Brennan: ‘If a President of the United States Is Willing to Weaponize Intelligence and Justice and Law Enforcement Investigators ... We Really Are in Deep, Deep Trouble’

Wallace: “What do you think will happen next, if Ratcliffe’s note has been sent along to DoJ, as has been reported, as some sort of predicate to investigate you criminally?”

BRENNAN: “I don’t know. It’s so sad and tragic. And, you know, I keep thinking, okay, this the authoritarian playbook. We’ve seen this play out so many times. And, unfortunately, I think we’re seeing it play out. A number of academics and writers have pointed out. Carl Schmitt, who was a German jurist, political philosopher and writer in the 1930s, his thesis, which Nazi Germany, you know, basically took up, was don’t worry about doing something that is ethical or principled or good or right. Do whatever you can to win, vanquish your adversaries, vanquish your enemies. And unfortunately, we have seen that happening overseas. We’ve seen it in Viktor Orban in Hungary. We’ve seen it with Vladimir Putin. We see it in China, other places. We see it also in terms of, you know, some of the foreign policies that are being implemented, including, you know, in the Middle East right now. So, I really am very worried that what we’re seeing now in this chapter of American history is a sad deterioration of, I think, the respect for the rule of law and for our system of government. And if a president of the United States is willing to weaponize intelligence and justice and law enforcement investigators, and the people who head up these departments and agencies are willing to bow to it, we really are in deep, deep trouble, which is why, I think, so many people are worried about the direction this country is taking. So, this whole thing about the CIA note and this possible referral of me and criminal investigation, I think, is just symptomatic of a much broader disease that we are confronting right now in terms of how our democratic principles are being eroded and corroded as result of this authoritarian March that we are witnessing every day.”