In Deep: The FBI, the CIA, and the Truth about America's "Deep State"

by David Rohde

After consulting with Baker and other close aides, Comey called Attorney General Lynch on the morning of July 5, 2016, and said he had decided to announce, on his own, the results of the bureau’s yearlong investigation of Clinton’s use of a private email server. When Lynch asked Comey what he planned to say, Comey declined to tell her. The announcement was an unprecedented step by an FBI director, who usually left prosecution decisions to Justice Department officials.

Whatever Comey’s intention, he had influenced the outcome of a presidential election in an unprecedented way. Chaffetz had weaponized congressional oversight in an unprecedented way. And Baker’s effort to abide by the rule of law would spark an unprecedented assault on the FBI and its credibility.

Clapper remained surprised at the unwillingness of Republicans, particularly McConnell, to take the Russian meddling more seriously. “All the previous dealings I had with McConnell, I thought he was a patriot, he cared about the country,” Clapper said. “But for whatever reason we were on two different planets when it came to this Russia deal.”

Three days later, on December 12, an anonymous columnist who used the pen name “Virgil” published the 4,000-word Breitbart polemic that introduced his concept of the American “deep state” to a broad audience of US conservatives. Peter Dale Scott—the author of the 2007 book The Road to 9/11—had defined the “deep state” as the military-industrial complex when he appeared on Alex Jones’s far-right conspiratorial program Infowars. “Virgil” defined the American “deep state” as something far broader, consisting of the “military-industrial complex,” the “establishment” and employees, political supporters, and beneficiaries of ever-growing federal, state, and local government spending.

Trump’s disdain for the CIA seemed to echo Flynn’s views. In the eyes of Flynn and other Trump supporters, a pattern had emerged under Obama, who they viewed as an authoritarian president.

Flynn’s actions had violated a long-accepted political norm that a president-elect and his aides not act as government representatives until they have assumed office. “There was a general concern about violating the principle of having one president at a time,” Clapper said.

The report concluded that Putin had personally ordered the Russian interference campaign to “undermine public faith in the US democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency,” and that, as Trump emerged as a viable candidate, “Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.”

“The way they all struck me was no exposure, or outright ignorance, about the way things work in government,” Clapper said. “It wasn’t malicious, it was born out of ignorance.”

At a news conference, he again criticized the intelligence agencies for failing to stop news organizations from publishing the dossier, a power that they, in fact, did not have. “I think it’s a disgrace, and I say that—and I say that, and that’s something that Nazi Germany would have done and did do.”

Trump’s relationship with the FBI and CIA was off to a disastrous start. No president-elect had clashed so openly and bitterly with intelligence officials in the decades since the Church reforms.

Trump then blamed the news media, not himself, for any tensions he had with the intelligence community, ignoring the fact that, ten days earlier, he had falsely accused US intelligence officials of leaking the Steele dossier and compared them to Nazis.

commander-in-chief needs a foreign threat addressed quietly. When things go wrong, though, the historical pattern is clear. From the Bay of Pigs to Iraq WMDs, politicians scapegoat the agency.

Comey left the White House convinced that Trump did not understand that the bureau had spent forty years trying to distance itself from the abuses unearthed by the Church Committee and the perception that the FBI was a tool for the president to attack his political enemies. That night, the FBI director wrote a memo memorializing his conversation with Trump, something he had not done after sessions with other presidents or senior FBI officials. Three days before Comey had dinner with Trump, Flynn’s behavior had again alarmed FBI officials. In a January 24 interview, Flynn lied to FBI agents, saying that he did not ask Kislyak to refrain from escalating the situation after the Obama administration expelled Russian spies and imposed sanctions on Moscow.

Flynn had lied to Spicer, the White House spokesman, Vice President Mike Pence, and other officials, about the content of the calls as well.

On January 26, Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates and Mary McCord, a senior Justice Department official, visited the White House and took the unusual step of informing White House Counsel Don McGahn that Flynn had lied to Pence and Spicer. Yates warned that Flynn’s continued false statements made him vulnerable to blackmail by Russian officials, who could threaten to reveal that Flynn had misled the vice president. It was an extraordinary moment. The White House national security advisor—the senior-most official charged with protecting the country—was vulnerable to Russian blackmail.

