Former CIA Director Michael Hayden said Wednesday that President Donald Trump's firing of FBI Director James Comey – along with two other high-level dismissals – were "associated with autocratic populist states" like Nicaragua.
"In 110 days, the president has fired a national security adviser, an acting attorney general and the director of the FBI," Hayden, who also directed the NSA, told Anderson Cooper on CNN, referring to Michael Flynn and Sally Yates.
"This kind of behavior is not normally associated with a mature Western democracy," he said. "It's associated with autocratic populist states."
Hayden, 72, a retired four-star Air Force general, explained "I have lived enough in the world. America sent me to places that weren't happy at the moment.
"I have seen how thin the veneer of civilization is. You just have that concern.
"People, be careful," he cautioned. "We're not guaranteed this kind of life that we have experienced for the last period of time."
Hayden noted Russia's global surveillance strategy is to "never create fractures in a society.
"They only work when a society has preexisting fractures," he explained. "What the Russians did, perhaps they knew us better than we knew ourselves.
"They went after the fractures in American society."
However, Hayden remained optimistic about the future – telling Cooper the United States has "resilient institutions, but we can't take them for granted.
"It also requires people of good faith to stand up and be honest and respect the truth and respect those institutions.
"The truth really matters, the processes really matters," he said.
"The separation of powers, co-equal branches, competing branches of government really matter – and they need to be respected."
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