Fiona Hill

And they got crazy fairly fast.

Yeah, exactly.

Well, I would say that I wasn't in that team with those guys, you know, rents and people like that.

They never really gave me the time of day.

And it was really at that kind of, you know, lower working level where, as I said, I did know a lot of the people and some of them I'd worked with, you know, in other settings.

And look, I also had a lot of reminders from people, you know, I respected who, you know, were pretty adamant that I shouldn't do this.

And they were pretty angry with me for doing it.

And I took that on board.

It wasn't that I disregarded it and decided not to, because I felt at the time that it was an important thing to do.

And I'd really thought about it.

And I talked to a lot of people.

And it wasn't that, you know, kind of the people said I should do it outweigh the others.

It's just that, you know, in that particular context of what the Russians had been up to.

And, you know, the danger of that moment, you know, why then had I bothered started studying Russian, you know, back in the 1980s, you know, kind of when there was the risk of nuclear Armageddon, you know, and I'd learned all this stuff about Vladimir Putin, you know, and I just had to think that perhaps I might be able to nudge things, you know, kind of away from the precipice, if not in, you know, kind of a better direction.

And of course, you know, the idea that I might sit down with Trump and be able to tell him anything was dispelled on day one.

You know, because the whole idea that Katie McFarland and General Kellogg, you know, had actually laid out to me and not really General Flynn.

I mean, to be honest, I had like two phone calls of a couple of minutes each with him, you know, in which he just, you know, it didn't really impart anything of anything.

And then he'd gone before I'd even started.

But their idea was that I would be able to sit down with Trump and just have a plain, you know, discussion as an ordinary, you know, kind of,

you know, person, you know, written a book and done all these different things and just sort of tell him, you know, what Putin was like.