Ex-CIA director warns those who work for ‘useful idiot’ Trump to ‘take notes’ — and keep a resignation letter handy

Ret. Gen. Michael Hayden on Friday warned his former colleagues not to take a job in Donald Trump’s administration, telling Yahoo! News it’s difficult to see the “personal credentials” of people like National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster “being threatened” by their time in the White House.

“The longer they were in the administration, the more their personal credentials were being threatened,” the former CIA director said on Yahoo! News’ Skullduggery podcast. “At what point do you stop being a guardrail and become an enabler and a legitimizer?”

Still, he said younger civic-minded people interested in government should join the administration—but warned they should “take notes.”

“Remember your own moral thresholds,” Hayden told Yahoo! News. “You may want to keep a draft letter [of resignation] in your desk drawer.”

Hayden, who's currently on tour for his new book “The Assault on Intelligence: American National Security in an Age of Lies,” said the president is serving as a “useful idiot” of the Kremlin and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“We’ve had presidents who lie, who have argued with us, who have disagreed with our version of objective reality,” Hayden 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.”

“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,” Hayden explained.