Fiona Hill

I mean, this is for Putin and for the Russians, this was just an incredibly fertile ground.

Yeah.

And, you know, Donald Trump didn't want to rein in any of the nefarious activity because he wanted to conduct the same nefarious activity himself.

But he's doing all of this in parallel.

Yeah.

And I think, you know, what became very clear to me as well, you know, during that whole series of testimonies leading up to the impeachment and then the impeachment trial itself, there was, you know, this whole parallel universe that was, you know, there alongside the, you know, seeming formalization and formality of state affairs, US to Russia, in which there was just a whole cast of characters around President Trump and his entourage who were just doing something entirely different.

And you might remember that I actually did say something along those lines of, you know, domestic political errands.

You know, that Gordon Sondland, the former U.S.

ambassador to the European Union, was engaging in.

Well, no, it's all domestic political errands.

And that parallel, you know, set of people, the operators around Trump, they're the people who are in charge.

And Marco Rubio is just a fig leaf.

He's kind of a, you know, the stand in for the state.

He's running two jobs at the same time as national security advisor and secretary of state.

But, you know, everything else is just is a crony, a close crony of Trump.

Doing, you know, basically the president's bidding.

And so, you know, that's kind of even more so playing in Putin's favor, because that's the kind of environment that he loves to operate in.

So Putin is the operative in the Kremlin and all of the United States is operating in a similar way of backdoor deals, you know, business transactions operations.

you know, all kinds of nefarious activities and all on compromising information and hardball tactics.

And, you know, this is just a world in which Vladimir Putin flourishes.