Fiona Hill

And a lot of people I worked with in government, like myself, naturalized Americans, a lot of them were immigrants, many were refugees.

And many people had fought in wars on behalf of the United States and Iraq and Afghanistan being blown up.

And, you know, they put their lives on the line.

They put their family lives on the line.

because they believed in America.

And they were reflections of Americans from all kinds of walks of life.

It's what really made that cliche of America great.

It wasn't whatever it was that was being bandied around in these crude, crass political terms.

It was just the strength of an incredible set of people who've come together from all kinds of places and decided that they're going to make a go of it and that they're going to try to work towards the whole idea of the preamble of the Constitution.

towards a more perfect union.

And I saw people doing that every single day, despite all of the things that they could criticize about the United States, still believing in what they were doing and believing in the promise of the country, which is what I felt like.

And then here we were, people were just treating it like a game.

And they were treating people like dirt.

And they were just playing games with people's lives.

I mean, we all had death threats.

People's whole careers, which were not just careers for their own self-aggrandizement, but careers of public service, trying to give something back, were being shattered.

And I just thought to myself, I'm not going to let that happen.

Because, you know, I've come from a, well, are they going to send me back to Bishop Auckland in County Durham?

Fine.

I'm totally fine to go back, you know, because I could do something back there.