After the meeting, Comey immediately wrote a memorandum describing what Trump had said, and gave copies to Baker and his other senior staff. Comey was again shocked by Trump’s behavior. The president was asking the director of the FBI to drop a criminal investigation of a close aide. Worse, the aide had lied to FBI agents about his contacts with Russia, a foreign power that had intervened in the election to help Trump. The behavior smacked of a cover-up.

Trump shifted the political debate and news coverage by making another blatantly false claim that heightened public fears of a “deep state.” At 6:35 am, Trump accused the Obama administration of wiretapping his phones.

Trump was exaggerating. The FBI had obtained a FISA Court warrant to wiretap former Trump advisor Carter Page, who had met with Russian officials in July 2016. Major FBI errors occurred in the Page investigation, but Obama played no role and Trump Tower was never wiretapped.

Comey’s testimony infuriated Trump. The FBI director had given an enormous boost to Democratic claims that Trump may have conspired with Putin to win the election. No such allegation—conspiring with a foreign adversary—had ever been made against an American president. And now, by refuting Trump’s claim that Obama had wiretapped Trump Tower, Comey was publicly calling the president a liar. Over the next several weeks, Trump would pressure the leaders of the FBI, the Justice Department, and the intelligence community to help curtail the investigation. They resisted him.

The next day, March 22, Trump asked Dan Coats, a former Indiana senator who had succeeded Clapper as the director of national intelligence, and Mike Pompeo, who had succeeded Brennan as CIA director, to speak alone with him in the Oval Office after his morning intelligence briefing. In an extraordinary request to aid him politically, Trump asked the country’s top two intelligence officials if they would say publicly that no link existed between Trump and Russia. Coats responded that his office had nothing to do with criminal investigations and it was not his role to make public statements regarding the Russia investigation. Pompeo later told investigators that he had no recollection of Trump asking him to stay behind after the briefing. He simply recalled Trump regularly urging officials to get the word out that the president had not done anything wrong related to Russia.

The specter of another Watergate-scale scandal was hanging over Trump, his White House aides, and the country’s top Justice Department and intelligence officials. For the first time since Nixon occupied the Oval Office, a president was pressuring law enforcement and intelligence officials to clear him of potential criminal wrongdoing. Trump was tempting fate and risking impeachment. Ordering an end to the investigation amounted to obstruction of justice, an impeachable offense.

When Rosenstein learned that the White House had cited his memo as a justification for Comey’s firing, he reportedly threatened to resign. Trump had ordered Rosenstein to write the memo, and then, without warning, used it to justify firing Comey. The White House, struggling to control

Trump had misjudged the reaction to Comey’s removal. Critics compared it to Richard Nixon’s “Saturday Night Massacre,” when his firing of Independent Counsel Archibald Cox resulted in the resignations of Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus. Comey’s deputy, Andrew McCabe, now the acting director of the FBI, was so alarmed by Trump’s behavior that he formally opened a counterintelligence inquiry into whether the president himself had been working on behalf of Russia. He also expanded the investigation to include whether Trump had obstructed justice. McCabe then met alone with Rosenstein on May 12 and urged him to appoint an independent counsel.

Yet Trump’s primary tactic in response to Mueller’s appointment was to lie. Just as during his 2016 campaign and his business career, Trump invented conspiracy theories, painted himself as a victim, spun false narratives for the press and social media, and stalled.

Instead, Trump publicly attacked Mueller and tried to discredit his investigation. On June 16, 2017, Trump, invoked the term “deep state” with his 60 million followers for the first time.

In fact, Trump’s staff was saving him from impeachment. Trump’s attorney general, White House counsel, chief of staff, deputy chief of staff, staff secretary, and former campaign manager had all refused to carry out the president’s orders to end or limit the Mueller investigation. More than any other factor, the refusal of his aides to obstruct or end Mueller’s investigation had saved Trump’s presidency.

Relations between Democrats and Republicans had been strained in the past, but no committee chair had dared take such a step. Nunes made a damaging allegation without releasing any concrete details, which made it impossible to disprove.

Nunes’s allegation set a new precedent for the use of intelligence as a political weapon.

