Preet Bharara:

From Cafe and the Vox Media Podcast Network, welcome to Stay Tuned. I’m Preet Bharara.

Fiona Hill:

Anybody who’s come and turned the lens onto the United States from outside, who have experienced or studied War-torn Societies, is deeply troubled by the things that they’re seeing here in the United States now. And if we saw this in another country that was one of our closest allies, we’d be trying to stage an intervention.

Preet Bharara:

That’s Dr. Fiona Hill, she’s a foreign policy expert at the Brookings Institution, specializing in Russian and European affairs. From 2017 to 2019, she served as a senior director on the National Security Council, where she was the Trump administration’s top Russia advisor. You may remember Dr. Hill as a key witness in the first impeachment of Donald Trump. The one that centered around his efforts to get Ukraine, to announce an investigation into Joe Biden and his son, Hunter.

Fiona Hill:

If the president or anyone else impedes or subverts the national security of the United States in order to further domestic, political, or personal interests, that’s more than worthy of your attention. But we must not let domestic politics stop us from defending ourselves against the foreign powers who truly wishes harm.

Preet Bharara:

Now she’s out with a new book, There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century. Dr. Hill joins me to discuss her unique upbringing, what she witnessed and endured in the Trump White House, and the potential for America to slip into autocracy. That’s coming up, stay tuned.

Preet Bharara:

Before we get to your questions, just a quick note that we here at cafe still love to receive questions in the form of voicemails. Lately we’ve observed that most folks tend to send their questions on Twitter or over email, but sometimes the old ways are the best ways. If you’d like to hear your question, played on the air, go ahead and leave us a voicemail at 669-247-7338, that’s 669-24 Preet.

Preet Bharara:

Now let’s get to your questions. This question comes in a tweet from listener Beth [Adimey 00:02:15], apologize if I didn’t pronounce that correctly. Beth asks, “Does the former guys pardon somehow cover Bannon’s actions leading up to January 6th?” I know it would not cover contempt of Congress should the justice department choose to pursue it? So that’s interesting question. Obviously you’re referring to the pardon that Steve Bannon got ostensibly for his role in a conspiracy to get money from people in connection with building a wall with private funds at the Southern border.

Preet Bharara:

Notably, as I’ve mentioned in the show many times before a few months ago, that case out of the Southern District of New York charged Steve Bannon and three other people, and the other folks were not pardoned, only Steve Bannon was. Now the interesting thing is, with respect to the actions relating to January 6th, the insurrection, remember Trump didn’t leave office January 20th.

Preet Bharara:

He actually was within his rights and powers and authorities as president under the constitution to essentially preemptively pardon people who were involved in that event, it would essentially be a little bit like what Gerald Ford did with respect to draft evaders. He didn’t enumerate every single person by name, identify them by name, rank, and serial number, so to speak, but a general pardon for people who had done that was permitted to be granted.

Preet Bharara:

Based on the language of the pardon here, though, I think we don’t have to worry. The Bannon is covered for the January 6th activities. The statement released in connection with Trump’s pardon of Bannon seems very specifically tied to the actual charges and indictment brought against him by the Southern District of New York. This statement read, prosecutors pursued Mr. Bannon with charges related to fraud stemming from his involvement in a political project, that fraud clearly is referring to the previously charged case. So Bannon will not have the same luck even when he gets charged with anything related to January 6th.

Preet Bharara:

This question comes in a tweet from Ted Hadamer. Is it up to Merrick Garland, singularly to decide if Steve Bannon will be arrested and prosecuted for ignoring a legal US House subpoena? So that’s a good question. We’ve talked about it, Joyce and I have on the Cafe Insider podcast. The statute that relates to this is titled to US Code 194, and it makes particular reference to the appropriate US attorney.

Preet Bharara:

Once the house has voted as the house now has with respect to the case of Steve Bannon, a referral is made, “To the appropriate United States attorney whose duty it shall be to bring the matter before the grand jury for its action.” Now as I’ve discussed before, the justice department doesn’t read the word shall in the way that some other statutes are interpreted, and believes that it retains discretion to bring a case or not bring a case.

Preet Bharara:

But even though the statute makes reference to the, “Appropriate United States attorney.” Obviously in a case of this magnitude the significance that everyone is going to be watching the acting US attorney in the District of Columbia is not going to take such action and make that decision without consultation with Merrick Garland. I think it really will be effectively the decision of Merrick Garland as you put it singularly.

Preet Bharara:

The next question comes in a tweet from Kathleen Moore, who expresses a sentiment that’s pretty common, that I’ve heard a lot with respect to the January 6th insurrection, and that I’ve heard a lot over the years of my career as a prosecutor. And she asks, “Why is it taking so long to arrest and prosecute the planners of the January 6th insurrection?” Now obviously scores and scores of people have been arrested for participating in the insurrection, charged around the country in federal court, charges of varying degrees of seriousness.

Preet Bharara:

There have been guilty pleas, there has been sentencing, but the question as to the planners is something I hear all the time. And what I usually answer is, these things take time. Evidence takes time to gather, leads take time to pursue. I thought I would on this occasion, do what I sometimes do and answer a question from a listener with the words of someone else.

Preet Bharara:

And in this case and you may not love these words. Bradley Moss, who is a National Security lawyer and often represents whistleblowers in his practice, had the following thread in response to questions like this on Twitter. And so if you’re angry about his response you can tweet at him. And Bradley Moss has this to say, “Some of you on this website need to crack open a beer, pour a glass of wine, or simply log off for a moment. Enough with the why hasn’t Garland arrested person A over crime X stuff already.

Preet Bharara:

You’re starting to sound like the mega folks towards the end of Trump’s tenure. If there is a case to be made against a member of Congress or their staff tied up in what happened on January 6th, I’m confident Garland will let DOJ pursue it to the end. I’ve seen nothing that indicates he views the events of that day as anything less than an attempted coup. What he is not going to do is authorize arrests just to make you all feel better.

Preet Bharara:

He wants a case that will win, not just a case for the sake of having a case and the media splash. That requires time, effort, and patience. It requires leveraging lower hanging fruit first. And it doesn’t mean there is a viable criminal case to be brought in the end. Some of these folks, and you all know which members of Congress I’m referencing are despicable, but they’re not stupid. They likely knew just how far to take it without crossing the criminal line.”

Preet Bharara:

So Bradley says, “Just chill for a few. Whatever’s going to happen in the 1/6 Criminal Investigations is going to happen. And no one will be happier than me if it means some of those despicable individuals are held accountable.” So that said, send your thoughts, questions, comments to letters@cafe.com. Stay tuned, there’s more coming up after this.

Preet Bharara:

If you followed any of the first impeachment hearings, you’ll remember Dr. Fiona Hill’s testimony in front of the House Intelligence Committee. She’s a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who served as former President Trump’s top advisor on Russia. Dr. Hill’s new book, There is Nothing for You Here, details or journey from an impoverished mining village in Northern England to close door meetings and the Trump White House. And finally to the day of her unforgettable testimony.

Preet Bharara:

Fiona Hill, thanks for being on the show.

Fiona Hill:

Thanks Preet, great to be with you.

Preet Bharara:

It’s great to talk to you. Congratulations on your book, which is called, There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century. And I guess, this is maybe the question you always get out of the box when you talk about your book. But given that you are an American now and you’re writing in America and you see the title, There is Nothing for You Here. One wonders, are you talking about the United States? And in fact, you’re not, what are you talking about?

Fiona Hill:

Well, the title comes from what my dad told me in 1984, as I was finishing up high school and trying to think about what next to do with my life, including applying for college. And he basically said to me, “If you do go onto college and you’re trying to not just get an education, but think of a profession, a job in the future and a life, you won’t be able to come back to your hometown to here.”

Fiona Hill:

He said there’s nothing for you here, in terms of opportunity because 1984 in the Northeast of England and the farm coal mining region that I was growing up in was beset by a massive unemployment crisis. Everything had closed down, all the big manufacturing enterprise and for a youth at that juncture it was 90% unemployment rate for people immediately leaving school. Take them a very long time to find something permanent or even just semipermanent.

