Former CIA Director Michael Hayden has some advice for colleagues asking whether they should take a job working for President Donald Trump: Don’t.
In an interview with Yahoo News’ podcast, the retired four-star Air Force general and ex-director of the National Security Agency said colleagues choosing to work for the Trump administration could put their future and reputation at risk, citing former national security adviser H.R. McMaster and former Homeland Security adviser Tom Bossert as examples.
“The longer they were in the administration, the more their personal credentials were being threatened,” Hayden said. “At what point do you stop being a guard rail and become an enabler and a legitimizer?”
“We’ve had presidents who lie, who have argued with us, who have disagreed with our version of objective reality,” he added, without naming names.
Trump is in a category all his own, he said.
“The difference here is, this seems to be a president who bases a fair number of decisions on something other than a view of objective reality,” he said.
“What we have is the president inarguably demanding of both the institutions and their leadership that their first priority is personal loyalty to him rather than to the norms that have governed their behavior for a couple of centuries,” he added.
Hayden qualified his advice, saying it isn’t meant to suggest young people shouldn’t take the chance to serve in government.
But they should “take notes,” a practice fired FBI Director James Comey adopted, he advised.
“Remember your own moral thresholds,” Hayden said, adding: “You may want to keep a draft letter [of resignation] in your desk drawer.”
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