Welcome to Hard Talk on the BBC World Service with me, Stephen Sacker. My guest today has been through a period of prolonged soul searching that has played out in America's public sphere.

Elizabeth Newman is a security and counter-terror expert whose public service began in the George W Bush presidency when, after the 9-11 terror attacks, she was recruited

into the newly created Department of Homeland Security. Fast forward a decade and a half,

and Ms. Newman was invited to join the Trump administration's Homeland Security team.

As a Republican voter with little affection for Mr. Trump personally, she was torn,

but she took the job. What followed was a three-year period of rising disillusion and growing alarm.

She saw America's far-right white supremacists as a growing security threat, and she felt Donald Trump

was fanning the flames of their extremism.

In April 2020, she resigned, having repeatedly warned of the dangers of violence from far-right

domestic terrorists. So when a pro-Trump mob stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6th in an effort

to overturn the November election victory of Joe Biden,

her words seemed prescient. What now, though? Will Donald Trump continue to dominate the Republican

Party? And will the lines between mainstream conservatism and far-right extremism be further

blurred? Well, Elizabeth Newman joins me now from her home in Virginia.

Welcome to Hard Talk. Thank you for having me. Let me ask you this as an opener. How much soul

searching have you done in recent months? Because for, what, the best part of three years, you were a top counter-terror

official inside the Trump administration, when it seems for much of that time, you saw

Donald Trump as a man who was fanning the flames of extremism and terrorism.

Well, I'd say that I was doing a lot of soul-searching and praying for much of the last

five years. The 2016 election prompted many of us to try to understand what we were seeing,

what was happening with the rise of Trump. The decision to go in was not an easy one.

I turned it down twice before somebody called a few days before inauguration and expressed concern that there weren't many people willing to come in and work in this administration that had much of a security background.

...