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WASHINGTON (AP) — Vladimir Putin paid scant attention to Fiona Hill, a preeminent U.S. expert on Russia, when she was seated next to him at dinners. Putin’s people placed her there by design, choosing a “nondescript woman,” as she put it, so the Russian president would have no competition for attention.
Fluent in Russian, she often carefully took in the conversations of men who seemed to forget she was there and wrote it all down later, she recalled in an Associated Press interview. “Hey, if I was a guy, you wouldn’t be talking like this in front of me,” she remembered thinking. “But go ahead. I’m listening.”
Hill expected not to be similarly invisible when she later went to work for another world leader, Donald Trump, as his Russia adviser in the White House. She could see inside Putin’s head, had co-written an acclaimed book about him, but Trump did not want her counsel, either. He ignored her in meeting after meeting, once mistaking her for a secretary and calling her “darlin.”
Again, though, she was listening. She was reading Trump like she had read Putin.
The result is “There Is Nothing for You Here,” her book out last week. Unlike other tell-all authors from the Trump administration, she isn’t obsessed with the scandalous. Much like her measured but riveting testimony in Trump’s first impeachment, the book offers a more sober, and thus perhaps more alarming, portrait of the 45th president.
If Hill’s tone is restrained, it is damning by a thousand cuts. It lays out how a career devoted to understanding and managing the Russian threat crashed into her revelation that the greatest threat to America comes from within.
In fly-on-the-wall detail, she describes a president with a voracious appetite for praise and little to no taste for governing — a man so consumed with what others said about him that U.S. relations with other countries rose or fell according to how flattering foreign leaders were in their remarks.
“From his staff…
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Source : yahoo
