Impeachment Made Simple: Day Five
By: Julie Mcclung Peck
Tags: Current Events, Resistance, Ukraine, Politics, Impeachment

I have just two words to say about Day Five, the final day of the public impeachment hearings.

Those words are Fiona Hill.

CNN’s Maeve Reston may have put it best:

Fiona Hill said this week that her only agenda was to serve as a fact witness for the House Intelligence Committee. But as the hearings fade into history, Hill’s legacy will be that of a woman who called out a dais full of powerful men for spouting fiction and suggested they ought to pay more attention when a woman shows anger, instead of brushing it off as an emotional reaction.

Sure, David Holmes, a political counselor at the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine also testified. A late addition to the schedule, Holmes added detail to the call he overheard between POTUS and Ambassador Gordon Sondland back on July 26, as well as surrounding his conversation with Sondland following the call. Holmes also put up with quite a bit of hectoring from the minority members of the combined committees and even clapped back at one point, which the Internet loved.

YouTube: Fox 10 Phoenix

Holmes claps back at the Republicans. (Source: Screenshot Author; Twitter Kyle Griffin)

But regardless of Holmes’ pizzazz (“pizzazz,” at the end of the day, being the Twitterverse’s favorite meme of the hearings, thanks to NBC), it was Hill who won the day with her intellect and her take-no-prisoners testimony.

Chief among the highlights was Hill disabusing the committee members of the notion that Ukraine had anything to do with 2016 election meddling.

YouTube: The Guardian

You may notice that I’ve diverged from my previous formula of analyzing the effectiveness of a given witness’ testimony through the lens of my mother’s understanding, using her as kind of an “everyman.” It’s hard to be objective when talking about Hill, though, as the Internet quickly realized, making her trend on Twitter and spawning the hashtag #FionaHillFanClub — thanks, no less, to George Conway.

The Fiona Hill Fan Club is born. (Screenshot: Author; Twitter @gtconway3d, @annelisenc)

All joking aside, at the conclusion of her opening statement, Dr. Hill delivered a serious warning for an American public already in the thick of the run-up to the 2020 election:

President Putin and the Russian Security Services operate like a super PAC. They deploy millions of dollars to weaponize our own political opposition research and false narratives. When we are consumed by partisan rancor, we cannot combat these external forces as they seek to divide us against each other, degrade our institutions, and destroy the faith of the American people in our democracy.

In her testimony, she also substantiated her observation of the quid pro quo, that it was apparent well before the call:

I left on July 19th, and the call took place the following week. In the months leading up to that, from May onwards, it became very clear that the White House meeting itself was being predicated on other issues, namely investigations and the questions about the election interference in 2016.

Correlating her testimony with that of previous witnesses, that would mean that the plan came to Dr. Hill’s attention in May and landed on the Ukrainians’ radar no later than the end of June (that from Laura Cooper on Wednesday).