Bureaucratic wing-nuts never pay a price, and they play by a different set of rules. Fiona Hill is one of those people. You’ll probably remember her face from Trump’s first impeachment where she posed as one of the Democrats’ star witnesses. She was lauded as a consummate public servant with unimpeachable credibility. Most of the useless politicians in the GOP also treated her with kid gloves.

Meanwhile, in a shocking, completely unexpected development, it turns out that Hill lied about her contacts with Christopher Steele, author of the famed (and pure garbage) Trump Dossier.

Source tells me that Fiona Hill *did not* tell Congress about the full extent of her contacts with Christopher Steele, who says she introduced him to the Brookings analyst who would later be the primary dossier source. https://t.co/IdV3tP0ZpK

— Chuck Ross (@ChuckRossDC) January 21, 2021

Fiona Hill, a top Russia expert in the Trump administration, was the person who introduced former British spy Christopher Steele to a former think tank analyst who would serve as the primary source for an infamous dossier he compiled on President Donald Trump, according to newly declassified FBI notes.

Hill, who was the director for Russia and Eurasia on the National Security Council during most of the Trump administration, introduced Steele in 2011 to Igor Danchenko, according to a summary of Steele’s interviews with the FBI in September 2017.

Hill kept secret her role introducing Steele and Danchenko all throughout her tenure in the Trump administration, as well as during congressional testimony she gave as part of the Trump impeachment hearings in November 2019.

Hill’s role in linking Steele to Danchenko was revealed on Tuesday, with the declassification of notes from interviews that Steele had with investigators working for the special counsel’s office in September 2017.

The reason this is all coming out now is because of a recent declassification of Steele’s notes. During Trump’s impeachment, Hill played dumb on the Trump Dossier. In reality, she was at the center of what can only be described as a scandal, with a then government official having been the one who introduced Steele to person that would later become his primary source, a source which turned out to be peddling made-up nonsense. Steele also described Hill as one of his “close friends” according to The Daily Caller report.

How involved she was once Trump came onto the scene is anyone’s guess. No one is going to actually investigate now, nor would she pay a price anyway. But it seems unlikely that she wasn’t aware of what Steele was working on. In fact, Steele claims she did know that Danchenko, the source, was involved in the creation of the dossier. It’s a very big lie by omission to not mention that to Congress. Hill also apparently concealed a meeting in 2016 with Steele, which he claims in his notes took place.

Hill acted shocked at even knowing Steele had written the dossier when questioned on it.

Hill told lawmakers in a closed-door deposition on Nov. 14, 2019, that she was “shocked” when she learned that Steele wrote the dossier. She said she had met Steele in the 2000s, when he was an officer at MI6 and she was a national intelligence officer for the U.S. intelligence community.

“I almost fell over when I discovered that he was doing this report,” Hill said of Steele.

Yeah, I bet.

Her characterization of her knowledge seems completely improbable at this point. Not only was she friends with Steele, she knew the sub-source, recommended him, and met again with Steele in 2016. In other words, she almost certainly knew what was going on. Yet, to save her own skin, she tried to play it off as if she were actually concerned Steele had fallen for Russian disinformation. Again, she’s the one who gave him his source. Did she knowingly recommend a Russian agent?

But she’s a bureaucrat so she has the magic shield of invulnerability. No one will pay a price for this travesty, especially with Trump out of office. The clock was successfully run out, and it’s now back to business as usual.

(Please follow me on Twitter…@bonchieredstate)