October 25, 2019

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

The Deep State Out in the Open

Calls for a Military Coup against Trump

Friends,

This past Christmas at a social gathering of some former high school classmates I had a brief conversation with an old friend, a liberal—I still have one liberal friend, but he’s about the only one left.  Aware of my positions on issues, and, yes, having actually read a few of the columns and essays I’ve written over the years, my friend—let’s call him Dave—enjoys needling me as a “conspiracy theorist.” And at that event he was at it again.

I don’t mind his banter, and, in a jocular fashion, I hand it right back at him.

This past Christmas Dave was all exercised about some of my pieces on “the Deep State,” and insisted that such discussion was nothing more than “right-wing talking points,” “conspiratorial exaggerations about legitimate government,” and, basically, much ado about nothing. The Deep State he explained, did not really exist—rather, I was “making it all up,” and that my criticism was actually misdirected at noble professionals who had dedicated their lives and careers to what he termed “the betterment of all Americans.”

How dare I attack those hard-working men and women who actually “made this country work!” [I am quoting his words, as I distinctly remember them.]

I don’t think my conversation that isolated in today’s America. But I also believe that the more zealous and frenzied the opposition to President Trump becomes, the more the reality of the Deep State has also become. As I have written previously, the election of the “great disruptor” has forced the administrative and managerial elites, fearful of losing their power and influence, increasingly out of the closet into the open. Indeed, Donald Trump, with all his bluster and unorthodox (according to Washington DC) manner of doing and saying things, has torn the mask off, at least partially, of the permanent, largely faceless bureaucratic class that has for so long dominated this country…and our lives.

But until recently, a full admission of this from the agents of the Deep State was unthinkable. The narrative was exactly that of my friend Dave: those upright and dedicated bureaucrats and experts, in government and in think tanks, were simply doing their job as professionals…but now that uncouth and ignorant “bull-in-a-china-shop” Donald Trump had attacked them, and he was thus “endangering our democracy” because of it.

Speaking, as it were, for most of the major media, Glenn Carle, a former CIA “clandestine services officer and an expert on national security,” called the very idea of a Deep State a “dark conspiracy.” Joined by other members of our intelligence agencies, he declared in May 2017:

The president has cast doubt on proven truths, undermined the laws, undermined the judiciary, the free press, the intelligence community…He's undermined the very values upon which this society was built. So, what do you do if you're an intelligence official? …This dilemma…has been widely discussed among those in the intelligence community, who have been forced to assess which is the greater threat: Trump's "authoritarian tendencies" which threaten "the fabric of the nation," or the clear national-security risks posed by a sustained stream of classified information being made public…."When leaks come from the intelligence community, it's not to undermine the president or to protect the deep state. It's to protect democracy — it stems from a sense of profound patriotism," Carle said. "The deep state does not exist in fact but it exists in the minds of Trump supporters…”

Talk about “projection”!  Protecting democracy—by undermining it?…when for decades this country (as most of the nations in Europe) has been virtually ruled and governed by an unelected, untouchable caste of managers whose vision increasingly centers on a universalist globalism in which the citizens of the American republic will have become mere cogs: do your work, pay taxes, but shut up and don’t ask questions about “things that don’t concern you,” like running this country.

But now that symbol and beacon of the American Establishment, The New York Times, has come full circle: yes, the Deep State DOES indeed exist, it asserts, but that is actually a “good thing,” good for you and good for the country. Perhaps the insistent talk by the president and increasingly by some conservatives forced the Times out from the shadows?

Here was the headline of the Times editorial on October 20, 2019: "They Are Not the Resistance. They Are Not a Cabal. They Are Public Servants."

Ironically, this admission/defense by “the Grey Lady” comes just a few days after a major Leftist columnist and contributing editor to Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi, blew the whistle on his fellow bedfellows. In a major essay—curiously not heralded on Fox and ignored by such media as CNN and MSNBC—Taibbi, no friend at all to President Trump or his policies, suggested that his friends on the frenetic Left “might soon wish they just waited to vote their way out of the Trump era,” and that, indeed, we ARE living through an attempted “coup” against the president and his agenda, that we are watching an hysterical effort to negate and undo the results of the 2016 election by any means.

Taibbi wishes to see the president gone, but he also sees that what is happening before us in Congress, in the press, and in academia,  is worse, far more damaging and dangerous to the survival of the American republic than the perceived infractions or lese-majeste’ of Donald Trump. The consequences of what the Left, the Democrats, and Never Trumpers are attempting and inciting are, in fact, driving a poisonous and violent stake into what is left of the republic.

