"I said to him. . . I think this is all going to blow up - and here we are."
Fiona Hill and David Holmes put a cocktail stick into the fictional narratives promoted by the GOP and the White House. She reminds us that there was a domestic political errand (“whatever drug deal that Sondland and Mulvaney are cooking up”) that was diverging from US national foreign policy.
Hill and Holmes testified there was no doubt that when Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani and other people referred to investigations of the energy company Burisma Holdings, what they really meant was Democratic presidential contender Joe Biden and his son Hunter, who sat on its board.
“It was very apparent to me that was what Rudy Giuliani intended, yes, intended to convey that Burisma was linked to the Bidens and he said this publicly, repeatedly,” Hill said.
Under questioning from Democratic counsel Dan Goldman, Holmes said he agreed that Burisma was “code” for the Bidens.
Two other key witnesses, Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland and former special envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker, both testified that they never made any such connection until after the rough transcript of Trump’s July 25 call with Ukraine’s president was made public.
www.bloomberg.com/...
Oddly, Devin Nunes and Steve Castor touched on these points at the beginning of the session.
(2015)
The United States is on a dangerous trajectory in its relations with Russia, a nuclear superpower that believes itself to be under direct threat. Several former U.S. officials and top think-tank experts released a report calling on the West to provide military support to Ukraine. (Two of them, our colleagues at the Brookings Institution, expanded on the report a week ago on this page [“Ukraine needs the West’s help now”].) The logic of sending weapons to Ukraine seems straightforward and is the same as the logic for economic sanctions: to change Vladimir Putin’s “calculus.” Increasing the Ukrainian army’s fighting capacity, the thinking goes, would allow it to kill more rebels and Russian soldiers, generating a backlash in Russia and ultimately forcing the Russian president to the negotiating table.
We strongly disagree. The evidence points in a different direction. If we follow the recommendations of this report, the Ukrainians won’t be the only ones caught in an escalating military conflict with Russia.
www.washingtonpost.com/...