Veterans are fed up with Donald Trump’s incendiary rhetoric against the intelligence community.

Hundreds of veterans with the veterans’ advocacy group “VoteVets” have just released an open letter condemning the president-elect for his repeated, flagrant dismissal of the nation’s intelligence agencies as representing nothing substantive or significant in their activities.

Trump’s dismissal of the nation’s intelligence workers is birthed out of something quite simple — they are loosely connected to something that he doesn’t like. Trump has a deep, disturbing, and still rather mysterious fondness for Russia and Vladimir Putin. Trump, for example, has expressed a roaring readiness to lift the United States’ currently in place sanctions against Russia.

The thing is, and what’s now been talked and pundit-ed to death, Russia waged a months long propaganda campaign in the U.S. on behalf of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.

Their campaign was successful — Trump is about to officially become the president. It didn’t have any sort of innocuousness to it either, with the anti-Clinton, pro-Trump propaganda taken from tens of thousands of private emails that were stolen from key figures in both the Clinton presidential campaign and the U.S. Democratic Party.

The U.S. intelligence community has been seriously investigating the hacking and propaganda campaign scandal, having, for example, in the past weeks released another report incriminating Russia. Trump has concurrently taken to brutally slamming and attempting to undercut the very legitimacy of the U.S. intelligence community.

His attacks got more intense after some more of the substance of the allegations against Russia — that they have been personally grooming Trump to run for president for at least several years — were released, with Trump literally comparing U.S. intelligence workers to Nazis over their imaginary campaign to specifically undercut his legitimacy.

As the veterans discuss, the members of the intelligence community of the United States work closely with the nation’s military to carry out the effective seeing through of our military objectives. And, quite simply, as has been so often said but far less often actually taken to heart, the intelligence community, along with the military, puts their lives on the line each and every day for the sake of protecting the lives American citizens.

The veterans’ letter begins:

‘Let us be perfectly blunt with you, sir: Every single day, intelligence officers and officials put their lives on the line, and many lose their lives, to help protect your right to tweet smears against them. But just because you have that right, doesn’t mean you should use it. It is beneath the dignity of the office you are about to assume, to engage in the belittling of intelligence officials.’

These veterans’ letter is far from the only public stand that has been made against Trump’s fiery and destructive rhetoric.

Outgoing CIA director John Brennan commented to The Washington Post of Trump’s behavior:

‘It’s when there are allegations made about leaking or about dishonesty or a lack of integrity, that’s where I think the line is crossed. Tell the families of those 117 CIA officers who are forever memorialized on our wall of honor that their loved ones who gave their lives were akin to Nazis. Tell the CIA officers who are serving in harm’s way right now and their families who are worried about them that they are akin to Nazi Germany.’

Featured Image via Drew Angerer/ Getty Images.