Committees release depositions of Fiona Hill, former aide to John Bolton and Lt Col Alexander S Vindman, top Ukraine expert The House committees released highlights of key passages in the transcripts (which combined are 786 pages long). Here is the top highlight from Fiona Hill, former aide to national security adviser John Bolton:
“I went back to talk to Ambassador Bolton. And Ambassador Bolton asked me to go over and report this to our NSC counsel, to John Eisenberg. And he told me, and this is a direct quote from Ambassador Bolton: You go and tell Eisenberg that I am not part of whatever drug deal Sondland and Mulvaney are cooking up on this, and you go and tell him what you’ve heard and what I’ve said. So I went over to talk to John Eisenberg about this. … I told him exactly, you know, what had transpired and that Ambassador Sondland had basically indicated that there was agreement with the chief of staff that they would have a White House meeting or, you know, a Presidential meeting if the Ukrainians started up these investigations again. And the main thing that I was personally concerned about, as I said to John, was that he did this in front of the Ukrainians.” The House impeachment committees have just released a transcript of the deposition of Fiona Hill, a former aide to US national security adviser John Bolton, and Lt Col Alexander S Vindman’s, the top Ukraine expert on the National Security Council. Previous reports of her testimony, which lasted 10 hours, said Hill claims Bolton was alarmed by the back-channel efforts to pressure Ukraine. Vindman reportedly expressed concerns in his testimony that the president and his allies were trying to enlish Ukraine into a campaign to smear political rivals. Continue reading... |