Fiona Hill - memorable (British born) Putin expert who testified at Bunker Baby's Impeachment hearings.
www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/12/fiona-hill-trump-putin-populism-interview?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
.... She was recruited into the Trump administration by KT McFarland, a Fox News talkshow host who had been made deputy national security adviser. McFarland had had Hill on her show several times to talk about Russia and Putin (Hill is the co-author of a well-regarded portrait of the Russian president, Mr Putin: Operative in the Kremlin.)
Now she was inside the White House, McFarland wanted Hill at her side giving Trump briefings on Russia, as she had done for George W Bush and Barack Obama.
“I think honestly, they got this idea initially that I could sit down with the president and do a bit of a spiel on Putin but it just never worked out like that,” she said. “He just wanted to get on with it himself.”
Hill’s first Oval Office encounter with Trump was inauspicious. It was on 3 April 2017. She was on her first day of orientation, but there had been a terror attack on the St Petersburg metro and she was called in to brief the president.
She remembers only having her running shoes on, having left home in a rush, leaving her work shoes behind, and trying to hide her feet under her chair. She need not have worried.
“Trump didn’t look up when I came in and I don’t think he looked up the whole time I was giving my spiel about the terrorist attack,” Hill said. The president was busy writing something on a pad on his desk. “And then Ivanka came in and sat down next to me, the first thing she did was look at my shoes.”
..... For the record, she is dismissive of the Manchurian Candidate theory that Trump was somehow controlled by Putin through the use of kompromat. She knew Christopher Steele, the former MI6 officer, from an earlier job in the national intelligence council. He was her counterpart, and she was taken by surprise when his dossier on Trump and Russia emerged.
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