Fiona Hill: Trump comparison to Navalny ‘brazen’ and ‘shameful’

Former National Security Council (NSC) adviser Fiona Hill went after former President Trump on Sunday after he compared himself to the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny as a fellow political dissident.

Trump dubbed himself a “proud political dissident” in a Saturday speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference, just days after Navalny died in what is believed to be a political assassination.

Hill served as a senior director for the NSC during the Trump administration, focusing on Europe and Russia policy. She also captured national attention when she testified at Trump’s first impeachment hearing in 2019 over abuse of power that involved a call about withholding military aid to Ukraine for not investigating Trump’s political opponent at the time, Joe Biden.

“What he’s doing in the most brazen and frankly shameful fashion is trying to suggest that the United States is like Putin’s Russia,” she said in a CBS “Face the Nation” interview with Margaret Brennan on Sunday, referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin. 

“Since when have we been assassinating our opposition candidates in this country? Since when has the president of the United States been wanting to take out political opponents through poisoning or through imprisoning them in, basically the equivalent of Arctic penal colonies?” she continued. “What President Trump is doing is degrading the United States.”

Trump initially did not speak about Navalny’s death until days later, when he compared the situation to his own criminal legal cases. The next day, he said a civil trial verdict against him was a “form of Navalny.”

Hill also criticized the former president for continuously being reluctant to denounce Putin.

“Former President Trump has made it very clear that he admires Vladimir Putin,” she said. “He continues to really extol him, despite all of the evidence to the [contrary] for what his view should be here, that Putin is an avowed enemy at this particular point to the United States.”