Tag: deep state

The Lies Aren’t Secret

Secrecy is the ultimateentitlement program for the Deep State. The federal government is creating trillions of pages of new secrets every year. The more documents bureaucrats classify, the more lies politicians and government officials can tell. In Washington, deniability is prized far more than truth. 

At the end of the Trump era, the Deep State is triumphant at home and abroad. Trump’s epic clashes with federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies helped cripple his administration, and they illustrate the continued danger of Deep State secrecy. If all of the FBI’s shenanigans on Russiagate came to light, it would be far more difficult for the FBI to manipulate American politics and presidents in the future. If CIA records on Syrian rebels were exposed, the Biden administration would have far more difficulty dragging America back into the Syrian civil war. But both seem unlikely. Recent court rulings make clear how badly Trump failed to drain the swamp. 

On January 12, 2017, FBI chief James Comey attested to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court that the Steele dossier used to hound the Trump campaign had been “verified.” But on the same day, Comey emailed then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper: “We are not able to sufficiently corroborate the reporting.” That email was revealed last week thanks to a multi-year fight for disclosure by the Southeastern Legal Foundation.

The first three years of Trump’s presidency were haunted by constant accusations that he colluded with Russians to win the 2016 election. The FBI launched its investigation based on ludicrous allegations from a dossier financed by the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. In late 2019, an Inspector General report confirmed that the FBI made “fundamental errors” and persistently deceived the FISA Court to authorize surveilling the Trump campaign. 

If the FBI’s deceit and political biases had been exposed in real time, there would have been far less national outrage when President Trump fired Comey. Instead, that firing was quickly followed by the appointment of  Special Counsel Robert Mueller to investigate the Russian charges. In April 2019, Mueller admitted there was no evidence of collusion. Conniving by FBI officials and the veil of secrecy that hid their abuses roiled national politics for years. Not one FBI official has spent a single day in jail for the abuses. The Bureau’s charade simply confirms the nearly boundless prerogatives of the nation’s most powerful law enforcement agency.

Absurd secrecy rationales also made mincemeat of Trump’s foreign policy. One of Trump’s biggest failures abroad was his failure to end U.S. involvement in the Syrian civil war. Beginning in 2013, the Obama administration began covertly providing money and weapons to Syrian groups fighting the government of Bashar Assad. The program was a catastrophe from the start: CIA-backed Syrian rebels ended up fighting Pentagon-backed rebels. Much of the U.S. aid ended up in the hands of terrorist groups, some of whom were allied with Al Qaeda. Providing material support to terrorist organizations is a federal crime, except apparently when the weapons are sent by U.S. government agencies. 

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Here Are 18 Ways Trump Did the Opposite of Drain the Swamp During His Presidency

On Tuesday, Donald Trump said farewell to America as he acknowledged “this week, we inaugurate a new administration.” Trump is yet to officially concede – a point which his most hardcore followers still believe indicates he will remain president – however, he finally spoke about handing over the reins of power to the Biden administration. “Now, as I prepare to hand power over to a new administration at noon on Wednesday, I want you to know that the movement we started is only just beginning,” Trump stated during his farewell address.

While he might not have mentioned Biden or Harris by name, it is clear that Joe Biden is going to be sworn in as the next President of the United States. Before America races to forget the Trump years we owe it to ourselves to pause and reflect on the facts of the Trump era. First, Donald Trump did not drain the swamp. As I illustrate below, Trump used his position of power to continue to empower the same industries and figures which have benefitted from every Democratic and Republican president before him. Indeed, I stand by my assessment of Trump made in November 2016: Donald Trump’s role was to be The Great Divider. He used his position to stoke the flames of division and chaos, all the while playing the role of the “anti-establishment” President (an oxymoron if there ever was one).

In 2018 I asked, “When Will Trump Supporters in The Freedom Movement Realize They Were Duped?”. I didn’t have much faith at the time, stating, “Now, of course, there are the diehards who will inevitably stick with Trump through his entire presidential career no matter what policy he takes, even when in contradiction with not only his own words, but with the principles previously espoused by these die hard followers.” Now, as Biden is about to wield the Presidential powers, Trump’s most diehard followers still claim Trump is going to stop Biden from being president.

