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

by David Rohde

leaked

frightened.

it exposed politically embarrassing details regarding how the new American president had conducted himself.

conversation, Trump had denounced the primary nuclear arms agreement between the United States and Russia as one of many bad deals negotiated by the Obama administration.

When we asked the White House for comment, spokesman

It's a federal crime to leak consevations of this nature and you will get 10 years. Additionally, how the hell did it move the ball foward by asking the question in the first place? The author noted it did not effect national security, the question about what Trump was aking but the leak itself did indeed undermine the new admistration Fuck this asshole! .

Mexico and Australia—had already leaked to news outlets and drawn more attention.

conversation, I promised that I would go to prison to protect the source’s identity. We both knew that the whistleblower was more likely to be prosecuted than me.

area. The source did not mince words: Career government officials had a duty to report waste, fraud, and misconduct by government officials, including the president. The whistleblower, whose identity Trump was demanding be made public, should be protected and the state of divisiveness in Washington was lamentable: “When doing your job as a policy expert means you are physically in danger, not from an international adversary,

To President Trump, my source, as well as the Ukraine whistleblower, are part of a conspiracy by a group of unelected government officials to force a duly elected president from power.

to people ranging from senior FBI and CIA officials to the Pentagon, to career civil servants across the federal government.

have mounted a concerted effort to delegitimize his presidency.

Democrats say Trump is spreading conspiracy theories for political gain. They defend the civil service, which was created after the Civil War to prevent politicians from turning the federal government into a patronage mill where ...

Jimmy Carter feared that members of the CIA would refuse to implement reforms designed to end decades of agency abuses.

Ronald Reagan thought liberals in the State Department opposed his effort to confront Communism.

George H. W. Bush distrusted independent counsels. Bill Clinton believed the FBI had gone rogue. George W. Bush’s administration searched intensively for the intelligence officials who they thought leaked the exis...

deploying large numbers of troops to...

On June 16, 2017, Trump became the first American president to apply the term “deep state” to the United States government. Trump retweeted to his 60 million followers a post from Fox News host Sean Hannity promoting his program that evening.

Hannity began his show with footage of the shooting that week of three people, including Republican House Majority Whip Steve Scalise, at a Republican practice session for Congress’s annual charity baseball game in Alexandria, Virginia. A left-wing activist angered by Trump’s election had fired 62 rounds from a semiautomatic rifle at the Republicans. It was a miracle that no one, apart from the gunman, had been killed. Gabrielle Giffords, a Democratic congresswoman shot in the head by a mentally ill man in 2011, condemned the politically motivated attack. For a moment, there was bipartisan fear that the country’s polarization could spark wide-scale political violence.

he condemned the investigation of Special Counsel Robert Mueller and warned viewers that the “deep state” was trying to reverse the result of the 2016 election.

media—they’re the willing accomplices.

selectively leaking information, intelligence information that is meant to damage, in this case, the president of the United States of America.”

industrial complex”—a cabal of generals and defense contractors who they believe routinely push the country into endless wars, operate a vast surveillance state, and enrich themselves in the process. Voters of all ideologies increasingly disdain the politicians, lobbyists, and journalists who they feel unilaterally set the country’s political agenda and are increasingly out of touch with ordinary Americans.

Belief in a “deep state” is pervasive and increasingly partisan in the United States. In a 2018 Monmouth University poll, 74 percent of Americans said they believed that “a group of unelected government and military officials” is either definitely or probably “secretly manipulating or directing” national policy.

Racial minorities and NRA members are even more likely to believe in the “deep state” than other Americans. A 2019 YouGov poll found that among Republicans who have heard of the term “deep state,” 83 percent believed it was trying to undermine Trump. Among Democrats, only 10 percent did.

For decades, “deep state” was a designation primarily used by political scientists to describe Turkey’s military, which repeatedly tried to undermine the emergence of democratic rule in that country.

applied to Egypt’s ...

