Chapter 1: What insights does Fiona Hill provide about Trump's admiration for Putin?
Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. Delighted to welcome to the show a former deputy assistant to the president and senior director for European and Russian affairs on the U.S. National Security Council during part of Trump's first term. She's also a national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia at the U.S. National Intelligence Council.
Currently a senior fellow in foreign policy at Brookings. Her books include her memoir, There's Nothing for You Here, Finding Opportunity in the 21st Century. It's Fiona Hill. How are you doing?
I'm doing all right. Thanks, Tim. Glad to be with you.
I've been kind of a little bit of a Fiona Hill fangirl for like six years now, you know, not fully. So I'm not fully briefed on your whole story.
Chapter 2: How did Fiona Hill's background influence her career in U.S. politics?
And so I thought, you know, in 2018, 19, in this period in Trump 1.0, these kind of characters emerged into our lives, you know, because people had to pay attention to things that normal people didn't pay attention to, you know, like what happened on national security briefing calls between Eastern European countries and presidential advisors.
And so for a lot of those people, they kind of like, like you, they emerged from the ether. Like, how did you find yourself testifying in Donald Trump's first impeachment? I guess, could you give us like a little life story that landed you in that place?
Yeah, I certainly ask myself that, you know, many times. I'm also glad to say that we came out the ether rather than the primordial swamp, which everybody else, you know, kind of sort of accuses all of doing. I mean, look, I mean, you know, I started off life in a rather unexpected place.
I mean, some of the people listening to this will know, you know, I started off in Northern England, daughter of a coal miner or a nurse while coal miner because all the mines closed down. My dad became a hospital porter. My mother, you know, was a midwife in, you know, one of those early batches of midwives trained by the National Health Service that kind of call the midwife from the BBC series.
That makes you feel like you're 300 years old to say that your mother was a midwife.
I feel 300 years old. I just turned 60. Oh, looking great for 60.
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Chapter 3: What was Fiona Hill's experience during Trump's first impeachment?
Well, thank you very much. When I look back at, you know, the little few pictures of my childhood, it certainly seems like it was in the 19th century, not the 20th, you know, it was like a totally a world away from this. But the whole point was, you know, thanks to expansion of education in the UK, you know, I get the education my parents never did.
It's actually a great American story, actually, for people of my age in America as well, I guess. you know, kind of funding to go to school, to university. I decided to study Russian because it's the peak of the Cold War. And like many other people of my generation, you know, I was obsessed with the risks of nuclear Armageddon and thought, you know, we'd die in a ditch listening to sirens.
You know, various places were blown up in an exchange between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. I decided to study Russian. I get a scholarship to study Russian. And then, you know, cut a long story short, I ended up getting a scholarship to the United States and, you know, amazingly to Harvard to study in what was then the Soviet Union program.
And as soon as I duly got a master's in Soviet studies, the Soviet Union went up and left on me, collapsing into multiple parts. And I decided I'd study history.
Not great news for your career, but good for the world.
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Chapter 4: How does Fiona Hill analyze the impact of Russian interference in U.S. democracy?
Yeah, it was the ash heap of history. So I thought, well, history, I've got to retrain quickly, retool. My dad had gone from being a mind hospital porter. I didn't quite make the same transition, but I studied history. I ended up doing lots of various things around at Harvard.
I get a job with Graham Allison, the famous Kennedy School of Government professor who's still going strong into his 80s and writing all kinds of things. I mean, somebody who many of our listeners are very familiar with. And it's, you know, working with Graham as, you know, one of his many assistants.
You know, I end up into the world of public policy and, you know, end up variously getting, you know, when I've graduated with everything and finished working with him, jobs down in Washington, D.C. And it's all about timing. Because I spent all of this time looking at the, you know, what had happened after the collapse of the Soviet Union to all the different constituent parts.
Why wasn't it moving in the directions that we anticipated? And I start getting, you know, kind of a bit of an obsession back in 2000 as I'd landed at the Brookings Institution as a as a fellow then. With a colleague, Clifford Gaddy, who is a pretty well-known expert on Russia and the Russian economy, we started getting a bit of a fixation on Vladimir Putin, who's still with us, of course.
This is in 2000.
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Chapter 5: What are the implications of Trump's dealings with foreign leaders?
And so for the last 25 years, I've been one way or another trying to figure out what makes Vladimir Putin tick. And it was because of that. And, you know, various other forays being loaned out by Brookings to National Intelligence Council, writing a book about Putin to try to figure out who is this guy? You know, why is he still here? Why is he likely to be here to infinity and beyond?