Fiona Hill:

So that was basically the landscape as it looked way back when in 1984, but I also picked the title, because as I’ve learned in my long years here in the United States, having come over here in 1989, increasingly people in the United States feel the same thing. Either that there’s nothing for them here in terms of the politics, they don’t see themselves reflected in elite, to the top political elites, members of Congress, et cetera.

Fiona Hill:

And in many cases too, and particularly the old rust belt of the United States, places that have lost their auto manufacturing, the steelworks, their coal mines as well. They start to wonder the same if there’s anything for them here, not just in the places where they live, but more generally, how will they find opportunity and will they be excluded from all of the changes in the economy moving forward?

Preet Bharara:

And when your father said that to you, did he say it with some amount of melancholy or was he just pragmatic? And did you react by thinking, well, that’s an overstatement or was everyone agreed and understood that there was nothing for you there?

Fiona Hill:

Well, it was a mixture. My dad was ever the pragmatist. He’d grown up in a mining village called a Pit Village in the North of England, about eight miles away from my hometown. And the village has been purpose-built to serve on the mines and a paint factory in a brick works that had grown up alongside the series of mines that were there. I mean, everybody in that village worked in the mines or one of the other industries.

Fiona Hill:

And when everything closed, which they did successively over a period of time, there was nothing for people there either. And my dad had literally got on his bike and cycle to Bishop Auckland, which was biggest town in the immediate vicinity and had got a job in the local hospital, there was a Potter in a very much on the bottom rung, but he’d already always been aware that times were going to change, places were going to move on. And the places you lived weren’t always going to be able to give you a job.

Fiona Hill:

And he was fortunate in finding one eventually in the general hospital, but it wasn’t really going anywhere after that, in terms of socioeconomic mobility, he didn’t find another job after that and ended up being a hospital part of for decades. And around in the town, given the high rates of unemployment, that really became the expectation for anybody who went off to get an education that they wouldn’t be able to bring the new skills back into the town, because there was no where to work.

Fiona Hill:

So it was a mixture of pragmatism, but also great melancholy, because that meant breaking up families who were multi-generational in the same place. I mean, somebody in my family going back, not just decades, but well, over 100 years had lived in and around Bishop Auckland and managed to find work there.

Preet Bharara:

You say something interesting about your father. He spent a lot of time talking about his identity as a miner and other people who were engaged in coal mining and other kinds of work in that field. And even though you write he was for decades a hospital porter, he was forever a miner. Why is that?

Fiona Hill:

Well, because he’d grown up. First of all, in a multi-generational community of miners, his great grandfather had been a miner, his grandfather a miner, his father a miner, all of his uncles, great uncles, cousins, his brother, everybody on the male side of the family they’d gone down into the coal mines. And also he’d left school at 14, that hadn’t really been much prospect for staying on. And so everything that he’d learned from 14 into his ’30s was on the job as a coal miner.

Fiona Hill:

And then there was the broader community identity. All of these small villages and small towns were built up around coal mining, or it might be a steelworks or been something else. For example, railway, wagon works, that was another big employer in the region. And every part of their social life, not just the working life revolved around the workplace, working men’s clubs, all kinds of societies that workers in the coal mines could join.

Fiona Hill:

Literacy societies, and my dad’s further education was all done through Miners Literary Societies, that were funded by the Jews that the miners pled to the local general miners association. All of the past times there in and outside of the clubs, the allotments, the garden plots that people had, pigeon racing, dog racing, everything from playing dominoes to cards. And then also most importantly, in the North of England soccer, football.

Fiona Hill:

I mean, this is an area that had spawned some of the great football soccer heroes of the United Kingdom. Many of whom had been coal miners or children of coal miners had got out of the mines by playing football, by playing soccer, and every local Pit Village would have a soccer team. And the often called in the case of my dad’s village, the welfare, Miner’s Welfare or the Local Welfare Team, because it was an idea of community and wellbeing.

Fiona Hill:

They’d also have a brass band, that would play for events. They would have banners and flags and they’d take part in all kinds of larger association meetings, gallas. And they’d also put on trips and educational programs for the kids. We know that the children and grandchildren of the miners too, so everything revolved around that. So your whole identity, your family identity, community identity, your personal identity was tied up one way or another by being a miner.

Preet Bharara:

Speaking of identity. May we talk about your accent for a moment?

Fiona Hill:

Of course.

Preet Bharara:

Because you write about it at some length and I will say for the record that I’ve always found your accent to be lovely bordering on enchanting. When you testified a couple of years ago, my co-host at the time Anne Milgram and I did a special episode of our insider podcast about your testimony. One of the things that we talked about was just how exceedingly lovely your accent is. So against that backdrop, it was interesting to read you talk about how when you were in England, your accent was something that perhaps in some ways held you back. Can you explain?

Fiona Hill:

Yeah, I mean, Britain accent is a marker of class. And even if it’s a regional accent, it depends on the region. And the associations that that has within the rest of the United Kingdom. So the Northeast of England, where I’m from has some pretty distinct regional accents, some of them have names. The accent from Tyneside Newcastle on Tyne is Jordy accent, and it has this kind of crazy history about how the name came about.

Fiona Hill:

And the part of the Northeast that I come from, which is around the River Wye, one of the three great rivers of the Northeast, the time the Tyne, the Tees, and the Wye, has a distinctive set of different accents depending on where you’re from. And in my locality, because it’s the coalfields, many of the older people on what my father included spoke a dialect called Pitmatic with its own distinctive features, not just words, but the whole phrasing and syntax was quite different from standard English.

Fiona Hill:

I kind of grew up with one of these distinctive accents, so if people are listening to me in the United Kingdom, they’ll immediately it was from the north. I mean, obviously over time accent is morphed somewhat, because when I first came to the US, although people would also express a certain amount of pleasure and listening to me, that also say like, “I just love listening to you, I can listen to you all day, but I have no idea what you just said.”

Fiona Hill:

So I would have to not just slow it down, but I think very long and hard about the words I was using. Sometimes I’d use a word and I think that everybody would understand it and realize I was using a pitmatic or a local dialect word. I got ha, hmm, my entire life, I didn’t realized that this wasn’t a standard English word. There you go. Learn something every day.

Fiona Hill:

But in the UK context and Northeast English accent is associated with being blue collar working class, a kind of a guilt by association of growing up in a region that everybody was a worker one way or another. And if you were in middle class, middle class in the British context, or a sort of upper class professional, you would have acquired somewhere along the way, the classic clip tones of BBC English, what’s known formerly as received pronunciation. And we might call Oxford English or the Queen’s English.

Speaker 3:

Members of the House of Commons, estimates for the public services will be laid before you. My Lords and Members of the House of Commons, other measures will be laid before you. I pray that the blessing of Almighty God may rest upon your counsels.

Fiona Hill:

And so speaking the way that I did, using the words that I did was immediately a marker of someone from the lower Ashland’s of a society. And right away people would make comments. And I talk in the book about how that accent and the way that I spoke followed me all the way even into the United States when I had encountered other Brits. And there’d be some great consternation about how someone of my kind of accent too, hadn’t changed it to some more like the BBC, had managed to make it as far as I heard.

Preet Bharara:

Am I correct that you write in the book that lots of people in the UK before they enter public life, or after they enter public life, actually engage in speech training. And I think maybe I made this up, because it’s been a couple of days, but did Margaret Thatcher do that?

Fiona Hill:

She did. And she came from place called Grantham, much further down into the south sort of Midlands kind of area of the United Kingdom than I did. Although everything’s relative in the UK, right? Because it’s a pretty small country. So we’re not talking about vast distances here, but she had something of her own regional accent from the area around where she grew up.

Fiona Hill:

And as she ascended up the political hierarchy, she had a pretty meteoric rise. She’d herself gone to a grammar school, a very select educational institution after age 11 and then gone on to Oxford. But as a politician, and people around her realized that she needed a bit more polish. So she wants to what people call elocution lessons and also the whole PR makeover from one of the big PR firms of the time in the United Kingdom, Saatchi and Saatchi, where they helped model her on the successful female politician that she wanted to be and the others wanted her to be.

