Former White House Russia expert Fiona Hill on ‘There is Nothing For

Fiona Hill, the National Security Council’s former senior director for Europe and Russia, arrives on Capitol Hill Nov. 21, 2019.

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Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Fiona Hill, the National Security Council’s former senior director for Europe and Russia, arrives on Capitol Hill Nov. 21, 2019.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Russia expert Fiona Hill warns that American democracy is under attack — from within.

In November 2019, Hill became one of the key witnesses at Trump’s first impeachment hearing, where she condemned the false narrative that it was Ukraine, not Russia, that interfered in the 2016 election, and described the Trump administration’s parallel policy channel in Ukraine to get dirt on Joe and Hunter Biden.

Hill worked in the Trump White House as the top Russia expert. She watched Russian president Vladimir Putin manipulate Trump, she says, and observed as Trump increasingly resembled the authoritarian leaders he admired, including Putin.

“Trump himself was a massive counterintelligence risk, because of his vulnerabilities and the fragility of his ego,” Hill says.

After her testimony at the impeachment hearing, Hill received death threats. “I stopped answering my telephone, switched off the answering machine, got some security cameras,” she says. “I was advised to seal up the mail slot on my door to make sure nobody put a pipe bomb or a packet of powder through it.”

Hill grew up in the coal country of northeast England, the daughter of a miner. By the time she graduated high school in 1984, the mines had closed down. At her father’s urging, she moved to the U.S. in 1989. She became an American citizen in 2002.

Hill’s new memoir, There is Nothing For You Here, takes its title from the words her father used when he encouraged her to leave England. In her time in the U.S., Hill says she’s seen the country take progressively “darker turns,” including the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

“The United States is teetering on the edge of violence here. We’re already, I think, in a cold civil war,” she says. “We’ve got a chance now to turn this around. But if we don’t take it, we’re heading…