Just because Putin is terrible doesn’t mean you choose other bad people who happen to be

American.

Putin is certainly the worst person on that list by far, but he also had more opportunity to be bad. The IC people on that list proved they would go to great lengths to support their personal political ideology and self serving interests.
We don’t really know how far they would go to do so, and I certainly would never answer that question. It would simply allow liberal media to take his answer out of context later and claim that Trump supported them.

I think we have many good Americans to choose from besides those “professionals”.