More on Fiona Hill…She was known as a ‘realist’ on her views about Russia - and this article is from Sept 2018…so she hung around T for a while. She sounds like a straight shooter (so to speak.)
WASHINGTON — Three days after Chechen terrorists killed more than 300 people at a school they’d seized in southern Russia in 2004, Fiona Hill, a British-American scholar, visited Russian President Vladimir Putin at Novo-Ogaryovo, his estate outside of Moscow.
Hill was part of a delegation of Westerners invited to hear about how the Kremlin planned to counter the insurgency that had roiled Chechnya for more than a decade. She came away impressed and at least partially convinced, as she made evident in an op-ed subsequently published in the New York Times: “Stop Blaming Putin and Start Helping Him.”
Last summer, Hill sat across from the Russian president once again. This time, the setting was the presidential palace in Helsinki, at the bilateral summit between Putin and President Trump. Hill, who’d joined the National Security Council two months into the Trump presidency as director of Russian and European affairs, sat between White House chief of staff John Kelly and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo at a working lunch with senior diplomats. She was one of only two women in the room.
Coverage of the Helsinki summit focused on the joint press conference afterward, during which the American president declined to reprimand his Russian counterpart for interfering in the 2016 elections.
But Helsinki also represented a remarkable achievement for a woman who may understand Putin better than anyone in the American foreign policy establishment. Even more remarkable is that she has brought that expertise to an administration that has been accused of coddling the Kremlin.
For nearly two decades, Hill has followed Putin’s trajectory, from the glum apparatchik presiding over the chaotic post-Yeltsin years to the modern-day czar who flouts international law and is suspected of hiding tens of billions of dollars in personal wealth abroad. That has earned her a top position in a White House split between those who admire the Kremlin and those who fear it. Between them stands a coal miner’s daughter, trying to negotiate a path both factions can countenance.
Trump has bestowed considerable authority on a woman who has none of the usual markers of influence in the Trump administration. Hill is not a billionaire, nor a Fox News regular. She does not golf or tweet. In a city of partisanship and self-promotion, Hill eschews both. People who’ve known her for years profess not to know her political affiliation.
In that sense, she’s almost certainly not part of the “resistance” described in a recent op-ed in the New York Times by a senior member of the Trump administration, who praised the president’s national security team for countering Trump’s worst instincts, including his “preference for autocrats and dictators, such as President Vladimir Putin of Russia.” Hill was proposed by some, including CNN’s Chris Cillizza, as the author of the op-ed. But at least one person who knows her says that’s impossible. Little in her career suggests the kind of sly political maneuvering the Times op-ed represented.
Yet Hill and her peers have managed to craft a Russia policy that is, by any measure — sanctions, expulsions, military buildup — tougher than that of the Obama administration. Trump has not always championed this approach, but he apparently hasn’t hindered Hill and her colleagues on the National Security Council or in the State Department from doing their work. He has, in effect, sanctioned a Russia policy that is entirely at odds with his own pronouncements.
One person who knows Hill well and worked with her on the NSC says Hill is not a Russia “hawk,” a term that suggests a desire for war, but “a realist,” one who “doesn’t want to be duped by the Russians,” the former official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity in order not to jeopardize past or present professional affiliations. Hill, whom the NSC declined to make available for an interview, is also unlikely to be rattled by Trump’s tweets, or by the baroque shows of disloyalty that regularly emanate from the White House. “Her job is not to keep up with the craziness of D.C.,” the former official said. That may be why Hill has kept her job, even as many around her have lost theirs.
Wonder if Trump’s echo chamber will ask him anything about this – should be interesting to hear what spin he’s concocted.
