If any American knew and was willing to confess that President Trump did in fact collude with the Russians to influence domestic election outcomes, it would be Fiona Hill. Reportedly nicknamed the “Russia bitch” by top administration officials such as Reince Priebus, Hill served as the senior director for European and Russian affairs for the National Security Council despite her liberal pedigree from her tenure at the Brookings Institution and academia.
Based solely on personal grievances, she had no reason not to spill the beans on Trump’s alleged malfeasance. Yet, despite providing testimony about the administration’s dealing’s with Ukraine, Hill maintained that the goal of the Russians was not to collude with Trump, but to delegitimize his office.
Now in a New Yorker profile, Hill puts what ought to be (but surely won’t be) the final nail in the coffin of the Russia collusion conspiracy theory. Instead, she quite honestly explains that Trump’s freewheeling, risky discourse with foreign dictators lacks not only malicious intent, but any intent at all.
“While many people in Washington believed that Trump’s friendly treatment of Putin was evidence of collusion, Hill saw the behavior as part of a pattern,” Adam Entous writes. “Trump was equally reluctant to criticize other autocratic leaders, including President Xi Jinping, of China, and President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, of Turkey.”
Whereas the Resistance mob tried to paint Trump as a maniacal genius, Hill saw what most non-crazy people suspected: that Trump treats his presidency like a business and diplomacy like dealmaking.
“He just wants to go in and shoot the breeze with these guys, because he thinks he’s got great chemistry with them,” Hill said.
Although Hill’s portrayal of Trump is hardly flattering, she saves her most scathing indictment for the press. Entous writes:
As Hill states, if she had thought Trump was colluding with Putin, she would have quit. Unlike the armchair experts in the commentariat, Hill understood that Putin’s primary goal was to sow discord in America and weaken the presidency’s power, not to empower Trump. By all accounts, she served the people faithfully in her position as the premier expert in subverting Russian aggression. Her loyalty toward the administration seems unimpeachable. She describes her rage not at the false rumor that she wrote the anonymous opinion article for the New York Times, but that anyone sought to undermine trust in the government in such a manner.
In short, Hill knows that in Trump’s case, it’s incorrect to ascribe to malice what mannerism and shortsightedness can easily explain. If the nation’s leading expert on Russian interference in our politics (and one with every reason to loathe the Trump administration) doesn’t buy the Russia collusion farce, then there’s no excuse for anyone else.