Fiona Hill:

And it wasn’t just about the language, the clip tones. I think they actually helped her bring her voice down by some significant degrees in the register, so that she wouldn’t sound in a high pitched or shrill in any way when she was emphasizing points. And they also thought about how she should dress, how she should have her hair. The kinds of accoutrements that she should have when she was out and about.

Fiona Hill:

I mean, I talk about this in the book as well, being a woman, there’s often a lot of extreme makeovers that you have to go through if you’re trying to present yourself in a different settings. And she was the daughter of a shopkeeper in Grantham. From a solidly British middle-class background, but certainly not from someone who came from the elite.

Preet Bharara:

It’s interesting, you said at the beginning of your answer, that people around Thatcher thought that she needed a little bit more polish and that was with respect to accent, maybe also with respect to dress. So the current prime minister, Boris Johnson, I guess he has the accent, right? Went to Oxford.

Fiona Hill:

He certainly does.

Boris Johnson:

Good afternoon, I have just been to see her majesty the queen, who has invited me to form a government and I have accepted.

Preet Bharara:

Does he have the polish or does polish mean something different or does it not matter anymore in modern western politics?

Fiona Hill:

Well, I think it does matter actually, because I mean, we obsess about it a lot. Don’t we? Everybody is always making comments about how people look all the time. I don’t think it should match, and I’m very helpful in the world of Zoom. That we’ll start to be a little kinder and less critical of each other, after we’ve all been in little boxes for some time. Just behind us right now, the sleeping dog is no longer sleeping, but is barking. That’s a Lola my dog. He doesn’t have to worry about appearances.

Preet Bharara:

I love her.

Fiona Hill:

She’s in the background. I think it was busy when the mail came. A classic dog barks at mailman moment.

Preet Bharara:

What kind of accent does Lola have? Maryland?

Fiona Hill:

Yeah, I think she has a kind of Midwestern accent. She’s actually from Wisconsin.

Preet Bharara:

Oh, okay. Standard English is spoken there, they say.

Fiona Hill:

Yeah, I mean, I think that they said that that’s where all of the best announcers in the United States come from, isn’t it? It’s supposed to be that neutral accent Midwestern. So she’s got a neutral dog barking accent when she’s calling up there.

Preet Bharara:

You talk about this issue of how women have to care about how they dress and you talk about how your team around you made suggestions when you had to testify in the first impeachment proceeding, is there a double standard whereby Boris Johnson does not have to comb his hair?

Fiona Hill:

Well, Boris Johnson deliberately uncombed his hair if that makes sense, I always have this kind of image in my head about when he gets up in the morning, he does a special ruffling session on his hair and kind of maybe as it even special mess up my hair comb. Because for Boris Johnson-

Preet Bharara:

The anti-comb.

Fiona Hill:

He is the anti-comb, exactly. And he’s kind of, this is all very studied, because Boris Johnson is trying to appeal across class in the opposite direction, because Margaret Thatcher had to appeal to the grandees of the Tory party, which she was most noticeably, not part of. She was a clever girl who had risen up through the grammar school and elite education system, but she wasn’t from the storied Tory party conservative party background as the offspring of an aristocrat like Winston Churchill was for example, from the Dukes of Marlboro’s family.

Fiona Hill:

Certainly from other elite long established families, who’ve dominated a lot of British politics for generations. Boris Johnson on the other hand comes very much from party establishment, though he himself has a fascinating background, because his family are a product of all kinds of immigration, including an Ottoman, Turkish political figure who was assassinated. I mean, it was a fascinating family history that he has.

Fiona Hill:

But he went to Eaton probably the most famous school in the United Kingdom, along with Harrow and Westminster. And then he went on from there to Oxford and had all the kinds of classic lifetime politician jobs from being a journalist and a commentator. And he hasn’t certainly toiled down a coal mine, or being behind the counter of a grocery shop, or all kinds of other things of the people he’s trying to appeal to.

Fiona Hill:

What he does appeal to instead is Britain’s great appreciation for the kind of counter-cultural somewhat comedic slapstick kind of figure. And he does a lot of physical comedy, lots of self-deprecating pratfalls along with the tussles hair and the permanently rumpled clothing. And he seeks to entertain and to divert attention away from his incredibly plummy, old Itonian accent, and to make people think that he’s one of them more relatable. And that is all part of the reverse Margaret Thatcher, Saatchi and Saatchi recommendations.

Preet Bharara:

Right, is there a version of that that applies to Donald Trump? He obviously does not engage in physical comedy really, but is there some of that also in so far as he’s a self-described billionaire, but he figures out a way to appeal to people at the other end of the socioeconomic spectrum?

Fiona Hill:

Yeah, because he talks the talk, he uses the same points of reference. He talks in his own words as the man of the people to sort of appeal to people who have not gone on to college, he tries to sort of sell them also a lifestyle of rich and famous of somebody who’s self-made. Best of you sort of saying you could be this as well. And he’s also listening to people very keenly following polling and trying to kind of figure out exactly the things to say, to engage directly.

Fiona Hill:

I think he’s a very clever retail politician and the same way that Boris Johnson is, but I mean, he’s obviously modulating his speech. Perhaps he’s always been speaking about that from having grown up on the streets of Queens, modulating to fit into the background. It’s all a kind of camouflage and sort of aware of engaging with those around you and basically saying to people what they want to hear.

Preet Bharara:

I want to ask you one more thing about your childhood and the way in which it affects your later work. And then we’ll talk about some things, more recent history. You talk a lot about your brushes with poverty when you were young, and the difficulties your family had, which I think is important to understand about you. But then you also say, that that experience gave you, “Unique set of insights offering me an entirely different perspective on global affairs from those of the majority of national security experts.” Explain what you mean by that?

Fiona Hill:

Well, look, when we study other countries from even the national security perspective, and you’re trying to assess what’s happening in the broader social dynamics. It’s usually in a very abstract, where looking at polling, polling data, survey data, looking at the kind of macroeconomic situation, and then some of the micro level data that you can accumulate, and most people are analyzing this from very intellectual perspective.

Fiona Hill:

And I realized as soon as I got to university and sort of started moving through my research that I was actually living data point, I was the kind of person and my family were the kind of people that people studied, to kind of assess how the working classes might think about something, or how broader societal factors might play out.

Fiona Hill:

And so for me, this wasn’t an abstract, this is real life. And I think it gave me a very different appreciation for the kind of phenomena that would I be looking out later on, because I could certainly relate it to real people. This wasn’t just information that had been collected in anonymous surveys or kind of basically small socioeconomic data. There was always a human dimension to it for me, sometimes it was me directly, or it was members of my family.

Preet Bharara:

And does that have a specific impact on you as a national security expert, as opposed to a general expert on government?

Fiona Hill:

I think it does, look, I’ve met other people who’ve come from the same sorts of backgrounds and it’s the same perspective of them, I mean, your question things a little more differently. And you are also more of a comparative perspective to bring to the table, or just a whole different worldview. And when I look at other world leaders for example, have come up that way. I mean, I start asked questions about them then otherwise might’ve been asked for example.

Fiona Hill:

Someone like Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, he comes from a working class background. He rose up by playing soccer, football. First of all, in pretty hard scrabble neighborhood. Vladimir Putin, grows up in a communal flat in what was then Leningrad Nelson Petersburg, also by the way of finds his way forward through sports, by playing judo, as well as then led to go into university and join in the KGB. I think it gives you a kind of appreciation for different perspectives of people’s worldview.

Fiona Hill:

And both Erdogan and Putin have brought along with them through their rise in politics, people that they knew from the childhood. People who played sports with them and others, and they have just kind of all different way. Of course, it’s in very different social contexts and cultural context, but a very different way of looking at things. And I think an awful lot of people are shaped by those early childhood and personal experiences in ways that we don’t always look at when there is a historian or a political analyst. We’re kind of looking at the lives of often the great men. Sometimes there’s a lot of great women of history.

Preet Bharara:

Right, of course, let’s fast forward a number of years. So then you had a very notable successful career as a national security expert. And in particular, an expert on Russia, you spend time in Russia, you became an American citizen at some point. And then let’s jump all the way forward to 2016. And you’re at the Brookings Institution and you get a phone call to come work at the White House.

