The Deep State vs. Trump

There were two stories used to delegitimize Trump during the election

There are a lot more than two now, though. Everything seems to be fair game for “The Resistance” (the use of the article suggests an internal cohesion and organization that is nowhere to be seen). There are his dark plans to end constitutional government and start wars, of course, but also his chaos, racism, past vulgarities, incompetence, kleptocracy, nepotism, mental and emotional health, body language and even that telltale sign of a dangerous fascist, his hands. All are more or less of equal importance or at least equal time in headlines, and all are conclusive evidence the man has to go.

This frantic and fevered shrieking about everything he says and does may be giving succor to many, but it is also letting them pretend the progressive half of the country is united and powerful when it clearly isn’t. There’s no need to worry about the long or even medium term when there is one and only one priority. Strategies and policies? That’s easy. Whatever Trump is for, we’re against, even if it means getting in touch with our inner John Birchers and giving anonymous leaks from a hostile intelligence community the same credence as the global scientific consensus on climate change. Who can afford to care about things like media bias and accuracy when Hitler is lighting matches outside the Reichstag?

Maybe he deserves it all, but there seems to be a lot of co-opting going on here. Those thoughtful efforts we saw during and immediately after the election to figure out why so many people supported him and to confront issues like jobs and income inequality seem like relics from a bygone age. We’re back to dismissing them all as stupid racists one should never be expected to share an apartment with. I have no idea where this is all going, but if he is crippled or worse, I suspect the kind of progressive who will emerge triumphant is the kind who looks to Hollywood celebrities for leadership, who thinks feminism’s priority is the plight of female senior executives in boardrooms and who takes heart and inspiration from Hillary Clinton’s middle-of-the-night tweets.

A Washington truism is that it is not the crime but the coverup. Flynn is gone not because he did something potentially illegal. He’s gone because he covered it up and lied to Pence and Trump’s inner circle about it. Even thieves need a certain level of trust to operate. Or to cite a related rule of power: while lying downward (to your underlings and the rubes) is expected, lying upward (to your bosses) is a cardinal sin.

I think your assessment of whether the FBI can be brought solidly behind Trump is the best calculus of whether a palace coup by the intelligence community can be carried out successfully. All signs point towards the color revolution model. If they manage to create the spectacle of popular protest in immediate (violent) confrontation with the state apparatus the police will have little recourse unless they have an ideologically unified mass at the center. Which is the question of the FBI. It is unclear where this all might be headed in the short/medium term. Color revolutions are also a pesky social phenomena for the deep state to control in the long term. They often have many unforeseen consequences that intelligence planners rarely take into account. When you give people expectations for the future, they are hard to control.

It’s good to see at least one snowflake return to correct the record here. Most everyone keeps wandering off into reality and recognition of the actual state of affairs which threatens what little remains of our republic.

I can’t help but worry because we have a sizable segment of our population and most of the chattering classes along with the entrenched exceptionalists in the establishment who are displaying an extreme form of tunnel-vision and don’t seem to care.

how exactly does the intelligence community have more power thsn the military in the event of a coup? for one, they are not warriors, with only a handful of special forces within their ranks, of whom most are probably loyal to Trump. Secondly, they are far outnumbered by the military and the police, also there are 40 million trump supporters armed to the teeth with guns who will be very pissed off if there is a coup. I think it’s pretty clear that the bulk of the military would back Trump. The IC would are fools for going down this path, but perhaps it is for the best, so we have clear casus belli to hang the deep state in the streets from lamp posts.

Our Trotskyite observers over at wsws.org, as usual, have the fullest and largely correct analysis of what is going on.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/02/16/trum-f16.html

I think they are putting too much faith in constitutional remedies such as impeachment, however. I suspect we’re beyond that, and impeachment would take too long and wouldn’t result in a preferable outcome.

We’re probably about to enter a period “without a president.”