I pass on a slightly-edited copy of Taibbi essay. Notice near the beginning as he writes about our divided country, he intimates that “we are speeding toward a situation when someone in one of these camps refuses to obey a major decree, arrest order, or court decision, at which point Americans will get to experience the joys of their political futures being decided by phone calls to generals and police chiefs.”

That incredibly chilling prediction is undergirded by an OpEd, again in The New York Times, by retired Admiral and Clinton loyalist, William McRaven [“Our Republic is Under Attack from the President,” October 18], in which he argues forcefully “that senior military leaders have lost confidence in the president and feel he is a threat to the nation,” and that “action” must be taken, “the sooner the better.” In other words…a military coup.

We're in a permanent coup

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/were-in-a-permanent-coup?fbclid=IwAR2ZclK5zzGIxMU7fMFgmQ5fMGcinw_E6rVOKTeHlAFiCSXosXxkVLBo2yQ

Americans might soon wish they just waited to vote their way out of the Trump era

Oct 11

By Matt TAIBI

I’ve lived through a few coups. They’re insane, random, and terrifying, like watching sports, except your political future depends on the score.

The kickoff begins when a key official decides to buck the executive. From that moment, government becomes a high-speed head-counting exercise. Who’s got the power plant, the airport, the police in the capital? How many department chiefs are answering their phones? Who’s writing tonight’s newscast?

When the KGB in 1991 tried to reassume control of the crumbling Soviet Union by placing Mikhail Gorbachev under arrest and attempting to seize Moscow, logistics ruled. Boris Yeltsin’s crew drove to the Russian White House in ordinary cars, beating KGB coup plotters who were trying to reach the seat of Russian government in armored vehicles. A key moment came when one of Yeltsin’s men, Alexander Rutskoi – who two years later would himself lead a coup against Yeltsin – prevailed upon a Major in a tank unit to defy KGB orders and turn on the “criminals.”

We have long been spared this madness in America. Our head-counting ceremony was Election Day. We did it once every four years.

That’s all over, in the Trump era.

On Thursday, news broke that two businessmen said to have “peddled supposedly explosive information about corruption involving Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden” were arrested at Dulles airport on “campaign finance violations.” The two figures are alleged to be bagmen bearing “dirt” on Democrats, solicited by Trump and his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani.

Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman will be asked to give depositions to impeachment investigators. They’re reportedly going to refuse. Their lawyer John Dowd also says they will “refuse to appear before House Committees investigating President Donald Trump.” Fruman and Parnas meanwhile claim they had real derogatory information about Biden and other politicians, but “the U.S. government had shown little interest in receiving it through official channels.”

For Americans not familiar with the language of the Third World, that’s two contrasting denials of political legitimacy.

The men who are the proxies for Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani in this story are asserting that “official channels” have been corrupted. The forces backing impeachment, meanwhile, are telling us those same defendants are obstructing a lawful impeachment inquiry.

This latest incident, set against the impeachment mania and the reportedly “expanding” Russiagate investigation of U.S. Attorney John Durham, accelerates our timeline to chaos. We are speeding toward a situation when someone in one of these camps refuses to obey a major decree, arrest order, or court decision, at which point Americans will get to experience the joys of their political futures being decided by phone calls to generals and police chiefs.

My discomfort in the last few years, first with Russiagate and now with Ukrainegate and impeachment, stems from the belief that the people pushing hardest for Trump’s early removal are more dangerous than Trump. Many Americans don’t see this because they’re not used to waking up in a country where you’re not sure who the president will be by nightfall. They don’t understand that this predicament is worse than having a bad president.

The Trump presidency is the first to reveal a full-blown schism between the intelligence community and the White House. Senior figures in the CIA, NSA, FBI and other agencies made an open break from their would-be boss before Trump’s inauguration, commencing a public war of leaks that has not stopped.

The first big shot was fired in early January, 2017, via a CNN.com headline, “Intel chiefs presented Trump with claims of Russian efforts to compromise him.” This tale, about the January 7th presentation of former British spy Christopher Steele’s report to then-President-elect Trump, began as follows:

Classified documents presented last week to President Obama and President-elect Trump included allegations that Russian operatives claim to have compromising personal and financial information about Mr. Trump, multiple US officials with direct knowledge of the briefings tell CNN.