Preet Bharara:

And Donald Trump has just been elected president and people warn you that maybe that’s not the greatest thing to do, you have your own concerns about Donald Trump. Close in time to the inauguration, as I understand it, you marched in the women’s march, why’d you come to government at that point and for that president?

Fiona Hill:

Well, it wasn’t for that president, let’s just put it that way. I came to the government because I was deeply concerned about national security. I was very worried about what had happened in 2016 with the Russian interference. I mean, I knew there was much more going on than that. But I really did feel that something had to be done and there was an opportunity to do something I would have to take it.

Fiona Hill:

I did not anticipate that that opportunity would come through being asked to join the administration. I was already commenting on some of the aftereffects of the Russian intervention, I was obviously deeply concerned about the impact that that was having on our polarization or pre-existing polarization. And it was clear that the Russians were exploiting certain vulnerabilities inside the United States. And there were an awful lot of people who were being details or asked to go into the administration, who I’d worked with before.

Fiona Hill:

I’d been the National Intelligence Officer for Russia and Eurasia from the beginning of 2006 into 2009, I’d gone through the George W. Bush administration and to the first year of Barack Obama administration. And I then spent sort of seven years back at the Brookings Institution working in one way or another on Vladimir Putin, a couple of editions of a book on him.

Fiona Hill:

And I knew that we had a lot of problems to address here, a lot of trouble on our hands. A lot of the people that I knew from previously at the National Intelligence Council, we’re all still there, different places in the government. And when I got asked which, as I said was a bit of a surprise. I thought, well, look, maybe there’s something that I can do here. And I genuinely thought at the very beginning that once I got in there, into the administration, that people would see the national security imperative of doing something to push back against what the Russians have done and then to try to make sure that they couldn’t do it again.

Fiona Hill:

Of course, that’s when I kind of fully encountered there were other peculiar personality of Donald Trump and realize that his political predilections are actually closer to Putin’s than they were to the other previous presidents. Not withstanding the concerns I’d already had about misogyny and respirating another divisive politics.

Preet Bharara:

Was it a close question for you or?

Fiona Hill:

About going in?

Preet Bharara:

About going in or given your affinity for public service and your care for the country was an easy decision?

Fiona Hill:

It wasn’t an easy decision because of the concerns that I had about Trump personally, but I did sort of think that, well he keeps saying, he’ll behave more presidentially. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and see how this goes. But my major concern was really about the public service aspects. The country was in some severe danger at that point.

Fiona Hill:

I mean, we were ripping ourselves apart already. And the Russians had obviously poured salt on some pretty gaping open wounds and using another metaphor. I sort of feel like our house was on fire and I’d been offered the opportunity to come and help put out the flames. So I thought, well, I should do it. I mean, otherwise, what had I been doing all this time?

Fiona Hill:

I’ve been in government before and here I am just pontificating from the nice cozy perch of the Brookings Institution, not stepping up and doing anything. I felt like there wasn’t much choice really in the matter though, I really did listen long and hard to all the people who told me not to do it, and why they’re telling me not to.

Preet Bharara:

As you sit here now, do you have any regret that you came back into government or would you do the same again?

Fiona Hill:

I’ll do the same again, even knowing what I know. I would have just done a lot more homework on who else was going to be there, because I was pretty naive. I think about some of the players in the political realm. I mean, there’s people, I just didn’t know who they were. And I’ve said publicly before that, I knew more about the Kremlin people around the Kremlin that I did people who ended up in and around the US White House. And that was a bit of a shock to the system.

Preet Bharara:

Who were some of those people aside from Trump himself?

Fiona Hill:

Well, I mean, all of them still out there playing out, let’s just say, I had a very different view of Rudy Giuliani from the person he appears to be today. I remembered him from being the mayor of New York during 9/11 and the prosecutor from the Southern District of New York. I mean, somebody you knew from your previous positions.

Preet Bharara:

Yes, no, tell me about it.

Fiona Hill:

I had no idea of the strange turns that he’d taken. And then there were all of the kind of hangers on people I’d never heard of, or people I don’t need tangentially heard of. And I didn’t realize that they were LinkedIn and quite such a cute way into the system of the roles that they would play. I think people like Alex Jones and Roger Stone, that Trump would allow people like that to essentially start to shape things within his administration.

Fiona Hill:

The role of Fox News and Fox News commentators, and how much the influence of the media from the outside would have on shaping the policies internally too. Let’s just say, I learned a lot and I learned more about the United States than I did about Russia and the time that I was there. And I already thought that knew a fair amount from my previous times in government, but I realized I knew nothing at all really.

Preet Bharara:

What did you learn about yourself?

Fiona Hill:

Well, I learned as I always sort of thought that you have to be able to really dig deep. I’d often wondered if I’d be able to sort of withstand those kinds of pressures. When I was a kid back in the North of England, there was all kinds of things got thrown at me, but usually they were kind of physical things that you could deal with in real time. A lot of this was real psychological pressures of people denouncing you in the outside and saying terrible things about you and behind your back, people who didn’t know.

Preet Bharara:

You should tell us some folks Ryan’s Priebus, I believe it was Ryan’s Priebus. Short-term first Chief of Staff to President Trump. Didn’t he coin a nickname for you?

Fiona Hill:

Apparently saw this letter from journalists who were doing interviews for a piece in which I featured in, that apparently called me Russia bitch.

Preet Bharara:

Do you have a t-shirt that says that?

Fiona Hill:

I don’t, but I have some t-shirts with some other things on it.

Preet Bharara:

Well, I bet you don’t have a t-shirt for the other name that you write that you recalled.

Fiona Hill:

Oh, no, I do not. No.

Preet Bharara:

That begins with which letter of the alphabet?

Fiona Hill:

Yeah, so letter C. I mean, I relate in the book how I learned the very negative and horrible power of that word very early on when I first heard it used and decided to try it up myself at home. And I had my mother stick a gripping giant bar of soap into my mouth to wash my mouth. That was kind of those old Victorian Dickensian approach to parenting and the North of England, I can still test the soap stuck between my front teeth.

Preet Bharara:

What do you think it was that provoked that kind of nastiness about you in the White House and around the White House?

Fiona Hill:

Look, I think this happens to pretty much everybody in public life, right? I mean, I’m sure you’ve had plenty of nasty things said about you as well. And people tend to either they pick the slur that they think is going to hurt the most. I mean, in the case of women-

Preet Bharara:

But usually not by people who are on your same team, technically.

Fiona Hill:

Yes, but that was only technically, because particularly these guys saw me as an antelope, they had no idea who I was now. They weren’t really sure how the heck it ended up there. There’s some times myself, I wondered, one of these sort of quirks of networking and contact, some people I’d worked with previously and they certainly didn’t want to hear anything that I had to say.

Fiona Hill:

And so that kind of genderized vitriol is meant to try to shut you up, but I put it all back in the North of England and usually from people who say it to your face, not behind your back. I think in part my upbringing, the place I grew up in a pretty tough, hard scrabble community, it already well prepared me for dealing with this kind of things.

Fiona Hill:

As I said, one I wasn’t really prepared for was the kind of cowardice that came along with it. People just lumbusting you from a distance on the internet, kind of this sort of insidious stuff, people who were anonymous just calling you names and trying to get rid of you, in the hundreds of the threats and threatening comments using these kinds of words and calling me things like a fascist hall and the N word as well, which I found perplexing. And just like what is the matter with people? Bonding around everything that they could possibly think of, to try to get a rise in the hope that you’ll kind of disappear.

Preet Bharara:

We’ll be right back with more of my conversation with Dr. Fiona Hill after this. Your book is not just memoir and it doesn’t just talk about your participation in the impeachment proceedings and your expertise about Putin, but also a little bit of a trends and analysis of what is happening in America and what is to come. And you have this sentence that I’d like you to elaborate on.

Preet Bharara:

“Russia is America’s ghost of Christmas future, a harbinger of things to come. If we can’t adjust course and heal our political polarization.” And I know what you’re saying, because you draw parallels to what has happened in Russia over the last number of decades and the slide back into autocracy or greater autocracy. But isn’t it fair to say that in the case of Russia, there was no multiple centuries long tradition of multicultural and pluralistic democracy. Whereas here there is, is the comparison fair, and what do you mean by the comparison?