The tragedy is that there are so many things Trump could have done to secure his rule even in the face of IC agitation against him. He could have done the right thing for the people; he hasn’t. In fact he’s acted to alienate more and more of them, generating more and more opposition, and putting himself and his regime in an untenable situation.

Blaming anybody but him and his crew will fail.

Until yesterday, I gave him till the end of the month. Now, it looks like he’ll be lucky to last till the end of the week.

But you never know. Chaos often has unexpected outcomes.

RE: Turkey,

The people put down the coup, not the police. They seen what happens when the military takes power and they took to the streets and put it down.

RE: Syria,

The Regime is still losing, and its ranks are now filled with Shia Militias from abroad. Also the Jihadists doing the beheadings are those Shia Militias. For all the media hype, IS beheads fewer people in a year than Mexican Drug Cartels do in a week and less than what the Shia Militias do.

Also the majority of atrocities and civilian deaths are attributed to the regime and the evidence is overwhelming and all over social media.

RE: The topic,

Game time. Trump either sics the FBI on the CIA and lets the FBI take the NSA as well, or he goes down hard.

For all its boasts, the CIA is an incompetent organization. The FBI has busted moles within it numerous times and had better intelligence assets in the USSR than they did. If the FBI sides with Trump, its game over for the CIA and NSA.

The military will likely just stay out of it so it can claim clean hands.

Could someone please answer this question: If the deep state wants Trump out why didn’t it do something about him before the election? Everyone knew exactly what one would get with Trump in the White House. But nothing was done about it. Didn’t any of these folks go with the dirt to the Clinton campaign? And if they did why didn’t the ‘Clinton Mafia’ do something with it? I do recall reading that the Obama White House had some dirt but decided to take the high road. Figures.

Anyway, there’s probably not much to worry about in the long run. It might be close to 70 this weekend in Chicago. I got a feeling nature will soon be taking care of all our little problems.

That is the cause – but the reason. The reason is to tell everyone else who is the boss – and thinking is not in their job description.

Oops, should read “can’t have a good economy for the people who voted for you if you have advisors like Puzder and Mnuchin”.

Now that they have Flynn’s scalp, the truth comes out, it was all bullshit.

Oh and the “lied to Pence” bullshit…Pence is not in the chain of command, until Trump is deposed. Pence was wrong [possibly illegal] to attempt to interject himself between the National Security Advisor and the president he serves. Pence got Pompeo his job and Pompeo is there for Pence…NOT Trump, it is a palace coup by neocon, all to the polite applause of “liberals”.

Indiana [R]’s were glad to be rid of Pence as he was seen as a climbing backstabber…you don’t get that reputation for a couple of incidents, it’s Pence’s SOP.

That said; effective the night of Trump accepting Flynn’s “resignation”, I stopped defending Trump, as Trump effectively gave in to the neocon/neocolonists and is no longer to the left of Hillary on foreign policy, the election has been negated.

This article backtracks the WaPo line and put’s out disinformation meant to provide cover.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/fbi-reviewed-flynns-calls-with-russian-ambassador-but-found-nothing-illicit/2017/01/23/aa83879a-e1ae-11e6-a547-5fb9411d332c_story.html?utm_term=.bf961462cfaf

A couple days ago, Naked Capitalism’s co-blogger Lambert Strether wrote a long comment on this subject of enough value that I will copy-paste it here.

Lambert Strether
February 14, 2017 at 2:50 am
Sketching some first thoughts, because the situation is overly dynamic and has a lot of moving parts–

Yep, the sharks smell blood in the water. (The tank is the Beltway, however.) Some links on Flynn:

WHY ARE NINE SOURCES COMING FORWARD NOW ON FLYNN’S CONVERSATIONS WITH RUSSIA? EmptyWheel

Michael Flynn Resigns as National Security Adviser NYT

This to me is the important story, from (Kushner’s) Observer:

In light of this, and out of worries about the White House’s ability to keep secrets, some of our spy agencies have begun withholding intelligence from the Oval Office. Why risk your most sensitive information if the president may ignore it anyway? A senior National Security Agency official explained that NSA was systematically holding back some of the “good stuff” from the White House, in an unprecedented move. For decades, NSA has prepared special reports for the president’s eyes only, containing enormously sensitive intelligence. In the last three weeks, however, NSA has ceased doing this, fearing Trump and his staff cannot keep their best SIGINT secrets.

