Fiona Hill

This is great.

Our chaos agent.

They knew they hadn't done it, but they'd love to take credit for it.

And so, you know, the very fact that other people couldn't explain these complex dynamics to themselves,

basically dovetails beautifully with Vladimir Putin's attempts to be the kind of the Kremlin gremlin in the system.

And he's, you know, basically was taking advantage of that forevermore.

And I wanted, you know, to basically try to work with others to cut through that.

And the thing is, then, you know, people lost faith in the integrity of the election system.

Because people were out there, you know, suggesting that the Russians had actually distort the elections.

People had written books about that.

They said, you know, that they hacked the system when, you know, they were trying to hack our minds.

But again, we were the fertile soul for this.

I mean, we know this from Russian history, the role of the Bolsheviks, you know, the whole...

1920s and 1930s with Stalin, the fellow travelers and the, you know, socialist, you know, international.

I mean, the Russians and the Soviets have been at this for years about kind of pulling, you know, kind of people along and into kind of a broader frame.

But it didn't mean...

that they were influencing directly the politics of countries writ large.

There were plenty of interventions.

It's just that we were somehow... It was a confluence of events, a perfect storm.

We were somehow exquisitely vulnerable because of things that we had done to ourselves.