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- Fiona Hill, a top advisor on Russia under Donald Trump, said he started to resemble Vladimir Putin during his presidency.
- Hill said that Trump started looking more like Putin in "political practice and predilection."
- She added that Trump used Ukraine as a "plaything for his own purposes."
Fiona Hill, a top advisor on Russia during Donald Trump's presidency, said Trump started to "resemble" Russian President Putin as his term wore on and used Ukraine as a "plaything for his own purposes."
In an interview with The New York Times Magazine published on Monday, Hill shared what it was like working for Trump and watching him deal with foreign leaders.
"In the course of his presidency, indeed, Trump would come more to resemble Putin in political practice and predilection than he resembled any of his recent American presidential predecessors," said Hill, per the outlet.
Hill compared Trump to the presidents before him, noting how meetings with George W. Bush in 2008 differed from her experience during the two years she served in the Trump administration, per The Times.
She told the outlet that Bush, unlike Trump, actually read his briefing materials. She added that she was allowed to give unpopular opinions to Bush without being punished or frozen out and that Bush asked respectful questions.
In comparison, Hill said it was a tall order to try to steer policy under Trump.
"It was extraordinarily difficult. Certainly, that was the case for those of us who were serving in the administration with the hopes of pushing back against the Russians, to make sure that their intervention in 2016 didn't happen again. And along the way, some people kind of lost their sense of self," she said, per the outlet.
Hill also told The Times that Trump "was using Ukraine as a plaything for his own purposes" — particularly when he sent his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani on a "domestic political errand" and pressured Ukraine to investigate then-former Vice President Joe Biden.
In the same article, Charles Kupperman, who was once a deputy national security adviser to Trump, recounted how his former boss once "let loose" on the topic of Ukraine and launched into an expletive-laden rant about the country.
"They're [expletive] corrupt. They [expletive] tried to screw me,'" Trump said while falsely accusing Ukraine of trying to sabotage his election chances.
Following The Times' article, Trump released a brief statement on Twitter via his spokesperson Liz Harrington, insulting Hill.
"Fiona Hill is a Radical Left RINO, but the word RINO is too good. She doesn't know the first thing she's talking about. If she didn't have the accent she would be nothing," Trump wrote, using the acronym for the pejorative term "Republican In Name Only."
"During the Impeachment Hoax #1, she had no credibility, obviously, because we won unanimously. Never listened to her, I hardly knew her at all. She knew nothing about me, I knew nothing about her, and I liked it that way," he added, referring to his first impeachment in December 2019.
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