At the same time, Trump, like all American presidents, was barraged with information. Foreign intelligence services mounted disinformation campaigns designed to influence his thinking. Democrats and other domestic political rivals tried to damage him politically. Aides jostled to advance their personal ambitions and agendas, including some who fed the president false claims clearly designed to play to his long-held beliefs and biases.

Disinformation, false information that is deliberately spread and designed to deceive, mixed with misinformation, false information spread unintentionally.

“When he is briefed well and served well, he will make good decisions,” the former senior official continued. “He will also change his positions.” A current official who asked not to be named said that while Trump’s public rhetoric toward Iran and North Korea was bombastic, the president himself adamantly opposed engaging the United States in an armed conflict.

Clapper and other current and former officials contend that intelligence officers have learned from the scandals of the past that “speaking truth to power” is best for national security, presidents, and the agencies themselves. The way Trump received the briefing differed from his immediate predecessors. Bush had received a written copy of the PDB each morning in a leather-bound briefing book, read it, and then went over each item in face-to-face meetings with CIA director George Tenet and a handful of aides. He often asked his intelligence briefers rapid-fire questions, according to Michael Morell, who was one of them. Obama received an electronic version of the PDB on his iPad, read it alone, and shared it with thirty of his top aides. He asked fewer questions during in-person daily briefings. After he took office, Trump received his briefing as he sat behind the “Resolute” desk in the Oval Office. At his request, as many as fourteen of his senior aides attended, including CIA Director Mike Pompeo, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coates, National Security Advisor H. R. McMaster, and, at times, his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Trump asked for the presentation to be primarily oral and visual. Written briefings on specific topics were kept to one page.

From the Bay of Pigs to Vietnam to faulty Iraq WMD intelligence, bias in the presentation of intelligence had helped cause some of the largest foreign policy debacles in US history. From Clapper to Blee to Hurd, three generations of American intelligence officials had generally embraced the approach of needing to present facts that might anger a president or a policymaker. Now, Pompeo, aides feared, was telling the president what he wanted to hear.

As he had in the past, Sessions stood firm and offered no assurances that the Justice Department would investigate Clinton. Two days later, on October 18, 2017, Trump used Twitter to publicly pressure Sessions to investigate Comey and Clinton. He tweeted, “Wow, FBI confirms report that James Comey drafted a letter exonerating Crooked Hillary Clinton long before investigation was complete. Many people not interviewed, including Clinton herself.” (Nearly all of Trump’s claims in the tweet were false or exaggerated. Clinton had been interviewed before Comey announced the bureau’s findings.) The following day, Trump tweeted, “Uranium deal to Russia, with Clinton help and Obama Administration knowledge, is the biggest story that Fake Media doesn’t want to follow!” Trump was referring to a debunked, three-year-old conspiracy theory circulated during the 2016 campaign by Peter Schweizer, a Breitbart News editor. Schweizer claimed in his 2015 book Clinton Cash that while Clinton was secretary of state, the US government had authorized the sale of a Canadian company that controlled twenty percent of the US uranium supplies to a Russian-controlled firm. The owner of the Canadian company subsequently made $145 million in donations to the Clinton Foundation. Fact-checkers at the Washington Post and other organizations had found Schweizer’s allegation to be false.

On November 22, 2017, Trump’s pressure paid off. Sessions sent a letter to John Huber, a former federal prosecutor in Utah, instructing him to determine if a criminal investigation into the uranium deal was merited. Eleven months after taking office, despite the appointment of a special counsel, Trump had pressured the attorney general into launching an inquiry into discredited Clinton claims. (Two years later, in January 2020, the Washington Post reported that Huber found no wrongdoing and had filed no charges in the case.) To the president, the opening of an investigation appeared to be more important than what was actually found. Clinton had been tarred as corrupt. Trump’s strategy was working.

Trump maintained extraordinary message discipline, falsely claiming, over and over, that he had brought unprecedented economic growth to the country, was the victim of an FBI witch hunt, and would fare well in the midterm elections.

In June 2018, Barr sent an unsolicited, nineteen-page legal memo to Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, who was overseeing the Mueller investigation. He spent much of the letter elaborating an argument that a president’s Article II powers rendered him essentially incapable of obstructing justice.

