Ukraine impeachment witness Fiona Hill said Democrats are pushing Russian disinformation when they call President Trump an “illegitimate” leader.
Hill, the Trump administration’s former Russia expert on the National Security Council, told 60 Minutes about what she viewed as being Russian President Vladimir Putin’s nefarious meddling in U.S. politics, and said both Republicans and Democrats helped spread Russian propaganda.
“What about the Democrats?” CBS News’s Lesley Stahl asked Hill in the interview that aired Sunday evening. “Have they also propagated any Russian disinformation?”
“Yes, they have,” Hill said. “I mean in the sense of talking about the president as being illegitimate.”
Hill, who provided testimony last year in the Democratic-led House impeachment effort against the president and is now back at the Brookings Institution, said: “Putin, sadly, has got all of our political class, every single one of us, including the media, exactly where he wants us.”
“He’s got us feeling vulnerable. He’s got us feeling on edge. And he’s got us questioning the legitimacy of our own systems,” the former national security official said.
Stahl asked how much of the polarization in the U.S. stemmed from Russian meddling.
“Well certainly in 2016 a lot of it did,” Hill said. “The Russians understand a lot of those divisions, and they understand how to exploit them.”
In her view, Republicans also pushed Russian disinformation, repeating her impeachment testimony that allegations of Ukrainian election interference in the 2016 presidential election were “a fictional narrative that has been propagated by the Russian intelligence services.”
Stahl also asked Hill if it made sense that the Russians would want Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders to be the Democratic nominee in 2020.
“It does make sense to me because what the Russians are looking for is the two candidates who are polar opposites,” she said. “They’re looking to have, basically, the smallest number of people supporting those two candidates, with everyone else lost in the middle. So it exacerbates, and exaggerates as well, the polarization in the country.”
Sanders was briefed in January about the Russian interference effort.
“I don’t care, frankly, who Putin wants to be president,” Sanders said in a statement in February. “My message to Putin is clear: Stay out of American elections.”
Hill testified last year that British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s controversial Trump-Russia dossier, which had Democratic benefactors, was a “rabbit hole” that “very likely” contained Russian disinformation and said that Steele “could have been played” by the Russians. Steele has defended his work, but Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz identified at least 17 “significant errors or omissions” in the Justice Department’s and the FBI’s use of Steele’s dossier when pursuing Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants to wiretap Trump campaign associate Carter Page.
The U.S. intelligence community concluded in 2017 that Russian military intelligence was responsible for hacking thousands of Democratic emails and providing those stolen records to WikiLeaks to harm Hillary Clinton, a finding bolstered by special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. House and Senate investigations also concluded the Kremlin interfered.
The U.S. intelligence community also disputed leaks to the media about a classified House Intelligence Committee briefing last month, denying that lawmakers were told that Russia is attempting to help Trump in 2020.
The State Department’s top counterpropaganda official Lea Gabrielle testified last week that Russia has mobilized “an entire ecosystem” of disinformation to prey on global fears that have accompanied the outbreak of the coronavirus.
