What Hill said about Christopher Steele!

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 25, 2019

Things you won't hear on cable: In last Saturday's report, we showed you some of the things Fiona Hill actually said.

More specifically, we posted some of the things you won't see on "liberal cable," despite the status to which Hill rose as a result of her appearance.

For obvious reasons, Hill was quickly accepted as a brilliant, near-oracular figure. But uh-oh! Some of the things she said!

Among other things, she said "the Ukrainian government...bet on Hillary Clinton winning the [2016] election."

She said "they were trying to curry favor with the Clinton campaign, it’s quite evident here."

She listed Ukrainian officials, including Ambassador Chaly (at the time, Ukraine's ambassador to the U.S.), among the people who "made some pretty unpleasant statements or ill-advised op-eds" during the campaign.

She seemed to say that officials from many governments, including Ukraine's, had made disparaging comments about Candidate Trump. She said she couldn't blame President Trump for feeling aggrieved about these statements.

She affirmed this January 2017 report by the New York Times' Kenneth Vogel, then of Politico. In the last few weeks, Vogel has been taking a lot of rather peculiar guff for his apparently accurate report, in which he listed Ukrainian criticisms of Candidate Trump during Campaign 2016.

Importantly, Hill also said there "was little evidence of a top-down effort by Ukraine" to monkey with the U.S. election. She stressed the fact that Ukrainian conduct can't be compared to the top-down effort which came from the Russian government.

We reproduced the statements in question because we were appalled by the absurdly selective presentation we'd seen the night before on the Maddow TV program. As usual, Maddow engaged in substantial picking and choosing about what her viewers would be allowed to hear, with grossly misleading embellishments added to the mix.

(That, plus all the mugging and clowning! It's so much fun to watch!)

The other tribe gets propagandized on Fox, but our tribe gets propagandized in various places too. Today and tomorrow, we're going to show you a few more things Hill said during her widely-lauded appearance—more specifically, things which will get repeated on Fox but not in more righteous forums.

Trigger warning! The remarks we show you today were made during questioning by Jim Jordan. They involve Hill's assessment of Christopher Steele and the Steele dossier. The Q-and-A went like this:

REP. SCHIFF (11/21/19): Mr. Jordan.

REP. JORDAN: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Dr. Hill, during your deposition, I asked you, “Was Christopher Steele’s dossier a rabbit hole?” Do you remember the answer you gave to that question?

HILL: Yes, I thought it was a rabbit hole.

REP. JORDAN: Yeah, and you also said, a couple of pages later in the deposition or in the transcript that I have here of your deposition, that you thought he got played. Is that fair?

HILL: That is fair, yes.

From there, Jordan orated at length, specifically claiming that Steele got played by Russian intelligence services, etc. and so forth and so on.

As you can see from the transcript, Jordan's oration ate the rest of his time, and Hill wasn't asked to respond. We don't know what she would have said if she;d been asked to assess Jordan's statements.

We also don't know exactly what Hill meant when she said that Steele "got played." We don't know exactly what she meant when she said the Steele dossier had been "a rabbit hole."

We also don't know if Hill is right in her assessments of Steele and the dossier. We're showing you this chunk of transcript because people will hear about it on Fox, and people on our channels won't.

People get shown and told certain things on Fox. We're often shown and told different things on liberal cable, and we often get misled by Rachel.

In our view, this is the problem we're all currently living with. With time off got a holiday, we'll be discussing this problem all week.

Also, this exchange: Earlier, Devin Nunes had asked Hill various questions about the dossier.

You can find the full exchange within the transcript. This Q-and-A occurred:

REP. NUNES: You mentioned in your deposition also that you thought that it was a, let’s get the exact quote, that “the dossier was a rabbit hole.”

Is that still your testimony?

HILL: That’s correct.

We don't know exactly what that statement means. We don't know if Hill's assessment of the dossier is correct. We do know this:

They'll be told about these statements on Fox. Our own multimillionaire corporate-paid minders will keep such knowledge from us.

This is the problem we're all living with. It's an ancient tribal problem, and a difficult problem to solve.