Fiona Hill, a former National Security Council official, is reflecting on former President Donald Trump’s Helsinki press conference in 2018, calling it “humiliating for the country.”
CNN’s Don Lemon asked Hill on Tuesday night, “Of all the disastrous things you have seen on the world stage, Fiona, where did that moment fall? And did you seriously consider that? It was that bad?”
She replied, “I did seriously think about it. I, first of all, looked around to see if there was a fire alarm, but we were in a rather grand building attached to the presidential palace of the Finnish president, who had lent it to us for the occasion.”
Hill continued, “And I couldn’t see anything that resembled a fire alarm.”
Comparing it to another significant moment during Trump’s time in office, Hill explained, “I had exactly the same feeling that Deborah Birx had during the infamous press conference where there was this suggestion by President Trump about injecting bleach to counteract to the coronavirus.”
Watch her comments below:
Fiona Hill on Helsinki: I had exactly the same feeling that Deborah Birx had during the infamous press conference where there was the suggestion by President Trump about injecting bleach… It was mortifying frankly and humiliating for the country pic.twitter.com/JPNwbQmHdF
— Acyn (@Acyn) June 16, 2021
She added, “It was one of those moments where it was mortifying, frankly, and humiliating for the country, and it was also completely, I have to say, out of step of what had happened in the meeting prior to that.”
Hill previously said she considered “the idea of faking some kind of medical emergency and throwing myself backwards with a loud blood curdling scream into the media.”
The former Trump official was included in the group of experts who helped President Joe Biden prepare for his summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
On Tuesday, a report from The New York Times reported why Biden would not be holding a joint presser with Putin following the summit, as IJR reported.
“Top aides to Mr. Biden said that during negotiations over the meetings, to be held at an 18th-century Swiss villa on the shores of Lake Geneva, the Russian government was eager to have Mr. Putin join Mr. Biden in a news conference,” Michael Shear reported.
He added, “But Biden administration officials said that they were mindful of how Mr. Putin seemed to get the better of Mr. Trump in Helsinki.”
Trump, during the Helsinki press conference, “publicly accepted Mr. Putin’s assurances that his government did not interfere with the 2016 election, taking the Russian president’s word rather than the assessments of his own intelligence officials,” according to the Times.