Fiona Hill:

Well, the comparison is obviously meant to shock. But I do think it’s fair because in the case of Russia, there’s been many attempts to create a much more pluralistic society going back during the Imperial Period of upsurge of the educated members of the Russian society trying to sort of reach out to heal divisions there and to put the country on a different footing.

Fiona Hill:

But in the 1990s, there really was building up on the reforms that Mikhail Gorbachev had initiated. And they ended the 1980s, a real experiment in democratization. And in fact, look, there were books written by American political scientists affirming that Russia was on a democratic path and that it wouldn’t turn around. But of course they hadn’t really banked on the kind of leadership that emerged with Vladimir Putin and also the disaffection that people felt for this democratic experiment on a number of fronts.

Fiona Hill:

First of all, there was a massive economic collapse in the 1990s. So an awful lot of people felt that, okay, this democratic experiment came along with great poverty and wrenching dislocation, I didn’t really get a lot out of this. And then there was also this failure to inculcate the rule of law and it enables a kleptocratic oligarchy of elite to emerge, who had basically siphoned off the assets of the state during privatization.

Fiona Hill:

And the failure also to really emphasize the independence of the judiciary in all of these later and the political party system as well getting hollowed out over a period of time, enables Vladimir Putin to roll back those sorts of freedoms and political gains of the 1990s successively over last 21 years, that he’s been in power. Didn’t happen all at once.

Fiona Hill:

This is what I mean about the United States. Yes, we’ve had centuries long experiments in democracy. We’ve been evolving all the time because we haven’t been perfect by any stretch. And we’ve had the civil war, we’ve had the reconstruction period that got reversed, we’ve had the civil rights movement. We’ve had all kinds of efforts, I mean, expanding the suffrage. We’ve had so many periods where we could have taken steps back, but we’ve always tried to make steps forward. And right now, enough of those inflection points.

Preet Bharara:

But do you think right now is a more dangerous and fraught inflection point than before?

Fiona Hill:

I think it’s one of those inflection points. It’s as fraught as it has been before and some of those other episodes that I was relating. And this is where the sort of similarities with post 1990s Russia come in, because we are seeing assaults on the independency of judiciary we’ve experience that, and the whole kind of legal system. We’ve seen assaults on the electoral system, I mean, by our own president, basically saying no point in voting, because your vote won’t count, it’s all illegal, the elections are going to be stolen.

Fiona Hill:

And also to be fair on that front as well, after 2016, there were many people saying that Trump wasn’t elected either by the American people. He was elected by Vladimir Putin security services. And now that makes Trump and others feel quite justified in taking this up a notch to a much larger scale, even though of course, the big difference in 2016. And one of the many differences of course, was that Hillary Clinton conceded the election pretty quickly. She conceded the election.

Preet Bharara:

The concession matters, that’s what we count on. We count on the concession.

Fiona Hill:

It really matters. And there was a peaceful transfer of authorities just like there was in 2000. Al Gore and George W. Bush as well. I mean, we’ve established this even in really difficult contested times. We now have a situation where the former guy still says he’s the guy and he will be the feature guy. And he is just perpetrating an enormous lie about the state of our democracy, and the presidency, and executive power.

Fiona Hill:

We’ve also got the chipping away at the independence of all of our institutions of the state, getting rid of employees and the previous administration replacing them with loyalists. Removing congressional oversight and the kind of checks and the balances in their system. And then the party system itself is in a state of disarray, two of the main candidates in previous elections and this election have not been technically part of the party. Bernie Sanders is an independent and ran as the candidate for the Democratic Party twice.

Fiona Hill:

And Donald Trump wasn’t even Republican and registered Republican to basically usurp the party having been previous a Democrat. And he has no previous experience unlike Senator Saunders of governance or being a part of the establishment. He thinks like a businessman, but a particular kind of businessman, a businessman in his own personal family and thought that he could run the country as such.

Fiona Hill:

Not just with kind of a clique of cronies, but his family members, it’s a bit different from Russia Putin’s family tends to be in the background, but he’s basically sees himself as independent to the party system, unless it’s the kind of the loyalty of people around him. It’s the Republican Party or the Trump Republican Party, not any independent entity that he’s basically emphasizing.

Fiona Hill:

And in Russia, Putin doesn’t have a party. There’s the ruling party, United Russia, but it’s just a vehicle there, that he going to uses from time to time. He’s not the head of the party, he’s not part of the party and there’s no kind of larger ideological discipline. I mean, I’m trying to use with this comparative lens, I’m trying to use this comparative lens to kind of frame the dilemma in that we’re in now.

Fiona Hill:

Of course, as you rightly point out, there are so many differences, but it’s those similarities that should give us pause for thought. And I’m not saying that this has to happen. I’m just hoping that people will without shock of seeing those comparisons will step back and figure out what we have to do to avoid this at all costs.

Preet Bharara:

Well, I’ll mention something else that would sound shocking to a lot of people. And I don’t think is being mentioned enough, and it’s a real future scenario. We talk generally about slides to autocracy and the undermining of our institutions and the trampling of norms and all of that as well and go good. But there is a particular thing that I don’t know if you’ll agree with me, that whether by legitimate or illegitimate means can come to pass before long. And that is a return of Donald Trump to the White House, that is a very real and feasible possibility. Do you agree?

Fiona Hill:

I do, and I think that that’s for us a pending disaster and people say, “Well, if he wins free and fair,” but all the signs are that that won’t be the case. And that’s the same in Russia. Vladimir Putin probably would get majority of the votes, the slim majority, let’s say plurality of the votes, but there are many efforts to suppress the vote so that the turnout is really low, which is just what happened in the recent parliamentary elections in Russia.

Fiona Hill:

Because in an opinion polling, people are very dissatisfied with the system that they have and the Communist Party of all things, it’s not the Communist Party of our fathers and grandfathers, but Communist Party of the Soviet Union, but did remarkably well in the recent parliamentary elections, because people are fed up.

Fiona Hill:

But a lot of them just don’t want to vote. And so I think there’s a real scenario here in the United States, where Donald Trump could win because lots of people don’t come out, because they just don’t see the point, they’ve been told that the election isn’t gonna work for them, that their vote doesn’t count, it’s going to stolen. And others have actually been actively stopped from voting, because of changes or make sure that their vote doesn’t count, redistricting and all the kinds of efforts to actually stop people from voting to raise the barriers and the hurdles of voting even higher.

Fiona Hill:

And also we’ve learned now through excessive elections that you can pretty much use the electoral college to your advantage and win by a very narrow margin there. And not at all make progress in the popular vote. These are some of the peculiarities of the American system that actually lend themselves to a demagogue and somebody who is not supportive of a democratic process to basically get themselves into power.

Preet Bharara:

Right, and the example has been made the model has been created so that other folks, including a number of people who aspire to the presidency on the Republican side, as we speak are borrowing behaviors from Donald Trump. Other people are starting to call elections illegitimate. They’re taking great steps and pains to make sure that elections can be invalidated, and all of this I think is shocking and needs to be talked about.

Preet Bharara:

I feel in some ways, for a lot of people in the country who are worried about what Trump was doing to the country, myself among them, once Biden got elected and we’ll get to the 1/6 insurrection in a moment, but once Biden got elected, I think some people have tuned out a little bit, and they watched the news less, and they’re a little less worried. And I don’t think they’ve really focused on the likelihood.

Preet Bharara:

I’m not saying it’s super likely, but the potential of Trump regain the White House. And so my question to you is, based on your observations and the way you talk about Trump, his personality, his proclivities as the president when you were there, what do you think a second Trump presidency would look like in terms of policy, in terms of personnel, I mean, no Fiona Hills are going to be hired by the next Trump White House, right?

Fiona Hill:

Yeah, no way. And I think we’d probably anticipate a pretty significant purge of people in the Department of Justice and many of the other institutions, Pentagon and elsewhere. I mean, the civilian and other sides for the institutions that stood up to Trump. We also have to remember, it’s not just about Trump himself, which I think you’ve alluded to here, because there’s an awful lot of other people who see themselves as the heir apparent.

