Fiona Hill Testifies She Told Sondland His ‘Political Errand’ For Trump Was ‘All Going to Blow Up’

The White House’s former top Russia expert Fiona Hill appeared to undermine a key argument defending President Donald Trump’s actions in Ukraine on Thursday, testifying Gordon Sondland was on a “domestic political errand” unknown to other diplomats.

During questioning by GOP counsel Steve Castor, Hill testified she had a “blow-up” with Sondland, the ambassador to the E.U., about his mission in Ukraine. She testified that she found that Sondland was acting on different orders than other diplomats in Ukraine.

“I was actually, to be honest, angry with him many times, and he deflected that on other people,” she said. “What I was angry about was he wasn’t communicating with us. I realized reading his deposition that he was absolutely right. He wasn’t communicating with us because we didn’t agree with what he was doing.”

“He was being involved in a domestic political errand and we were involved in national foreign policy and those two things had just diverged,” she continued. “I did say to him, Ambassador Sondland, ‘Gordon, I think this is all going to blow up,’ and here we are.”

“Ambassador Sondland was not wrong that he had been given instructions — that he had been instructed to carry out and we were doing something that we thought was just as, or perhaps even more, important but it wasn’t in the same channel,” Hill said, indicating there was a separate channel to conduct Trump’s personal political investigations.

Devin Nunes then interjected to ask, “At the end of the day, isn’t it the commander in chief that makes those decisions?”

“My point, Mr. Nunes, is we at the National Security Council were not told… that we were supposed to be focused on these issues,” she said. “I was given a directive on July 10th by Ambassador [John] Bolton to stay out of domestic politics.”

Watch above, via CNN.