Former deputy assistant to President Trump on Trump-Putin summit

(CBS, KYMA/KECY) - Fiona Hill, former Deputy Assistant to President Donald Trump, joined Margaret Brennan on Face the Nation Sunday following the Trump-Putin summit in Alaska.

Hill, who was an advisor during the Helskini summit in 2018, shared her thoughts on the Alaska summit saying, "The optics were much more favorable to Putin than they were to the United States. It really looked like Putin set the agenda there, the narrative and in many respects the tone for the whole summit meeting."

Brennan followed up by asking if Hill thinks President Trump's team set him up for success at the summit, and Hill said:

"It may well have been that one of the demands, because we've heard from Secretary Rubio, which I have to say, I think was a very fair assessment of where things are. So it may well have been that one of the demands by the Russians to make any progress in moving further forward was to actually have that kind of show of pomp and pageantry, that basically marks Putin's re-entry into international affairs. Maybe the Russians said to them in Moscow, either to Steve Witkoff or to Secretary Rubio, or to anybody else, that basically they wanted to have a major US-Russia, bilateral summit appearance before they would move on to the nitty-gritty of anything else in Ukraine. That's to give them- them all the benefit of the doubt there. But, it all now depends on what comes out of this. And I think again, Secretary Rubio made it very clear that it's not going to be easy. He was certainly downplaying any expectations of a major breakthrough. But he did say that there was something that might be possible. I think that's what's going to be the proof of whether this was actually worth all the effort that they went to in Alaska or not. And as Congressman Crow said, there's a pretty high bar here, because what Putin is doing is pretty brutal, and he's not showing, right now, any signs whatsoever of giving anything up."

During the interview, Brennan and Hill talked about why Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin discussed U.S. mail-in voting during their summer.

Hill says Putin wants to see the U.S. "tie ourselves up in knots between now and the midterms" in 2026.

"He's trying to sow chaos, and he's just basically used his time with President Trump to push that along. It's, again, it's a diversion, it's a distraction, really, from the negotiations on Ukraine, because Putin doesn't really want to give anything up, so he gives up, basically, something that plays well in the political arena for President Trump and something that actually plays very badly for the United States in its own political arena, which is the mail-in voting point that he made."

Fiona Hill, former Deputy Assistant to the President of the United States

To watch more of Brennan's interview with Hill, click here.