Fiona Hill:

So in fact, the preferences instead of Trump, because many people have hitched themselves to his bandwagon and his style, knowing that he’s not necessarily competent, but that he will kind of go along with some of their agenda items to basically have himself in power, because he wants to win, he wants to be back. He doesn’t feel that he’s gone in the first place, and all of them have pretty clear agenda items that they want to push forward, and they’re prepared to make that trade off and have him there as long as they can push their agendas.

Fiona Hill:

And so there will be an awful lot of people pushing forward there and then trying to get rid of people within the system that are standing in the way. I think there’s an awful lot of people who be very comfortable with a minority rule that we’ve seen in other countries where the majority of people’s votes really doesn’t matter and doesn’t count. And I think it’s more likely to happen when people aren’t paying attention. And that’s one of the reasons why I’m trying to speak out.

Fiona Hill:

I mean, although the book talks about a lot of other things, what it does underscore is how fragile our democracy is right now, because right now the system isn’t delivering for the vast majority of people, and that’s again, also fuel for demagogue, for populous leaders who can say, “Well, we’re going to fix it for you, just kind of give us your vote so we can stay in power for a longer period of time.” Putin for example, in Russia, initially if he’d stepped aside after his first two terms, and then we went off to be prime minister. I think we’d have a very positive assessment of him in relative terms, in Russia of what he did in that period, turning the country around, putting it back on his feet.

Fiona Hill:

Our view of him has changed as he just kept on staying, and staying, and staying, and staying, because he’s saying that he’s the only solution. People around him say, “There’s no Russia without Vladimir Putin, nothing will get fixed from a pothole to this stand off with the evil west that’s trying to bring Russia to its knees without Vladimir Putin.” It’s very easy to envisage a scenario where kind of a significant portion of voters are persuaded that only by keeping the same group Trump and people around him and the success of Trump who we might or might not name in power for an indefinitely, will they be able to see the sort of achievements of things that they want?

Fiona Hill:

And even though there might be a majority of the population might like some of those things, that’s not how the process is supposed to work here. I worry a great deal when I look at that, I mean, Vladimir Putin found a way to amend the Russian constitution. And we shouldn’t rule that out, we should not rule that out in the United States context.

Preet Bharara:

It’s funny, I’ve been thinking lately that one of the most important provisions of the constitution in my mind now, which came fairly late in the history of the country was the provision that prohibits a president from serving as president for more than two terms. And that happened remarkably after-

Fiona Hill:

Recently.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, after FDR-

Fiona Hill:

How many died in office?

Preet Bharara:

Got elected four times, and one of the most revered presidents of all time arguably saved the country from fascism and what a smart thing we did as a country. And it’s not easy to amend the constitution here. I don’t know how it compares to amending the constitution in Russia, but that is a very important protection. And I still like to think that that’s a very hard thing to overcome.

Preet Bharara:

That whatever Trump does, the bar on serving more than twice as president would be a very hard thing to change. But you never know. And I think people need to be cognizant of that. I want to talk you at sort of close to the end of your book, as you go somewhat chronologically. Talk about the moment that you testify first behind closed doors and then in public with respect to the Ukraine affair.

Preet Bharara:

One question I had for you and we were talking about internally in the team, do you have an alumni group with the other witnesses? Do you and Marie Ivanocich and Alexander Veneman and others, do you have a biweekly beer or something?

Fiona Hill:

We haven’t because of COVID, but perhaps we should, but we do all keep in touch with each other. I think when people have gone through-

Preet Bharara:

I’d like to come, if you have that, I’d like to come and I I’ll buy the first round.

Fiona Hill:

First beer good, yeah. Well, I mean, when you’ve all been through something like this obviously it does tend to sort of forge different sets of relationships, but there were many people who were snarled up in the impeaching trial, had to give a testimony as well. People who certainly didn’t anticipate doing that and who were still on their jobs actually within the government, and still continued to be admirable public servants. And they really should be commended for really sticking to their oath to the constitution there. It wasn’t just those of us who tended to kind of be more in the spotlight, but many others who were still there in the government.

Preet Bharara:

What was the hardest part about testifying for you?

Fiona Hill:

For me, it was just really the aspersions that were being cast, not just against me, but against all of my colleagues. This idea that we were, as Jim, John others kept putting it deep state coup plotting bureaucrats. It’s total mouthful, being able to be a sail of this.

Preet Bharara:

Don’t put that on a t-shirt.

Fiona Hill:

No, and that somehow we were disloyal, traitors, un-American by stepping forward to tell the truth and to uphold our oath of office. And that’s really one, I knew that we were in big trouble as a society. I mean, it wasn’t the vast majority of people, I have to say that all of us got 100s of lessons from around the country commending us on our public service, but it was just this idea that you could be portrayed in that regard.

Fiona Hill:

I mean, really the one point that some of the Republican members of Congress, people like Matt Gates, were basically saying this was sort of a Soviet Era trial of the president. And I was like, come on. I mean, I know a Soviet Era’s short trial when I see one, I’ve studied plenty of them.” And it was us who were being basically put on this as supporters kind of accused of the kinds of things under Stalin, where people would out each other, because maybe they wanted their neighbor’s house, the neighbor’s flat rather, or the neighbor’s wife or the neighbor’s wife’s fur coat.

Fiona Hill:

And it was all these kind of crazy denunciations and that’s kind of what we were experiencing. And that certainly got my back up, I have to say, and made me quite angry. And I felt that’s kind of one of the reasons why I sort of felt that I had to put myself in that opening statement for the testimony, just to set the record straight about who I was, just like who everybody else was.

Fiona Hill:

Years later, I can say with confidence that this country has offered me opportunities, I never would’ve had in England. I grew up poor with a very distinctive working class accent. In England, in the 1980s and 1990s, this would have impeded my professional advancement. This background has never set me back in America. For the best part of three decades, I’ve built a career as a nonpartisan, non-political, and national security professional, focusing on Europe and Eurasia and especially the former Soviet Union.

Preet Bharara:

Well, so there were some denunciations, that’s true. And some of those denunciations came from people who you might be proud to have as adversaries and enemies, but there were many, I think, many, many, many more people who were auditory, who hailed you, who felt a revelation that we have public servants like you and Colonel Vindman and others, who quietly behind the scenes do the work to protect the country. And you were the object of quite a bit of adulation also from other folks. How did you handle that? And did that come as a surprise?

Fiona Hill:

Well, that was the most surprising aspect of it, and I’d never considered that that would be the outcome. One of the person, I mean, who was really in the spotlight of this and as well as [inaudible 00:59:20] Colonel Vindman, who was really harshly and unfairly treated is of course, Marie Ivanovich. And her removal had been the precipitating factor for everything, because everybody around the government knew this was grossly unfair, unwarranted, and a sign of something pretty nefarious going on in the background.

Fiona Hill:

Because she was one of the most respected members of the diplomatic core and one of the very few women at her level. So there was a sort of a double attack there, not just on the best of the best of our diplomatic service, but also one of the few women at the very top of the profession here. And so as soon as she was removed in the spring of 2019, everybody knew that we were in big trouble here, and that everything had gone awry, and there was real effort to undermine US Foreign Policy and National Security.

Fiona Hill:

And ultimately as it became a power over the course of the whole depositions and testimony, an attempt to privatize foreign relationships and national security, which was shocking, even in the larger context of many other shocking things. And so as I said, I hadn’t really thought about how this would all be we received, but for me and for the others, it was important to speak out against this.

Fiona Hill:

It’s always important to tell the truth. I mean, we bring our kids up to tell the truth. I don’t know what members of Congress are telling their kids at the moment, don’t pay any attention to mommy and daddy when we lie on television.

Preet Bharara:

Something like that.

Fiona Hill:

Please just tell me the truth about what you did kind of don’t do as do, but do as I say, I mean, that’s never the best sort of parenting approach. I really do wonder about that, because I mean, certainly when I was growing up telling lies had consequences, now they just don’t admit it.

Preet Bharara:

They don’t admit that they lie. I mean, that’s the way you get around it. They don’t concede that they lie. And with respect to some things, the argument grows. Trump actually believes some of the lies, even though there’s contrary evidence.

