Former President Donald Trump ripped ex-National Security Council official Fiona Hill Thursday as “a Deep State stiff with a nice accent” who was “terrible at her job” in response to disparaging comments Hill made about the 45th president while promoting her new memoir.
“The first time I remember hearing her name was during Impeachment Hoax # 1, where she worked hard to say anything bad, but there wasn’t much,” Trump recalled in an emailed statement.
“It was a total con job. She may have been in the Oval and conference rooms with me, but this was not anybody who I recognized. Then she acted like she was a know-it-all, but in reality, she had no influence whatsoever.”
Hill briefly gained the national spotlight in late 2019, when she testified before the House Intelligence Committee on claims Trump wrongfully pressured Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate then-presidential candidate Joe Biden, his son Hunter and the latter’s work for Ukrainian energy company Burisma.
In her testimony, Hill recounted then-National Security Adviser John Bolton’s anger upon learning that Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani and other administration figures were conducting a shadow foreign policy campaign to persuade Ukraine to open the probes Trump wanted.
At one point, she recalled, Bolton said he was “not part of whatever drug deal [then-US Ambassador to the European Union Gordon] Sondland and [then-acting White House chief of staff Mick] Mulvaney are cooking up.”
Trump’s Thursday statement seized on Hill’s professional link to Bolton, whom Trump called “one of the dumbest and most ‘crazed’ people in Washington.”
“Both of them didn’t say much and what they did say wasn’t listened to, especially after Bolton’s statement that he wants the ‘Libya Model’ on North Korea in the midst of my negotiation with Kim Jong Un,” the former president said, referring to a remark Bolton made on CBS’ “Face The Nation” in April 2018.
“Fortunately, Kim Jong Un understood how stupid he [Bolton] was,” Trump went on, “and wouldn’t allow him at meetings or dinners (I liked that).”
Hill, now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Center on the United States and Europe, has made the media rounds this week promoting her book “There Is Nothing for You Here.” The tome recounts Hill’s life, from her upbringing as a coal miner’s daughter in the northeast of England to her time in the Trump White House. It also argues that lack of economic opportunity is “driving American politics over the brink” and that the US is “running out of time to save ourselves from Russia’s fate.”
In an interview with the Daily Beast earlier this week, Hill said that Trump had “autocrat envy” and flattered authoritarian leaders like Chinese President Xi Jinping, Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Hill further described the former president as a “a counter-intelligence and national security risk because he was so vulnerable to manipulation based on the fragility of his ego.”
“Anyone could induce him to do something by raising the specter of someone insulting him — or by praising him,” she added. “His ideology was idolatry.”
While Hill dismissed the long-held left-wing idea that the Kremlin held compromising material about Trump that explained his administration’s purported “soft on Russia” policies, she did say that “what Putin had on Trump is what everybody else had—recognition of his extreme vulnerability to manipulation.”
Trump concluded his statement by railing against a recent spate of books “being written by people like her who had virtually no access to me, and who I didn’t even know. They write it as if they’re experts on ‘Trump,’ but they know absolutely nothing about me.
“My function was to save our Country and Survive,” he said. “Unfortunately, when you look at what is happening now with Afghanistan, the Border, inflation, etc., our Country is not being saved. It is in big trouble!”
