Fiona Hill

I mean, there's a new book coming out by a couple of journalists in The Washington Post.

I haven't actually seen it yet, but I really did, you know, kind of worry that myself that it became a spectacle.

And although it actually, I think, in many respects was important in terms of an exercise of civic responsibility and, you know, gave people a big, massive lesson in civics.

Everyone's kind of running out and looking up the whole process of impeachment and what that meant and congressional prerogatives.

I was as well.

I was, you know, running off myself and, you know, trying to learn an enormous amount about it because I was in the middle of all of this.

That it didn't ultimately show responsibility and accountability, right?

And that in itself was weakened because on both sides, there was a lot of partisan politics.

I mean, I think that there was a dereliction of duty in many respects.

I mean, especially, I have to say, on the part of Republican members of Congress who were kind of, they should have been embracing Congress's prerogatives.

You could have kind of basically done this in something of a different way.

But the whole thing is because it was this larger party

atmosphere of polarised, not even polarised, but fractured, fractured politics.

And I was deeply disappointed, I have to say, in many of the members of Congress on the Republican side.

I mean, there's a lot of grandstanding that I really didn't like a bit on the Democratic side either.

And not admitting to mistakes and, you know, not kind of addressing head on, you know, the fact that they'd, you know, kind of been pushing for, you know, Trump to be impeached and, you know, talking about being an illegitimate president, you know, kind of right from the very beginning.

And that, you know, as a result of that, a lot of people just saw this as kind of a continuation of, you know, political games, you know, coming out of the 2016 election.

But on the Republican side, it was just a game.

There was people I knew who were, you know, basically, you know, one point one of them winked at me.

You know, in the middle of this, you know, kind of impeachment, it's just like, don't take this personally.