Fiona Hill testimony demolishes Christopher Steele dossier and media reporting, Scathing portrayal of Steele, President was attacked as well

• Fiona Hill, who was the top Russia expert at the White House, told lawmakers in October that she believed Russians fed disinformation to dossier author Christopher Steele.
• Hill offered a scathing portrayed of Steele during a deposition she gave as part of the Democratic-led impeachment inquiry of President Donald Trump. 
• Hill said she was “shocked” to find out that Steele was the author of the dossier, in part because she had known him to “constantly try to drum up business.” 
• The FBI relied heavily on Steele’s information for its investigation into possible Trump-Russia collusion.

A former White House official who Democrats consider a key witness in their impeachment inquiry told lawmakers in October that she believed Russians likely planted disinformation about President Donald Trump with dossier author Christopher Steele.

Fiona Hill, who served as the White House’s top adviser on Russia affairs until July, told lawmakers she was “shocked” to find out that Steele, a former MI6 officer, was the author of the dossier. That’s in large part because when she had met with Steele in the years leading up to his dossier work, he was “constantly try to drum up business.”

“Because if you also think about it, the Russians would have an ax to grind against him given the job that he had previously. And if he started going back through his old contacts and asking about, that would be a perfect opportunity for people to feed some kind of misinformation,” said Hill, who was a scholar at the Brookings Institution until she joined the Trump administration.

Hill said she was not aware of the dossier until a colleague showed it to her day before BuzzFeed published it on Jan. 10, 2017.

When she read the report, Hill said she had “misgivings and concern that [Steele] could have been played.”

“I almost fell over when I discovered that he was doing this report,” Hill said of Steele, who she said she worked with from 2006 to 2009, when she served as a national intelligence officer.

Hill said she met most recently with Steele in 2016 and saw from those meetings that he “was clearly very interested in building up a client base.”

“And this is why I was concerned about the Steele report because that is a vulnerability,” said Hill.

“Christopher Steele going out and looking for information. He’s obviously out there soliciting information,” she added. “What a great opportunity to, basically, you know, present him with information that he’s looking for that can be couched some truth and some disinformation.”