In 2007, Peter Dale Scott, a retired University of California, Berkeley, English professor, published The Road to 9/11, which, for the first time, explicitly applied the term “deep state” to the United States. Scott accused the US military of having fueled conflict both inside and outside the country from the Cold War to 9/11. After that book’s publication, Scott became an occasional guest on Alex Jones’s far-right consp...

On December 16, 2016, an anonymous author, writing under the pseudonym “Virgil,” published a 4,000-word article in Breitbart News, then under the leadership of Steve Bannon. Entitled “The Deep State vs. Donald Trump,” the piece introduced the term “deep state” to a broader conservative audience. The author defined the “Deep State” as all federal employees as well as their political supporters, the policy elite (the “chattering class”), and the mainstream media (“MSM”).

And oh yes, the MSM and

a “great power struggle” was under way between Trump and the “Deep State,” fed by over $4 trillion a year in federal spending. “Who’s likely to prevail?” Virgil asked, asserting that “We can answer by observing that Trump has done well so far, and yet we can also observe that the Deep State hasn’t given up, and probably never will.”

Declarations of a “deep state” conspiracy by Trump have created a potent political narrative that taps into Americans’ long-standing suspicions of government, particularly among conservatives. After decades of being the party of law and order, Republican support for the FBI has dropped under Trump. In a 2018 poll,

“members of the FBI and Department of Justice are working to delegitimize Trump through politically motivated investigations.” According to other polls, the number of Republicans who have a positive view of the bureau has declined from 59 percent in 2014 to 48 percent in 2019. Trust in the CIA has fallen as well, with Republicans who say they trust the agency decreasing from 66 percent in 2017 to 60 percent in 2019. In another reversal of traditional party roles, more Democrats than Republicans said they...

Since 1939, the Hatch Act had barred federal workers from engaging in political activity while performing government duties.

Some experts argue that career civil servants, like the press, represent an additional “check and balance” that helps prevent abuses by the executive, legislative,

to describe government workers. As the chart below illustrates, one’s semantic choices reflect where one stands on the political spectrum:

An EPA worker may be a “watchdog” to a Democrat but a “job-killer” to a Republican;

a conservative may see a national-security contractor as a “patriot,” while a liberal may deride them as a “war profiteer.”

All told, nine million Americans work for the federal government as contractors, full-time employees, or members of the military. These people make up roughly five percent of the country’s 160 million–person workforce. The largest group are the 3.3 million people who serve in the military or work as defense contractors. (About 1.3 million Americans are active-duty service members, a decline from roughly two million during the Cold War.) These military personnel are supported by hundreds of thousands of defense contractors, a number that surged after September 11, 2001, and has in recent years abated.

They vary from public-health experts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to TSA agents

After taking office, an American president installs more than three thousand political appointees.

In general, American elected officials have more power over permanent government workers than their counterparts in other liberal democracies.

1980s and 1990s, when the economy surged, trust in Washington temporarily surged as well. After the 9/11 attacks, it soared to a three-decade high of 60 percent—before quickly declining after the

soaring income inequality.

state.” Supporters of President Trump are right to argue that unelected officials who refuse to implement the orders of an elected president are a threat to American democracy.

The FBI and CIA are enormously powerful organizations that have long and sordid histories of abusing the civil rights of Americans.

At the same time, the allegations of treason that President Trump has made against the FBI and CIA are momentous if true, but shameful if false. No other American president has accused the FBI and CIA of carrying out a “coup” in the United States. No other American president has so relentlessly sowed public doubt in government.

to false intelligence about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, to the NSA mass surveillance revealed by Edward Snowden.

Congress, from Ford to Obama.

the relentless spread of conspiracy theories online and on air. It scrutinizes the work of William Barr, who, like no attorney general since Watergate, has acted as the president’s political shield and sword.

Barr is the most feared, criticized, and effective member of Trump’s cabinet. Democrats accuse him of using deceptive statements, religious invocations, and criminal investigations to benefit the president politically, charges he flatly denies.