Marc Polymeropoulos on Trump’s Plans To Remake the Federal Government: ‘It’s Chilling’

EXCERPT:

POLYMEROPOULOS: "Well, look, Willie, in January of 1993, I took an oath the second I walked into CIA headquarters. I wrote it down this morning. It said, 'I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.' That fidelity to the Constitution, that’s not a bedrock, that is the bedrock of the CIA. And what that means for the men and women there is that they are not loyal to an individual. They don’t look to the president as the supreme being. You know, we don’t live in an autocracy. It’s chilling to, I think, the men and women who do things like my colleagues did, go spend one, two, three years in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, defending the United States, protecting Americans from terrorism, from our enemies, but are they going to be doing so by looking over their shoulder? Are they sufficiently loyal? You know, if this didn’t send a chill down the spine of those who care about democracy, I really don’t know what would. And it reminds me of my time in the Middle East. You know, Saddam Hussein had this famous video in 1979 of his purge of the Iraqi Ba'ath party. You know, this is the lore in the Middle East circles. It sent a chill across the region. Is that what we want for America? The notion that we’re talking about purges, that is profoundly un-American, profoundly un-democratic, and I think it really should worry many people."