Since NSA provides something like 80 percent of the actionable intelligence in our government, what’s being kept from the White House may be very significant indeed. However, such concerns are widely shared across the IC, and NSA doesn’t appear to be the only agency withholding intelligence from the administration out of security fears.

What’s going on was explained lucidly by a senior Pentagon intelligence official, who stated that “since January 20, we’ve assumed that the Kremlin has ears inside the SITROOM,” meaning the White House Situation Room, the 5,500 square-foot conference room in the West Wing where the president and his top staffers get intelligence briefings. “There’s not much the Russians don’t know at this point,” the official added in wry frustration.

None of this has happened in Washington before. A White House with unsettling links to Moscow wasn’t something anybody in the Pentagon or the Intelligence Community even considered a possibility until a few months ago. Until Team Trump clarifies its strange relationship with the Kremlin, and starts working on its professional honesty, the IC will approach the administration with caution and concern.

I previously warned the Trump administration not to go to war with the nation’s spies, and here’s why. This is a risky situation, particularly since President Trump is prone to creating crises foreign and domestic with his incautious tweets. In the event of a serious international crisis of the sort which eventually befalls almost every administration, the White House will need the best intelligence possible to prevent war, possibly even nuclear war. It may not get the information it needs in that hour of crisis, and for that it has nobody to blame but itself.

So factions within the intelligence community have gone on strike (so much for “democratic norms”) A few things.

1) Chuck Schumer issued the same threat (“Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you. So even for a practical, supposedly hard-nosed businessman, he’s being really dumb to do this”). So we’re looking at, as it were, full spectrum dominance within the political class by the “intelligence community.”

2) So far as I can tell from the Schindler article linked above, Flynn fucked up, maybe on about the level of Petraeus or Democrat Sandy Berger, who hid classified documents in his pants and smuggled them out of the National Archive. (Of course, a lot of people in the Beltway were very happy to see Flynn fuck up, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t. And while we’re at it, can somebody please point me to a fully paid-up member of The Blob who isn’t crazy pants? Or corrupt? And isn’t the Logan Act a dead letter?)

3) To me, looks like a well-executed play in a game-plan that intelligence community slash Democrat factions have been running since at least mid-summer. (At this point we remember that “American statesman” Leon Panetta was Obama’s chief of state, head of DoD, and head of the CIA. So I would be very interested to know who appointed WaPo’s nine anonymous sources.) Clinton calling Trump a Russian stooge in the debates was one play, the 25-page “dodgy” dossier was another play (now, apparently, SIGNINT is “confirming” parts of it, so that’s still on the boil), the call for “faithless electors” to be briefed in the (farcically bad) JARA memo was another play, this is another play. No doubt impeaching Trump or getting him to resign by peeling off “moderate Republicans” would be a touchdown).

4) Note that Clinton made her charges of Trump treason in the debate in as direct a fashion as possible, so voters have aleady had the chance to take all this into consideration, at least at a high level (and since we can never see any of the intel, the high level is all we ever will see.) So, if the winning play in the gameplan is removing Trump from office, we’re seeing the intelligence community reversing an election result.

5) If the intelligence community can (a) vet a Presidential candidate after he is elected but before he takes office, and (b) can reverse an election result based on evidence the public cannot see, then the intelligence community is, in essence, a new fourth branch of government not accountable to the people in any way. Anybody who thinks the military will go back to the barracks after staging a coup is delusional. In the same way, anybody who thinks the intelligence community will go back to its SIGINT and HUMINT is delusional. Once they have achieved this change in the Constitutional order, it will never be undone.

