WASHINGTON When the impeachment inquiry opened in September, it centered on a single question: Did President Donald Trump block U.S. military aid to muscle Ukraine into investigating Joe Biden and others, and risk national security to boost his reelection campaign?
The evidence is steadily mounting that he did.
Now, the scandal is expanding.
It has intersected with the federal prosecution of two Soviet-born associates of Trumps buccaneering personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, for allegedly funneling Russian money into a U.S. political campaign.
It has revealed further Russian influence in our politics, the exploitation of Moscow-style disinformation to take down a respected U.S. ambassador and smear a potential Democratic rival to Trump.
Most important, it has begun to feature a shadowy figure who always seems to be just offstage: Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Russia was repeatedly invoked on Friday by Marie Yovanovitch, the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, as she recounted Giulianis successful campaign to get her ousted from Kyiv apparently because her anti-corruption efforts there got in the way of his clients business.
How is it that foreign corrupt interests could manipulate our government? she asked during a day of riveting testimony before the House Intelligence Committee. Which countrys interests are served when the very corrupt behavior we have been criticizing is allowed to prevail?
She answered her own question.
Such conduct undermines the U.S. … and widens the playing field for autocrats like President Putin, she said.
This week, Putin will move onto center stage when the House committee questions Fiona Hill, a former CIA analyst who worked inside the Trump White House for more than two years.
Hill is a leading authority on Putin. She was hired by Trumps first national security advisor, Michael Flynn, and kept on by Flynns successors, H.R. McMaster and John Bolton. All three quit or were pushed out.
But Hill remained the White Houses top Putinologist until she resigned in July. Shes not a never Trumper.
And what she has to say is chilling.
Corruption is our Achilles heel, she told the House committee in her closed-door deposition last month. Corruption is the way President Putin and other nefarious actors, be they from China, Iran or North Korea, access our system.
Putin has been trying to compromise influential Americans since the 1970s, when he began his KGB career as a case officer in Leningrad, she said.
She did not charge that Putin had succeeded in compromising Trump. But she said Trumps history as a businessman who spent years trying to land a real estate project in Moscow put him in Putins sights long ago.
Its what Putin did, she said. They went after American businessmen and set up sting operations.
We know that Russian intelligence escalated its operations on U.S. soil during the 2016 election. But Hill says Putin not only targeted Trump, but was targeting all of the other campaigns as well.