Four intelligence chiefs in the FBI’s James Comey, the CIA’s John Brennan, the NSA’s Mike Rogers, and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, presented an incoming president with a politically disastrous piece of information, in this case a piece of a private opposition research report.

Among other things because the news dropped at the same time Buzzfeed decided to publish the entire “bombshell” Steele dossier, reporters spent that week obsessing not about the mode of the story’s release, but about the “claims.” In particular, audiences were rapt by allegations that Russians were trying to blackmail Trump with evidence of a golden shower party commissioned on a bed once slept upon by Barack Obama himself.

Twitter exploded. No other news story mattered. For the next two years, the “claims” of compromise and a “continuing” Trump-Russian “exchange” hung over the White House like a sword of Damocles. 

Few were interested in the motives for making this story public. As it turned out, there were two explanations, one that was made public, and one that only came out later. The public justification as outlined in the CNN piece, was to “make the President-elect aware that such allegations involving him [were] circulating among intelligence agencies.”

However, we know from Comey’s January 7, 2017 memo to deputy Andrew McCabe and FBI General Counsel James Baker there was another explanation. Comey wrote:

I said I wasn’t saying this was true, only that I wanted [Trump] to know both that it had been reported and that the reports were in many hands. I said media like CNN had them and were looking for a news hook. I said it was important that we not give them the excuse to write that the FBI has the material or [redacted] and that we were keeping it very close-hold.

Imagine if a similar situation had taken place in January of 2009, involving president-elect Barack Obama. Picture a meeting between Obama and the heads of the CIA, NSA, and FBI, along with the DIA, in which the newly-elected president is presented with a report compiled by, say, Judicial Watch, accusing him of links to al-Qaeda. Imagine further that they tell Obama they are presenting him with this information to make him aware of a blackmail threat, and to reassure him they won’t give news agencies a “hook” to publish the news.

Now imagine if that news came out on Fox days later. Imagine further that within a year, one of the four officials became a paid Fox contributor. Democrats would lose their minds in this set of circumstances.

The country mostly did not lose its mind, however, because the episode did not involve a traditionally presidential figure like Obama, nor was it understood to have been directed at the institution of “the White House” in the abstract.

Instead, it was a story about an “infamously corrupt individual, Donald Trump, a pudenda-grabbing scammer who bragged about using bankruptcy to escape debt and publicly praised Vladimir Putin.” Audiences believed the allegations against this person and saw the intelligence/counterintelligence community as acting patriotically, doing their best to keep us informed about a still-breaking investigation of a rogue president.

But a parallel story was ignored. Leaks from the intelligence community most often pertain to foreign policy. The leak of the January, 2017 “meeting” between the four chiefs and Trump – which without question damaged both the presidency and America’s standing abroad – was an unprecedented act of insubordination.

It was also a bold new foray into domestic politics by intelligence agencies that in recent decades began asserting all sorts of frightening new authority. They were kidnapping foreigners, assassinating by drone, conducting paramilitary operations without congressional notice, building an international archipelago of secret prisons, and engaging in mass warrantless surveillance of Americans. We found out in a court case just last week how extensive the illegal domestic surveillance has been, with the FBI engaging in tens of thousands of warrantless searches involving American emails and phone numbers under the guise of combating foreign subversion.

The agencies’ new trick is inserting themselves into domestic politics using leaks and media pressure. The “intel chiefs” meeting was just the first in a series of similar stories, many following the pattern in which a document was created, passed from department from department, and leaked. A sample:

·         February 14, 2017: “four current and former officials” tell the New York Times the Trump campaign had “repeated contacts” with Russian intelligence.

·         March 1, 2017: “Justice Department officials” tell the Washington Post Attorney General Jeff Sessions “spoke twice with Russia’s ambassador” and did not disclose the contacts ahead of his confirmation hearing. 

·         March 18, 2017: “people familiar with the matter” tell the Wall Street Journal that former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn failed to disclose a “contact” with a Russian at Cambridge University, an episode that “came to the notice of U.S. intelligence.”

·         April 8, 2017, 2017: “law enforcement and other U.S. officials” tell the Washington Post the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judge had ruled there was “probable cause” to believe former Trump aide Carter Page was an “agent of a foreign power.” 

·         April 13, 2017: a “source close to UK intelligence” tells Luke Harding at The Guardian that the British analog to the NSA, the GCHQ, passed knowledge of “suspicious interactions” between “figures connected to Trump and “known or suspected Russian agents” to Americans as part of a “routine exchange of information.”