6) It’s been amazing to see what liberals have been willing to throw away for Clinton’s sake. Apparently, having a vehemently pro-life Pence as President isn’t a problem for them. Nor is turning the intelligence community in a Praetorian Guard and giving them veto power over voters’ choice of a President a stumbling block. And it can’t be that they really believe Trump is a fascist, else for example Trump’s nominee to the VA wouldn’t be approved 100-0. So it’s all about their power and their rice bowls, plain and simple (and, I would argue, the war with Russia that The Blob wants, which amounts to the same thing). It would be wonderful to spot a good faith actor in this mess, but frankly, I’m stumped.

7) So this is what a legitimacy crisis looks like when liberal Democrats foment it. It would be entertaining if it weren’t so horrific and sad.

8) Of course, all the Democrat establishment really had to do was:

a) Get 10 Democrats on the road doing Town Halls, just like Sanders is doing, talking about universal programs that deliver concrete material benefits, especially to the working class

b) Make voter registration a core party function.

That would do it. Boom, Senate 2018, Presidency 2020. Rather than do something simple that connects with voters, they’re fomenting a slow-moving soft coup and a change to the Constitutional order from inside the Beltway. Swell. Just swell.

Reply ↓

Clintonites everywhere, including the Clintonites in the House and Senate, would prefer a President Pence over a President Trump. If the Clintonites can’t get their President Pence, they would prefer a President Ryan over a President Trump. In the short-to-medium term, I hope we can ” crush-kill-destroy” the power and influence of the Clintonite Senators and the Clintonite Representatives.

In the longer term, I hope we can purge, burn and exterminate every trace of Clinton and Obama supporters and their fellow travelling filth, sewage and garbage from out of the Democratic Party.

You value that fact free dribble? And Lambert? a guy who actively censors every blog he’s ever touched…sheesh.

Again; WaPo says it’s accusations against Flynn were bullshit; which means Lamebert’s efforts to be a waterboy for the mainstream media look rather foolish. There is no need for the media to go further; the election has been negated, the Bush/Obama administration’s policies remain in place.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/fbi-reviewed-flynns-calls-with-russian-ambassador-but-found-nothing-illicit/2017/01/23/aa83879a-e1ae-11e6-a547-5fb9411d332c_story.html?utm_term=.bf961462cfaf

I see this is as a ideological war between Empire USA and Nation USA. The United States was never made to be an empire but for the past 20 years has been run increasingly as one. Leader of the Free World, Obama declaring himself a President for the World, care about those outside our borders – those are all part of Empire USA. And the global Empire USA is being run by the CIA.

This is a push-pull between these two sides with this integral, existential, decision in the middle. One side legitimately fears that if Empire USA goes to far it will lead to World War. They would rather we deal with Empire USA from within then have a foreign alliance have to handle it for them. However, those who work to support Empire USA this is also a existential question because without Empire USA they do not exist.

I expect it to get ugly. I was reading more about the Fourth Turning today and this crisis is expected to last until 2030 at least. I’m currently thinking about how best to survive it. It’s never a good idea to take no sides whatsoever. What would you do if you were in the run-up to the Civil War, The Revolutionary War, in Great Depression etc?? How would you thrive? I would expect the outcome to be a default on the national debt, a regress on extra-territorial islands, a limited nuclear exchange, China dropping Communism and going to a more traditional heaven mandate system, break up of Europe, and USA giving up on Empire.

In some decades years go by and in some years decades go by. The Fourth Turning.

What now?

@che

Trump has a win at all cost, never give up mentality. Much of the hegemonic system is based on norms, rules, and unwritten laws. I expect Trump to break these rules, even if it breaks the system, to do what no one else has done before. I suspect a crisis will happen and Trump will let the system fail rather than bail it out on the backs of the public. Trump believes in the power of positive belief thinking (Norman Peale) and that will allow him to go where leaders haven’t gone before, to flush the system by letting the to big too fail… fail. And that will break the system.

