakers will likely vote along party lines, and, as Democrats are in a majority, Trump will probably be impeached.
But Republicans dominate the Senate, where any impeachment trial will be held. It is unlikely that the two-thirds majority needed for a conviction can be mustered.
Although the proceedings have seen much talk from Trump supporters about Ukraine’s supposed rampant corruption, it has also been the stage for many eloquent and moving pronouncements of support for Ukraine.
Every witness has said that helping Ukraine fight Russian aggression is in America’s national interests. They and the politicians participating in the inquiry — both Democrats and Republicans — have praised the courage of Ukraine’s people in the battle to defend shared values and said that assistance must continue unhindered.