·         December 17, 2017: “four current and former American and foreign officials” tell the New York Times that during the 2016 campaign, an Australian diplomat named Alexander Downer told “American counterparts” that former Trump aide George Papadopoulos revealed “Russia had political dirt on Hillary Clinton.

·         April 13, 2018: “two sources familiar with the matter” tell McClatchy that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office has evidence Trump lawyer Michael Cohen was in Prague in 2016, “confirming part of [Steele] dossier.”

·         November 27, 2018: a “well-placed source” tells Harding at The Guardian that former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort met with Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy in London.

·         January 19, 2019: “former law enforcement officials and others familiar with the investigation” tell the New York Times the FBI opened an inquiry into the “explosive implications” of whether or not Donald Trump was working on behalf of the Russians.

To be sure, “people familiar with the matter” leaked a lot of stories in the last few years, but many were clearly problematic even at the time of release. Moreover, all took place in the context of constant, hounding pressure from media figures, congressional allies like Democrats Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell, as well as ex-officials who could make use of their own personal public platforms in addition to being unnamed sources in straight news reports. They used commercial news platforms to argue that Trump had committed treason, needed to be removed from office, and preferably also indicted as soon as possible.

A shocking number of these voices were former intelligence officers who joined Clapper in becoming paid news contributors at left wing outlets. Op-ed pages and news networks are packed now with ex-spooks editorializing about stories in which they had personal involvement: Michael Morell, Michael Hayden, Asha Rangappa, and Andrew McCabe among many others, including especially all four of the original “intel chiefs”: Clapper, Rogers, Comey, and MSNBC headliner John Brennan.

Russiagate birthed a whole brand of politics, a government-in-exile, which prosecuted its case against Trump via a constant stream of “approved” leaks, partisans in congress, and an increasingly unified and thematically consistent set of commercial news outlets.

These mechanisms have been transplanted now onto the Ukrainegate drama. It’s the same people beating the public drums, with the messaging run out of the same congressional committees, through the same Nadlers, Schiffs, and Swalwells. The same news outlets are on full alert.

The sidelined “intel chiefs” are once again playing central roles in making the public case. Comey says “we may now be at a point” where impeachment is necessary. Brennan, with unintentional irony, says the United States is “no longer a democracy.” Clapper says the Ukraine whistleblower complaint is “one of the most credible” he’s seen.

As a reporter covering the 2015–2016 presidential race, I thought Trump’s campaign was disturbing on many levels, but logical as a news story. He succeeded for class reasons, because of flaws in the media business that gifted him mass amounts of coverage, and because he took cunning advantage of long-simmering frustrations in the electorate….the collapse in trust in institutions like the news media, the Fed, corporations, NATO, and, yes, the intelligence services. In enormous numbers, voters rejected everything they had ever been told about who was and was not qualified for higher office.

…when he [Trump] attacked the “deep state” and the “fake news media,” doesn’t change the reality of what’s happened since. Even paranoiacs have enemies, and even Donald “Deep State” Trump is a legitimately elected president whose ouster is being actively sought by the intelligence community. [….]

Trump, at least insofar as we know, has not used section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to monitor political rivals. He hasn’t deployed human counterintelligence “informants” to follow the likes of Hunter Biden. He hasn’t maneuvered to secure Special Counsel probes of Democrats.

And while Donald Trump conducting foreign policy based on what he sees on Fox and Friends is troubling, it’s not in the same ballpark as CNN, MSNBC, the Washington Post and the New York Times engaging in de facto coverage partnerships with the FBI and CIA to push highly politicized, phony narratives like Russiagate.

Trump’s tinpot Twitter threats and cancellation of White House privileges for dolts like Jim Acosta also don’t begin to compare to the danger posed by Facebook, Google, and Twitter – under pressure from the Senate – organizing with groups like the Atlantic Council to fight “fake news” in the name of preventing the “foment of discord.”

I don’t believe most Americans have thought through what a successful campaign to oust Donald Trump would look like. Most casual news consumers can only think of it in terms of Mike Pence becoming president. The real problem would be the precedent of a de facto intelligence community veto over elections, using the lunatic spookworld brand of politics that has dominated the last three years of anti-Trump agitation.

…third world country, and it’s where we’re headed, unless someone calls off this craziness. Welcome to the Permanent Power Struggle.

*****

Now, if I see my friend Dave this coming holiday season, I may share with him Taibbi’s essay. It may not change his mind, he may be too far gone, but at least he will be forewarned when the REAL WAR breaks out.