Well , S Brennan, either I have misunderstood the actual purpose and meaning of what Lambert Strether has written . . . or you have.

I think you have. But “which one of us has misunderstood” it . . . is a decision which every other reader here will decide for hermself. And one of us will gain some credibility and one of us will lose some. Let Darwin decide.

Meanwhile, Naked Capitalism remains one of my few favorite politiblogs as of now.

Apparently Hugh;

Diff-Clu, ks & Lamebert think that when you discover a mole, the first thing do is coordinate a massive press release.

and yeah, I am laughing at their studied ignorance. Either they are dumber than the average rock, or so imbued with partisanship that the most idiotic counterfactual ideas seem to pose the only solution.

different clue
February 16, 2017

What’s that saying? What goes around, comes around.
Flynn’s removal was the first part of the coup against Trump.
What disturbs me most of all; there is no mass movement against the treasonous CIA/NSA/FBI in the undermining of the democratic process.
If ever there was a more clear picture, that U.S. democracy is indeed broken; likely irreparably…
The single biggest failure of Usian’s in their brief history.

@ Gaianne

No one supports Daesh and all such claims have been disproven.

Daesh was initially founded in 1989 by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Afghanistan as a newspaper, morphed into a militant organization in Jordan in the early 90s, thrown in prison for a few years, then released by the current King of Jordan in the late 90s because he thought they were harmless.

If anyone is to blame, blame the King of Jordan for being a dumbass and letting them out.

As for the NSA:

It does SIGNIT and its agents work in air conditioned offices with no glamour attached. If it needs to physically tap something, they subcontract that out to the Military. They aren’t getting involved in this unless they have irrefutable and damnable evidence against Trump.

Given they have access to everything, yet have not prevented one terrorist attack, its clear they have no real purpose and can be disbanded.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rq5Cg_Rccns

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xxSwH8B31w

Jimmy Dore is on a roll. Subscribe if you haven’t already.

@Tom

Gaianne is just another example of the multitude of people who seem to have their heads screwed on properly about much of our dilemma but became TH fanatics after 9/11. They know there is no real evidence to support their claims about the non-existent US/AQ connection so they chant this meme as a repeating mantra to reassure their fellow travelers.

It seems that when the lifetime exceptionalist conditioning of even resisters of US imperialism met the reality of 9/11 there was a burning of wires causing a short circuit to a more palatable explanation of those events. The fact that the US was weak, unprepared and incompetent which allowed this attack to happen cannot be rationalized with the view of the Hegemon as omnipotent so there must be an alternate reality to embrace.

Tom–

“No one supports Daesh and all such claims have been disproven.”

Daesh gets a lot of good weaponry, and it is coming from somewhere. Most of it is American. They are also well funded. They are the most powerful jihadi group in the Middle East.

As a general point, note that no army–regular or irregular–persists for long without support from somewhere. Guerrillas and terrorist groups are no different.

There is more. The US has admitted to supplying weapons to “moderate” jihadi groups that have several times turned their weapons over to either Daesh or Al Qaeda. To a reasonable person this would sound like a conduit–a supply chain.

Peter–

9/11 is not on-topic for this thread. But it might be noted that the official narrative violates the laws of physics and is therefore false. What did happen and who did it is a different problem–although the absence of an investigation is itself a hint.

–Gaianne

Charlotte W;

While I voted for Trump to keep the she-demon from starting a war with the Russians [which she surely would have done] and the faint hope [now dashed by Schumer] of infrastructure investment, I have to disagree with point “If they hate Trump… that means he’s on our side”.

The enemy of your enemy is not necessarily your friend…as America’s dalliance with radical Islam starting in the late 70’s has so often proven.

That said; watching so called “liberals” willingly, publicly and frequently fellate the CIA, calling for a Staci-state and attempting a war with Russia tests the limits of Orwellian doublespeak as today’s so called “liberals” would be, in a sane world, referred to as fascists. And I don’t mean that as insult, just an attempt at accurate description based on their observed behavior.