Fiona Hill:

Oh, I think he does, I think he does actually just from firsthand observation, I think he sort of talked to himself, because he can’t basic countenance the truth and certainly admit it to himself.

Preet Bharara:

Early in that first impeachment process in October, when you came and testified behind closed doors as an initial matter, did you have a view on how things would play out in the house in the Senate? Did you at any point think, well, maybe the president will be impeached and maybe he’ll be convicted or did you have the opposite view that we’ll put this all out in the record, it’s my patriotic duty to do so, but at the end of the day will fail in the Senate or were you not thinking about that at all?

Fiona Hill:

On the initial phase I didn’t think about that. I thought the latter that it was my duty to do, this needs to be all out on the record. I believe in representational government, I believe in congressional oversight, which seems that members of Congress are throwing out the window, that check and balance on executive power. But it was only really kind of later as we got to the public testimony.

Fiona Hill:

And when I saw the way that things were playing out by a lot of people just thinking of this as just a political game and the statements that they were said, where I thought, well, they’re just making a mockery of all of this. And history will not judge them already of as well for not taking this more seriously. Knowledge is the international community, honestly, because you have to also bear mind as an immigrant and lots of family members in other places.

Fiona Hill:

I was certainly hearing in earful from other people watching this elsewhere and just saying what an earth is going on in the United States, because United States, certainly for my family and relatives being a beacon and the gold standard for how to run elections and how to do things, competence of government. And we were just ranking competence and disregard for any kind of due process being a political or otherwise.

Fiona Hill:

And that was a shock to people, how far of the United States had fallen? I mean, a great delight for somebody like Vladimir Putin or others who would rather that the United States was consigned to their view, the hardship of history and just to kind of become a middling power that everyone can disregard. But for others who were locking to United States for leadership, this is a tragedy.

Preet Bharara:

Were you surprised the Trump ended up getting impeached a second time?

Fiona Hill:

Well, I think for all of us getting impeached a second time, we impeached the first time was a bit of a shocking achievement, isn’t it? I don’t know, whether that’s a double win or what this is there. But from the events of January 6, and everything that he had said in the interim between January 2020 and January of 2021, I mean, there has to be some responsibility in some accounting for all of this.

Fiona Hill:

I mean, I think it got worse after that first impeachment trial, President Trump became the biggest threat to the US elections that we’ve seen since the Russians in 2016. And people like my colleague, Chris Krebs, who were at the Department of Homeland Security trying to shore up the election, found themselves having to speak out against their own president, rather than against foreign threats. The foreign threats were easy to deal with.

Preet Bharara:

I wanna ask you another question about January 6th, and about this whole group of people, you can call them many things. You can call them the Trump base, you can call them folks who believe they’ve been forgotten. You and others talk about these sort of economic argument for why people have certain beliefs and follow Trump. But there there’s another point of view and I’ve seen it being offered by various folks, including Tom Nichols, who writes this, and I wonder your reaction.

Preet Bharara:

He writes, “The January 6th riders were an extreme example of a stupifying level of narcissism. These insurrectionists were not disenfranchised or oppressed people trying to engage in a peaceful assembly, rather the whole event was a day camp outing for middle aged, middle class, gainfully employed Americans who wanted to be heroes storming Congress, and then go back home to sell real estate, attend work retreats in Mexico and brag about all of it on Instagram.” Is there any truth to that?

Fiona Hill:

I think there is some truth to that as well, but I mean, everybody’s been sort of feeding off this idea of dislocation loss. And I think what Tom says certainly resonates. There’s also some other research that’s been done by professor at Chicago university, Rob Pip. I hope I’m promising his last name correctly, P-I-P, who showed that the vast majority of people who took part in the interaction, the storming of the capital were coming from counties across the United States. So at the county level, not the state level, that were undergoing rapid demographic change.

Fiona Hill:

Literally the first is the people around them are changing and they’re kind of not keeping up with it. It feels very threatening to them. And they’d also, though they’d been as Tom Nichols, just solidly middle class, maybe had some kind of financial problems in the work of the great recession, the financial crisis of 2000 and 2009. So they definitely felt somewhat on board.

Fiona Hill:

And I think looking for something to pull them out of this funk, thinking about how they would move themselves forward, how they could be part of something that’s sort of bigger than themselves, all of these factors come to play. I think the problem that we have now is there’s so many layers to all of this, and obviously in the book I basically focus on this things that I know the best that I’ve seen with my own eyes. I wanted it to be authentic, empirical things that I could observe rather than stuff that I was talking it about or just second or third hand.

Fiona Hill:

But I think there’s all elements of all of this in there. And we are at one of the, again, these moments where we are especially vulnerable and ripe for demagogy and tyranny. So we have to unpack all of this. And that’s why I think that the exercise of understanding what happened in January 6 is very important. Again, it’s not just who these people were, why they did it, but how did the whole environment around them sort of shape what they did in the larger context? And that includes what happened on Facebook, failures of law enforcement, et cetera, et cetera.

Preet Bharara:

I’ve quoted you recently more than once as describing the January 6th insurrection as a dress rehearsal. You and I have been mostly talking about what may happen politically in the future with Trumpism and Trump himself. How much do you worry given your expertise on these issues in a number of countries, how concerned are you about significant violence in America?

Fiona Hill:

I’m worried a lot about it. So just yesterday, the day before I got a nasty phone call on my home phone, which I probably should switch off again, as I did during the testimony. Somebody saying, “Why are you Fiona Hill inciting civil war?” And I think it’s because I described in one media interview that I thought the United States was in a status of cold civil war right now, because we’ve already got violence. We’ve had so many episodes of violence over the last several years.

Fiona Hill:

And President Trump has encouraged so much of this. We remember during the violence around the Black Lives Matter Movements and the Proud Boys, instead of asking them to cease and desist, he tells them to basically stand by and all the encouragement, the fighting talk, the little fighting talk that he uses. And some of the research work that I’ve done back in the past on ethnic and civil violence, Trump would be called a violent entrepreneur.

Fiona Hill:

Basically somebody who talks the fighting talk to get people all stirred up. And many of the places that I’ve locked up that have ended up in civil war often on an ethnic basis, not just on a political basis have been when there’s been a tipping point in society, either in the economy, overwhelming levels of inequality, and people getting incredibly dissatisfied. And you see that in the uprisings around the Arab spring for example.

Fiona Hill:

Or when there’s a demographic tipping, where people feel that they’re losing their place in society, that can be either through immigration or just demographic change. And a lot of the demographic change in the United States is being driven by inter marriage and birth threats, not by immigration. Immigration is some of the lowest it’s ever been in US history, contrary to what you would think.

Preet Bharara:

That was a surprising statistic.

Fiona Hill:

Yeah, I know, exactly. I mean, if anybody wants to have a look more at this, there’s my colleague at Brookings, William Frey, Bill Frey, F-R-E-Y, has some amazing interactive information, and maps, and things looking at the census from 2020. Very deep analysis showing a lot of this information.

Fiona Hill:

And so we are at one of those tipping points, then you also look at polling and in social surveys that I participated in years back again, and looking at ethno-political and other civil violence. When you reach a point where about 12% of respondents says that they’d be willing to basically commit an act of violence to further whatever a cause it is that they’re promoting. And they feel that there’s no other way to make their voice heard, then you’re in real trouble.

Fiona Hill:

And that’s where we are right now. And we are seeing in polling that people see the opponent in really stark terms and the primary identification in the United States now tends to be Democratic or Republican, blue or red. People call it tribal, but you can call it whatever you want. I mean, we’ve basically got people seeing themselves getting divided into these hostile groupings, they don’t want members of their family to marry into the opposing side.

Fiona Hill:

And again, this could be an ethnic group. I mean, I’ve seen this in place like Armenian Azerbaijan, go on the cutback, all kinds of places that I’ve studied in the past, where you’ve had these outbreaks of really nasty violence. And also people kind of saying that they’re so opposed to the side, that they think that they become dehumanized and that violence is the only way to teach people a lesson.

Fiona Hill:

So we’re seeing all of that right now, that is why I and many other people are extremely worried and anybody who’s come and turned the lens onto the United States from outside, who have experienced or studied War-torn Societies, is deeply troubled by the things that they’re seeing here in the United States now. And if we saw this in another country, that was one of our closest our lives, we’d be trying to stage an intervention.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, and that’s one of the best ways of thinking about it.

