They’ve been purging from the very beginning:
Just months into his presidency, a small circle of senior White House advisers met with Donald Trump about a carefully curated list containing the names of dozens of perceived political opponents, particularly leakers, working inside the government.
A detailed account of the meeting was revealed for the first time to CNN by two former senior administration officials, who said that the April 2017 gathering included then senior strategist Steve Bannon and former national security adviser H.R. McMaster.
After being shown the list, the President told McMaster to deal with it, according to one of the officials. McMaster and Bannon walked away from the meeting with different interpretations of Trump’s instructions, according to the two former officials and two other former senior officials in the President’s orbit who were briefed on the conversation.
Three of the officials told CNN that Bannon understood Trump wanted people fired, while the fourth said that McMaster believed the President’s direction was to deal with leaks in a systematic fashion, rather than a mass firing.
[…]
The President expressed in public remarks last Saturday that he’s getting rid of bad people in government who are “not people that love our country.”In recent weeks, Trump has expressed to aides that he wants fewer people working for him at the White House and only those identified as loyalists to hold key positions in his administration, leading to a fresh batch of lists from allies, the existence of which was first reported by Axios.
The existence of “deep state” lists in the early days of Trump’s presidency was widely talked about in the halls of the National Security Council and the State Department, according to multiple former White House officials, although several officials named on the list tell CNN they didn’t know that any such list really existed or that they were on it. The “deep state” refers to a right-wing belief that certain members of the federal bureaucracy are actively undermining the Trump presidency.
One contributor to the list that was collated and frequently updated in early 2017 was former NSC official and former Trump campaign aide Rich Higgins. He told CNN in an exclusive interview recently that from the beginning of his tenure he was convinced that leaks of minutes of highly classified meetings were from holdovers of the Obama administration and he suspected widespread resistance to some of the administration efforts.
Higgins is not involved in the current lists and does not have a current connection to the White House. The White House did not respond to requests for comment for this story. Bannon and McMaster declined to comment for this story.
Higgins, 45, a former Pentagon official who consulted for the Trump campaign in the 2016 election as a counterterrorism adviser, joined the NSC in February 2017 as director of strategic planning.
Higgins told CNN he arrived to find two senior NSC directors and fellow Trump appointees, Col. Derek Harvey and Ezra Cohen-Watnick, regularly meeting over coffee or gathering in their offices and joined them in a mission to find alleged leakers and those perceived as resistant to the Trump administration’s policies.
There is much more at the link. It’s astonishing. This administration has been deeply twisted from the get. Not that we didn’t know it, but it’s important to recognize that the fascistic, Stasi-like tendencies manifested themselves long before the “witch-hunt” stuff.
I will say again — if this was what they did from the very early months of his presidency, imagine what they will do in a second term.