That I ended up getting asked to join the Trump administration. It was literally through connections that I'd made being loaned out to the government in a much earlier period in the 2000s at the end of Bush and leading into Obama and from people who'd read the book. That's as fast as I could do it for you now.
Okay, that was pretty good. That's pretty fast. I had two follow-ups. One is you didn't mention the key part of your lore. Which is that a boy set fire to your hair when you were a child and you put the fire out with your bare hands?
Well, actually, the other little boy next to me put the fire out with his bare hands as I was going, what's happened? Is my hair on fire?
Chapter 6: How does Fiona Hill view the current state of U.S.-Russia relations?
So, I mean, it's kind of one of those stories as you need friends looking out for you. That guy who did that, Stuart Quamby, was most recently a steward on British Airways. You can just, you know, kind of be sure that he'd look out for you in an emergency.
Really? You've kept touch with him the whole time? The boy that put out the fire?
Well, yeah. I mean, when somebody saves you from, you know, having literally your whole head on fire, you know, you tend to keep an eye on them. You never know when you might need them.
My other question was going into the Trump administration the first time at all. I just was kind of wondering your mindset on that, because at some level, I think certain people kind of rationalize what my book is about, like rationalize going in because it's like, hey, we need good people.
And if I'm working over in the Treasury Department, it's better to have a good person there than a bad person. And, you know. You went in as a Russia expert. And so even at the beginning, you knew that was going to be a hot spot with Trump, given what had happened in the election and going into the election.
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Chapter 7: What role do backdoor deals play in Trump's administration?
And so I was just curious what your mindset was on going in the first time.
Well, that's definitely a hair on fire moment. Related questions. You know, it's actually I mean, there was a number of people that I knew that were still, you know, in the government, professional, you know, analyst experts, some people who'd gone in to the National Security Council as well. none of whom were partisan or political.
That's sort of what I was approached, first of all, which was by Katie McFarland, and, you know, weirdly, General Flynn, and also General Kellogg.
I mean, yeah, it's a kind of... General Flynn approached you?
I'd worked with him in the previous, you know, iterations of General Flynn. Do you keep in touch with him still? I do not, no.
He's doing kind of like a Christian nationalist tour through the country.
He has completely transformed from the person that I met when I was in the National Intelligence Council. He was my counterpart in the office of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which was Admiral Mullen at the time. And, you know, we were actually working, you know, in lockstep of the crisis in Georgia when the Russians invaded Georgia.
You know, can we even remember all of these things that have happened, you know, back in August of 2008?
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Chapter 8: What are the potential consequences of Trump's foreign policy decisions?
And he remembered me as being just a straightforward, straight shooter. And I kind of was having a hard time, to be honest, reconciling, you know, the person that he kind of appeared to be during the campaign, but with the person that he was. But there was a lot of people I'd worked with then in the chairman's office and people who worked with him that he brought on board.
And they were all, you know, pretty sensible people. So, look, I will say that I actually thought national security was going to win out if they'd asked me, you know, then again. You know, there was probably a chance that they were going to do something serious to try to deal with Russian interference.
And, you know, I shouldn't just sit there, you know, basically lobbying criticisms from the, you know, the sidelines. If I really, you know, meant, you know, to try to have some kind of impact, then at least you should try. And I did get some really good advice from colleagues.
One of my colleagues at Brookings at the time, one of my colleagues, Martin Indyk, you know, who you will obviously remember as former assistant secretary for the Near East, former ambassador to Israel, who was my boss for a while at Brookings. And he said to me, look, you know, you can go in and do this as long as you're part of the solution.
As soon as you think of being part of the problem, you've got to leave. And, you know, that was kind of, you know, pretty good advice. So I took in a box, you know, that I didn't have a resignation list already, but I took in a box that I could just throw my stuff in and just, you know, leave if things got pretty crazy. And they got crazy fairly fast.
That is good advice with one caveat, which is that there's a human nature element to it, which is that a surprising number of people, I think, went in with that intuition and then didn't leave. I remember talking to Ryan Sprevis about this, who's my boss, and he ends up going to be the chief of staff.
And I sent him an email that said, basically, the most important thing you're going to have to do if you go in there is say no.
Yeah, exactly.
You know, you have to be able to say no a lot. Yeah. And if he crosses the line, you're going to have to be able to give him a final no. And he kind of nodded his head at me and said, yeah, yeah, yeah. And obviously he didn't. You know, he ends up getting left on the tarmac by Donald Trump with him insulting him on Twitter, never having stopped anything. Right. And so it is it's tough.
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