Current and former Justice Department officials told me that the main problem was not Sessions but Trump, whose administration required them to defend contorted legal positions. Under Sessions, the department defended the travel ban, a prohibition on transgender people joining the military, a policy of separating immigrant children from their parents, and a dismissal of claims that the president had violated the emoluments clause. Several career officials declined to put their names on legal memos.

Months after being sworn in, Barr had emerged as the most feared, criticized, and effective member of Trump’s cabinet. Like no attorney general since the Watergate era, he acted as the president’s political sword and shield. Both men believed that any constraint on presidential power weakened the United States. Both men combined the pro-business instincts of traditional Republicans with a focus on culture clash and grievance. And both men shared a sense of being surrounded by a hostile liberal insurgency.

Most important, Ratcliffe was a full-throated backer of Trump’s practice of trafficking in conspiracy theories for political gain. Ratcliffe repeatedly claimed that Hillary Clinton, not Donald Trump, colluded with Russia, and that a cabal of CIA and FBI officials, working with foreign intelligence services,

carried out a global conspiracy to entrap Trump aides.

And yet, Trump’s plan had been derailed by the whistleblower. The emergence of the complaint showed that—despite Trump’s pressure—the system created in the 1970s to prevent waste, fraud, and abuse by presidents, intelligence agencies, and individual federal workers alike still functioned.

As the whistleblower was supposed to do under the law, he or she had filed the complaint with the inspector general of the Intelligence Community, one of the independent watchdogs created in 1978 by Congress and Carter to counter waste, fraud, and abuse. Inspector General Michael Atkinson then deemed the whistleblower’s complaint “credible and urgent” and, again following the law, forwarded it to the acting director of national intelligence, Joseph Maguire. Maguire, a former Navy SEAL, agreed with the inspector general that the complaint was credible. When Maguire attempted to take the next step in the process by law—sharing the complaint with the House and Senate intelligence committees—he was blocked by the White House and the Justice Department.

Trump tried to discredit the claim and blame it on a conspiracy. He dismissed the whistleblower as a “political hack,” questioned whether the person was “on our country’s side,” and declined to hand the complaint over to the House Intelligence Committee. After the dispute dragged on for several days, the Constitution’s checks and balances set in.

Once considered one of the government’s most trusted national-security officials, Baker found that Trump’s attacks impacted his ability to find a job.

On October 11, two months after the whistleblower complaint was filed, Barr appeared at Notre Dame Law School to make a case for ideological warfare. Before an assembly of students and faculty, Barr claimed that the “organized destruction” of religion was under way in the United States. “Secularists, and their allies among the ‘progressives,’ have marshalled all the force of mass communications, popular culture, the entertainment industry, and academia in an unremitting assault on religion and traditional values,” he said. Barr blamed the spread of “secularism and moral relativism” for a rise in “virtually every measure of social pathology”—from the “wreckage of the family” to “record levels of depression and mental illness, dispirited young people, soaring suicide rates, increasing numbers of angry and alienated young males, an increase in senseless violence, and a deadly drug epidemic.”

Donald Trump does not share Barr’s long-standing concern about the role of religion in civic life. What the two men have in common is a willingness to traffic in fear and aggrievement.

With no clear definition of an impeachable offense delineated in the Constitution, Hurd, like other members of the Congress, had come up with his own definition for what act would merit impeachment. “For me, it’s a violation of law,” he said. “Is there a crime? Is there a violation?” Hurd, added, though, that the evidence of a crime had to be clear. He said that the actions that Trump was accused of carrying out regarding Ukraine could merit impeachment, but he didn’t feel that Democrats had proven their case.

Unlike the politicians who surrounded them, they focused on fact. They were the opposite of the “deep state” caricatures drawn by Trump. As millions of Americans watched their testimony, Taylor and Kent seemingly refuted “deep state” conspiracy theories.

Yovanovitch—who spent more than three decades in the US Foreign Service, with assignments in Somalia, Kyrgyzstan, Armenia, and Moscow—described an extraordinary series of events. While she was enforcing the US government’s stated policy of countering corruption in Ukraine, she was undermined by Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer. According to Yovanovitch, Giuliani worked with corrupt Ukrainians who were angered by Yovanovitch’s crackdown to force her out of her position.