Fiona Hill
Fiona Hill is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution whose possesses the rare fusion of a luminescent mind and great rigor, with an enduring commitment to public service.
Hill grew up in economically depressed County Durham in northern England. Her father, a coal miner who saw limited opportunity there for his daughter, advised her, “There is nothing for you here.” Those words became the title of her 2021 memoir, tracing her journey from County Durham to the White House. Her working-class origins gave her an intuitive understanding of communities left behind by economic change and shaped her study of deindustrialization and political populism.
Heeding her father’s advice, Hill studied at the University of St Andrews and earned a doctorate in history from Harvard. She became an American citizen in 2002 and established herself as one of Washington’s leading authorities on Russia, Vladimir Putin, and authoritarian power.
From 2006 to 2009, Hill served as National Intelligence Officer for Russia and Eurasia across the George W. Bush and Obama administrations. She returned to government in 2017 as deputy assistant to the president and senior director for European and Russian affairs on the National Security Council. Hill regarded her work as service to the presidency and the Constitution, not personal service to a president.
Hill left the NSC shortly before Trump’s July 2019 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. She was not on that call, but she had witnessed the pressure campaign preceding it. At a July 10 White House meeting, she heard Ambassador Gordon Sondland connect a presidential meeting with Ukraine to proposed investigations. At National Security Adviser John Bolton’s direction, she reported the matter to NSC lawyers.
Subpoenaed during Trump’s first impeachment inquiry, Hill provided firsthand testimony about the effort to divert foreign policy toward what she called a “domestic political errand.” She also rejected the conspiracy theory that Ukraine, rather than Russia, had interfered in the 2016 election, warning that Russia was exploiting America’s divisions.
In March 2025, President Trump directed agencies to revoke any active security clearance held by Hill. She continues her work at Brookings and, since 2023, has served as chancellor of Durham University - a return to the region she had to leave. She testified despite pressure from the White House to prevent administration officials from cooperating with the inquiry.
“Russia is America’s Ghost of Christmas Future, a harbinger of things to come if we can’t adjust course and heal our political polarization.”
MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA - APRIL 20, 2024