White House officials are pushing for Fiona Hill, the National Security Council’s director for Europe and Russia who is an outspoken critic of the Kremlin, to be in the room when President Trump meets with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Germany later this week.
According to a report in the Daily Beast on Wednesday, senior Trump administration officials want Hill to participate in Friday’s meeting on the sidelines of the Group of 20 economic summit in Hamburg, Germany, as a way to temper any potential effort by Trump to overly appease Putin.
Trump has spoken positively of Putin in the past, and has repeatedly said he hopes to work closer with Russia on counterterrorism issues.
Hill, formerly a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, has expressed misgivings about attempts to normalize relations with Putin.
In a November article in the Atlantic, Hill was quoted as predicting the U.S. and Russia were “going to have an awful lot of friction” during the Trump administration.
“Trump isn’t exactly the most diplomatic of people,” Hill said, “So I imagine he’ll fall out with his new friend Vladimir pretty quickly.”
In her 2013 book Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin, Hill described Putin as willing to use “forms of blackmail, intimidation, punishment, and blatant distortion of the truth” to defend Russia.
The Daily Beast says White House officials are wary of appearing too close to Russia at a time when special counsel Robert Mueller and Congress are investigating the Kremlin for its interference in the 2016 election, and possible collusion with the Trump campaign.
Hill is already in Hamburg preparing, the Daily Beast reports, although there has been no formal announcement about who will attend the Trump-Putin meeting.
“We’ve clearly had an optics problem [on this issue],” a White House official said told the Daily Beast. “This [Hill attending the meeting] would be one small corrective.”
