Trump's former Russia advisor says he didn't consider her 'part of his team' because she was a woman

Fiona Hill, former senior director for Europe and Russia on the National Security Council, takes her seat to testify at a House Intelligence Committee hearing as part of the impeachment inquiry into U.S. President Donald Trump.
Loren Hill/Reuters

Trump's ex-Russia advisor said he didn't consider her a "part of his team" because she was a woman.
"As far as President Trump was concerned, my academic and professional credentials and expertise were irrelevant," Fiona Hill wrote.
"For all intents and purposes, as a woman and an outsider, I was not part of his team," she added.
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The top Russia expert in the Trump administration said then President Donald Trump didn't consider her a "part of his team" in large part because she was a woman.

That's according to Fiona Hill's new book, "There Is Nothing For You Here: Finding Opportunity in the 21st Century."

Hill, who served as the senior director for European and Russian affairs on the National Security Council under Trump, wrote that it became clear in her first couple of weeks on the job that she was never going to get a one-on-one meeting with the president.

"I was never going to have any kind of sit-down with Donald Trump to talk about Vladimir Putin or Russia, or pretty much anything else in my portfolio," she wrote. "One of the major reasons was that I was a woman, and a completely unknown quantity at that. These two factors became critical in shaping my time in the NSC."

Hill said those factors became the main obstacle to her "doing the job" she had been hired for.

"As far as President Trump was concerned, my academic and professional credentials and expertise were irrelevant. For all intents and purposes, as a woman and an outsider, I was not part of his team," she wrote.

She said that her work was further complicated by the fact that her boss, H.R. McMaster, was also unfamiliar to Trump.

"He was in the process of figuring out for himself how to navigate the White House when I came on board," Hill wrote. "Our mutual lack of familiarity with Trump and his team would prove to be a huge obstacle in the year ahead."

Hill maintained a relatively low profile after joining the Trump administration in April 2017. But she catapulted into the spotlight in 2019, amid the House of Representatives' impeachment inquiry into Trump's efforts to strongarm the Ukrainian government into launching politically motivated investigations targeting the Bidens.

Hill was one of several career officials who testified about Trump's pressure campaign against Ukraine. Among other things, she told lawmakers that she was "shocked" and "saddened" when she read a transcript of a July 2019 phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, in which Trump asked Zelensky to "do us a favor" and investigate the Bidens.

"I sat in an awful lot of calls, and I have not seen anything like this. And I was there for 2 and a half years. So I was just shocked," Hill testified. She also told lawmakers that her boss, then national security advisor John Bolton, referred to the pressure campaign as a "drug deal" he didn't want to be a part of.

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