Impeachment Star Witness Hid from Congress Her Role in Steele Dossier

Jan. 31 , 2021 (EIRNS)—Fiona Hill, the top Russia expert in the Trump Administration, who served as one of the Democrats’ star witnesses in Trump’s first impeachment trial, is shown to have been the person who introduced former British MI6 spy Christopher Steele to a former think-tank analyst who would serve as the primary source for the infamous dossier he compiled for Hillary Clinton’s campaign against President Donald Trump. The revelations come from FBI notes on their interviews with Steele and his source that President Trump had declassified on Jan. 19, Daily Caller’s Chuck Ross reported on Jan. 21. Ross’s coverage also relies on a Jan. 20 article for “Just the News” by investigative reporter John Solomon.

Hill, the National Security Council director for Russia and Eurasia in most of Trump’s administration, introduced Steele to Igor Danchenko in 2011, according to a summary of Steele’s interviews with the FBI in September 2017, but kept her role in the introduction secret, including during congressional testimony she gave as part of the Trump impeachment hearings in November 2019 reported Ross.

Ross writes that Steele, in his notes, says Hill knew that Danchenko, Steele’s source, was involved in the creation of the dossier with Steele. But Hill told Congress in a closed-door deposition of Oct. 14, 2019 that she was “shocked” when she learned that Steele had written the dossier: “I almost fell over when I discovered that he was doing this report,” Hill said of Steele. She had belittled the report in that deposition, intimating she thought it bore hallmarks of “Russian disinformation.” However, when it became public that Steele was the author, she continued to cover her role in having introduced Steele to Danchenko, both in her remarks to the media and in later testimony.