Fiona Hill

You've got to kind of hope that you could do this, use the same networks for positive effect.

But that's exactly what happened.

It was, you know, kind of, I think that, you know, Putin and some of the people around him understood because, again, propaganda state, they spend an awful lot of time thinking about how you, you know, basically put out your own content and how you get maximum effect through performance.

Putin himself is a, you know, political performance artist.

I mean, Trump understood exactly the same thing.

They were actually operating in parallel, not in collusion, but in parallel.

You know, basically, Trump understood how to get lots of free airtime, you know, how to get himself at the center of attention.

Putin, you know, did that through a kind of, I think, a less organic kind of way.

You know, he had a lot of people working around him.

I mean, that's the old, you know, Bolshevik agitprop and, you know, kind of then the whole Soviet propaganda machine.

And

You know, Putin kind of growing up in that kind of environment and having, you know, the kind of the Kremlin press office and all the kind of people around him got kind of a massive machine knew how that worked.

I mean, they haven't done what the Chinese did in Russia of like, you know, blocking everything and having a big firewall.

It was kind of putting out lots of content, getting into the, you know, the sort of center of attention.

Trump's doing the same kind of thing.

And the Russians understood that, you know, if you put a bit of things out there and then you call up New York Times and people are going to run with it.

And what they wanted was the perception.

that they had actually sweared the election.

They loved it.

This was the huge mistake of the Democrats and everything.