My concern is that folks who previously supported many of the actions taken by Trump will not recover the principles they once held, and instead, further entrench themselves in the false left/right paradigm, convincing themselves that Trump represented the fight against the “Deep State” and Biden is the Swamp incarnate. The problem with this belief is that it reinforces the idea that one party is actually better than the other, when in reality they both play for the same masters. Most importantly, this belief that Trump was fighting the Deep State is not backed up by the facts. Allow me to present a partial list of the evidence showing Trump’s relationship with the swamp.

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The defense-industry swamp is eager to engulf the Biden administration

Just days after the presidential election, a new investment firm called Pine Island Acquisition Corporation quietly began trading on the New York Stock Exchange, with the prospect of becoming a notable player in the $2 trillion defense and aerospace industry. The company’s greatest asset was not its relatively modest bankroll goal of $200 million, but its connections — deep ties to policy establishment figures shaping the incoming Biden administration.

In describing itself to potential investors, Pine Island’s prospectus boasted a leadership team with “extensive access, insight, expertise and management skill” in the defense sector.

In the dawning Biden era, that might be an understatement.

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After the Deep State Sabotaged His Presidential Bid, Bernie Sanders Mocks Those Who Believe it

Since Eisenhower’s pointed warnings, and long before Trump’s election, the massive power and incomparable dangers of the U.S. Deep State have been widely and explicitly documented — from leftist foreign policy critics Mike Lofgren and Peter Dale Scott to the 2013 book by journalists Marc Ambinder and D.B. Grady entitled “Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry.”

A three-part Washington Post exposé in 2010, by two-time-Pulitzer-winner Dana Priest and William Arkin, was entitled “Top Secret America.” It described the “hidden world, growing beyond control,” which “has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.” This, said the Post, all “amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight.”

During the Trump years, the U.S. media alternated between vehemently denying the existence of this well-documented Deep State to celebrating the Deep State’s noble anti-Trump subversions. As I noted last week:

[Democrats and allied media outlets were] cheering reports that unelected security state officials were concealing information they did not want the elected President to have, and more recent reports that they misled him about troop positions in Syria to prevent his withdrawal efforts: classic Deep State coup behavior whereby unaccountable military and intelligence officials prevent the elected president from implementing polices they decide are misguided.

The more honest liberal pundits explicitly said they were grateful for the Deep State. Writing under the headline “God bless the ‘Deep State,’” Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson — while dismissing right-wing claims of a “Deep State conspiracy” — nonetheless argued that the hidden intelligence officials who operate in the dark are performing a vital service in undermining Trump: “with a supine Congress unwilling to play the role it is assigned by the Constitution, the deep state stands between us and the abyss.”

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Trump’s reign has proved the US president is merely a figurehead. Does it really matter who wins the vote?

Four years of Trump slugging it out with the permanent political class he calls the “Deep State” has proven that president is at best a ceremonial post. Why are we still biting our nails over who won, when it changes so little?

Love him or hate him, President Donald Trump has done more than any other politician this century to pull up the curtain on the entrenched political interests that really run Washington, drawing them out of the shadows to defend what they believe is their turf against the spray-tanned barbarian at the gates. Between his uncouth mannerisms and his alarmingly sane policy promises, Trump in 2016 broke all the unwritten rules of being president, leaving his Deep State nemeses to pick up the pieces and try to put them back together.

Four years later, Trump has been largely neutered, his media crucifixion and lamentably orthodox term a cautionary tale to all future presidents who might try to buck the system. The powers that be no longer need to assassinate a troublesome president – it’s far easier (and less messy) to kill their spirit. Trump has not ended any wars (indeed, he’s dropped more bombs on more civilians than superhawks George W. Bush and Barack Obama), nor has he drained the Washington ‘swamp’ of lobbyists, career politicians and think tank goons (unless you count appointing them to his cabinet as ‘draining’).

Instead, he’s cut taxes for the rich, rolled back the regulations that kept Big Business from polluting America’s air and water, and given away the store to Israel, even assassinating one of its most powerful enemies, the Iranian Quds Force Commander Qassem Soleimani. 

While some of his supporters no doubt love those latter policies, these are the kind of ‘wins’ any other president would secure to please his wealthy masters – hardly the actions of a maverick like Trump fans believe their hero to be. The square peg has been stuffed into the round hole. Trump has become a creature of the establishment that (ironically) still hates him, even as he blusters about locking some of them up.

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