Ian at this point you being hypocritical and contrived. You said this summer to be OK with the Hillary and DNC leaks to be happy truthful info was out there. We have the same thing here but we’re upset because it leaked to the mainstream press instead of wiki leaks? Flynn admitted to hiddeing the conversation and Flynn is a bad guy, I think your letting your hate of the deep state blind you.

Russia would be a great friend and I would prefer that. But not while Putin’s in charge. Not because he’s evil, no , because he is smart. He doesn’t want to be our ally he wants the upper hand, He needs to be kept at arms length, we don’t want a cold war but we don’t want to embrace Putin either.

@ Gaianne

ISIS is self-funded and relies on captured weapons plus whatever it can manufacture. The only provable trade deals that exist for it are with the Syrian Regime for whom it sells oil for cash until recently when it began destroying the Gas Lines supplying the Regime after capturing them.

@ V Arnold

The information comes from the large files captured by the Delta Force in 2015 when they raided the home of ISIS’s oil chief.

We also have the files of ISIS’s Chief Strategist after he was killed by the FSA and which were posted here.

We have a pretty good ideal of how ISIS forms and gets its money. What we don’t have is the names of all its shadow members who form the real leadership. Baghdadi is just a figurehead and easily replaceable.

I have been following this group since 2004 when it became heavily involved in combat with the US Occupation of Iraq. It is decades old and not a phenomenon that came out of nowhere in 2014.

@ Tom

You supply no links, no sources, nothing!
Are you bloody stupid?
But of course you are…
Go away to a place that matches your ignorance; you’ll not fly here…

@ V Arnold

The information is on this blog back from 2015, Ian even wrote an article on it after I linked the find.

The raid on ISIS’s finance chief was also posted around the same time and is still on this site as well as googlable. It was a major news story after all.

Now kindly sit down.

S Brennan

Indeed, thanks.
I quit wasting my time on that git.

Tom–

It certainly seems that Daesh makes some of its own weapons, but that is just one source.

Note: A guerrilla operation cannot survive long depending on captured weapons. That can only be a temporary phase–and it is never a happy one–other means must be found.

I am not going to let your word “proven” pass by. Very little in this world can be proven.

Evidence is another matter. There is certainly good evidence that Daesh was raising money, by–among other things–selling oil through Turkey.

Tony Wikrent–

Your good points should not pass without acknowledgement. When selfishness pervades over a commitment to public good, then political, social, and cultural life deteriorates quickly. One thing you can do is focus your attention on those networks where trust is still possible, and keep those networks sound and trustworthy.

And of course you are right: The general outlook is terrible.

–Gaianne

@ Billikin

Can you be more specific? There were recurring fantasist claims regarding Obama, during his reign. Most notably, that he was a Muslim and that he was a Communist, and that he wasn\’t an American citizen. (Obama\’s Kenyan origin, BTW, was a myth begun by Obama\’s literary agent, and that Obama acquiesced to for years. See https://realclimatescience.com/2017/01/exposing-the-first-birther/)

I would call these fairly specific claims, for which the \’evidence\’ was mostly ideological and partisan irrationality. Furthermore, there was neither mainstream media echoing of these claims, nor were the politcally elite opponents (i.e., prominent Republicans) repeating these claims. (Doubtless, there were some exceptions.)

I am referring to vague claims (what, exactly, was \”hacked\”, e.g.?? what substantive subjects were discussed, and how, exactly, did this violate the Logan Act and/or hurt Hillary\’s campaign??) who have unknown sources (IC is also too vague), that get relentlessly flogged by prominent Democrats and echoed in mainstream media. That \”patriotic\” leakers feel justified in leaking only vague conclusion, but no transcripts, is a laughable proposition.

My cousin and I both feel that this sort of vagueness will eventually blow up in the faces of Trump\’s opposition. Their unwillingness to \”put up or shut up\” suggests that they are likely desperate, and don\’t have any impeachment or article 25 level of dirt on the Trump Administration.