Fiona Hill

And I mean, I really saw that.

I saw that the United States was the gold standard for, you know, some of its institutions.

And I worked in the National Intelligence Council and I'd seen the way that the United States had tried to address the problems that it had faced in its whole botched

analysis of Iraq and this terrible strategic blunder of, honestly, a crime in my view of invading Iraq.

But the way that people were trying to deal with that in the aftermath.

I mean, I went into the National Intelligence Council, the DNI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence when they were coming to terms with what had gone wrong.

in the whole analysis about Iraq in 2003, you know, in the whole wake of people trying to pull together after 9-11 and to learn all of the lessons from all of this.

And I saw, you know, just really genuine striving and deliberation about what had gone wrong, what lessons could we learn from this?

And then suddenly I found myself in this, I couldn't really describe it in any way, this totally crazy looking glass thinking of, you know, Alice in Wonderland, Alice through the looking glass version of American politics.

I mean, I'd seen everything starting to unravel over a kind of a period of time before I'd been asked to be in the administration, but I did not expect it to be that bad.

I honestly didn't.

I mean, I'd been warned by people that this was, you know, kind of really a very serious turn that the United States had taken.

But I really thought that national security would still be uppermost in people's minds.

And it was with a lot of the people that I work with.

But what I found, you know, if you want to use that term of heartbreaking, was the way in which all of these principles that I had really bought into and tried to uphold in the United States government and in the things that we were trying to do with me and my colleagues was just being thrown out the window.

And I would have to step up in defense of them and in defense of my colleagues who were being lambasted and criticized and given death threats for actually standing up and doing their own jobs.

Not just on Ukraine, but on national security overall.

So, I mean, I'd gone through this whole period even before we got to that point.

I'm seeing non-partisan government officials being attacked from all sides, left and right, but especially the right, and being basically accused of being partisan hacks in a deep state, coup plotters, you know, you name it.

Their patriotism being questioned as well.