Fiona Hill:

And I don’t mean a military intervention. I mean, intervention where we’d take them off to one side say, “Hey, you need a bit of mediation.” We did that very successfully in Northern Ireland. I keep across Northern Ireland having a resurgence of the troubles in the work of Brexit. But I think we could do with some of our European colleagues coming and giving us a bit of a hand here, bringing some of the expertise back again.

Preet Bharara:

Fiona Hill, I want to thank you for spending so much time with us. I want to thank you for your service, I want to thank you for what you’ve written in this book. It’s very important, and I really enjoyed it. There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century. Fiona Hill, thanks very much.

Fiona Hill:

Thank you so much, Preet, it’s been a pleasure.

Preet Bharara:

My conversation with Dr. Fiona Hill continues for members of the Cafe Insider Community. To try out the membership free for two weeks, head to cafe.com/insider. Again, that’s cafe.com/insider.

Preet Bharara:

So folks lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about and talking a lot about, and sometimes writing about the issue of whether or not we can have good faith debate and what the nature of good faith debate is in this country. And so I want to end this week show addressing a debate that’s been happening, good faith disagreement among people who I like and respect on both sides of the question.

Preet Bharara:

Over the past few days, I’ve been seeing a number of questions about this issue, and it is this, whether attorney general Merrick Garland should appoint a special counsel to investigate the origins of the January 6th insurrection, rather than having DOJ do it itself. Here’s an example of a question from Twitter user Rich H Rants, “Been seeing a lot of debate about whether it would be more effective to have a special counsel or let the DOJ and Congress handle January 6th investigations. What do you think is the best way to go? #AskPreet.”

Preet Bharara:

As the listener points out, this question has sparked something of a debate on legal Twitter. And there are people who I deeply respect on both sides of the question. In fact, a number of them are colleagues of ours at Cafe. So I thought I’d take a moment at the end of the show to summarize that debate and give you a sense of my own thoughts briefly.

Preet Bharara:

A quick reminder, first, for those who are a little foggy on the definition of special counsel, what that is, and what the circumstances are that give rise to one. So you may remember that there used to be something called the Independent Council Statute in 1990, but that expired. And so there isn’t today a federal statutory law governing the appointment of a special counsel. There are DOJ regulations that address that issue, and it’s those regulations under which Special Counsel Bob Mueller was appointed several years ago.

Preet Bharara:

And the regulations essentially say this, “That the attorney general will appoint a special counsel when there’s a determination that criminal investigation of a person or matter is warranted and that investigation or prosecution of that person would present a conflict of interest for the department, or other extraordinary circumstances.” Make a note of that, would present a conflict of interest for the department.

Preet Bharara:

“And also that under the circumstances would be in the public interest to appoint an outside special counsel to assume responsibility for the matter.” So there are a bunch of folks who I like and respect and who contribute to Cafe, who are solidly in favor of the appointment of a special counsel, notably Asha Rangappa, a former FBI agent. Who’s very smart, has a lot to say on the issue.

Preet Bharara:

She says, there’s a lot of pros to appointing special counsel, among other things she says it’s warranted. And she points out, “Contrary to what some have suggested, a conflict of interest is not a requisite for appointing a special counsel. Appropriate grounds include that an independent prosecutor would be in the public interest or that there are extraordinary circumstances.” As I just read to you from the regulation.

Preet Bharara:

She also suggests that the appointment of a special counsel would signal that getting to the bottom of this is a priority for the justice department. She also suggests it could provide for a more efficient investigation because DOJ has a lot of things on its plate. She recognizes that it’s not an overwhelming case in favor of special counsel, there’s some cons as well. For example, she says it creates a new space for politicization as we saw with Mueller, attacks on the special counsel, attacks on the FBI, attacks on DOJ. She’s not alone in her support for a special counsel to investigate the insurrection.

Preet Bharara:

John Dean, former White House counsel says it is long past time for AG Garland to appoint a special counsel. He says using an exclamation mark, our democracies at stake for heaven’s sake! Noted Harvard Law School Professor Larry Tribe agrees with John Dean that there should be a special counsel. Max Boot, the conservative leaning historian foreign policy analyst, who’s been a guest on this show has written an op-ed in favor of a special counsel.

Preet Bharara:

The arguments in favor of a special counsel in part seem to rest on the idea that it sends a message and a signal that this is very important. And given its importance, there should be one person or one agency duly appointed to investigate this that is not distracted by other concerns, issues, investigations, or prosecutions. And I get that. There are folks by the way on the other side of the coin, including my friend and former colleague Dan Goldman, who focuses on the question of the conflict of interest.

Preet Bharara:

He writes, “There is no conflict of interest that warrants a special counsel. Garland was an a political judge until this year, just because Trump turned the DOJ into his political arm in court does not mean that’s what DOJ is. Garland is perfect to handle this.” Barbara McQuade, my friend and former US attorney from Detroit says also, “There is no need to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate a former president. Unlike a sitting president, a former president is not at the AGs boss. In fact, who’s to say, DOJ has not started investigating Trump already as part of January 6th.”

Preet Bharara:

And Jill Wine-Banks also noted lawyer, former Watergate prosecutor says as well, “No special counsel needed, AG is not investigating his boss as he would’ve been in Watergate or even Whitewater.” So the difference of opinion it seems to me, among these good faith, super smart former federal prosecutors and legal analysts is the question of the conflict of interest.

Preet Bharara:

And typically, as we saw with Mueller, when you have the possibility of malfeasance in and around the White House, and that person is still in the White House, you want to have someone outside of the justice department that can be weaponized, as we saw Trump trying to do. Someone outside of that department doing the investigation, that’s not present here, Asha points out very wisely, that there is also a provision for the appointment of special counsel.

Preet Bharara:

If there are extraordinary circumstances, which certainly exists here as well. And once in a lifetime insurrection is no small matter. A couple of other points on each side that I’ll mention that I haven’t so far, one, special counsel as we saw with Bob Mueller, would also probably be preparing a report. Even when there were prosecutions, and even if there weren’t, we might get some kind of fuller accounting for transparency of what happened in the days and weeks leading up to January 6th and on January 6th itself.

Preet Bharara:

That arguably is a benefit of a special counsel, which you wouldn’t get from the DOJ, they’re not in the business DOJ of preparing reports like special counsels are. And a point on the other side, it may have been true that there is some efficiency to putting together a special counsel and an office, but we’re now many months from January 6th, lots and lots of investigations and prosecutions have happened.

Preet Bharara:

And it takes time for a special counsel to be appointed, there’s difficulty in figuring out who the proper person would be. They’re not that many folks who are not on the record about January 6th, and whether they think those folks were acting in good faith, or whether they were traitors to their country. Finding someone to do it who will be viewed as impartial by everyone would be difficult and it takes time to staff up and get resources going.

Preet Bharara:

So for my own part, I understand the arguments on both sides, but I’m slightly on the side of the folks who say, “Let DOJ handle it, there’s no reason to believe they can’t handle it, and they’re already underway.” Part of the reason I’m addressing this question is not just for the substance of it, but as an exercise in showing that people can have strong feelings about a particular issue, even a legal issue, and have good faith disagreement about it and debate with integrity and honesty and respectfully. And I think we need more of that.

Preet Bharara:

Well, that’s it for this episode of Stay Tuned. Thanks again to my guest, Dr. Fiona Hill. If you like what we do, rate and review the show on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen, every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics and justice. Tweet them to me at Preet Bharara with the #AskPreet, or you can call and leave me a message at 669-247-7338, that’s 669-24 Preet. Or you can send an email to letters@cafe.com.

Preet Bharara:

Stay Tuned is presented by Cafe and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper, the technical director is David Tatasciore, the senior producers are Adam Waller and Matthew Billy. And the Cafe team is David Kurlander, Sam Ozer-Staton, Noa Azulai, Nat Wiener, Jake Kaplan, Chris Boylan, Sean Walsh, Chelsea Simmons and Namita Shah. Our music is by Andrew Doss. I’m your host Preet Bharara. Stay tuned.