Shallow, Self-Serving Lies About “the Deep State”
President Trump’s senior policy advisor, Steven Miller, has played the “deep state” card in responding to the news that President Trump tried to use taxpayer fund to persuade the Ukrainian government to investigate possible corruption there by Joe Biden’s son. The CIA employee who filed the complaint evidently followed the correct legal procedures, as the inspector general and the new head of the National Security Agency confirmed.
Still, Miller (and others, including the president) continue to rail about “the deep state” and how “unelected bureaucrats” are trying to mount a coup inside the government. “I know the difference between a whistleblower and a deep state operative. . . .Do you want a democracy in this country, or a deep state? It’s a binary choice.”
But Fox News’ Chris Wallace pushed back on Miller when he went “deep state” in that interview on Sunday, September 29th.
That the whistleblower is a deep state operative is a lie, plain and simple, and either Trump and Miller know this, or are totally blinded by self-interest in the pursuit of remaining “in power.” The New Yorker had these comments:
Since the day he took office, Donald Trump has blamed a “deep state” for trying to undermine his Presidency. This morning, the American people have an opportunity to judge the so-called deep state themselves. A meticulous nine-page whistle-blower complaint was released this morning by the House Intelligence Committee. In the document, an unnamed U.S. intelligence official describes an apparent effort by President Trump to use the powers of his office to pressure Ukraine to launch a criminal inquiry into a political rival, Joe Biden. Furthermore, the whistle-blower alleges that White House officials then covered up the President’s actions. The White House and the Department of Justice then delayed Congress from seeing the whistle-blower complaint. In all, the actions taken by the President, White House officials, and the Justice Department surrounding the complaint threaten the checks and balances between the President and Congress, which define and protect American democracy
The wagons have been circled, and the President is in siege mentality. This is war, he tweeted. He suggests his war was with the “deep state” that has tried to unseat from the beginning of his presidency. The plain truth is that the truth he or his staff tried to hide on a “classified” server is now out in the open for all to see. What was hidden is now in plain view, so you can expect misdirection and conspiracy theories can blossom. Trump and others, like Pat Buchanan, will feed this narrative endlessly.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/pat-buchanan-what-deep-state-does-outsiders
Buchanan fulminates as follows:
“Recognize reality. Whether or not Trump was ill-advised to suggest to the president of Ukraine that passing on the fruits of the investigation of Joe and Hunter Biden, the end game is bringing down Trump, democracy’s equivalent of regicide”. (emphasis in original)
Regicide is, of course, killing the king. It’s an interesting analogy, since the Founders fervently wanted a democracy, not a monarchy.
Setting aside Miller and Buchanan’s “talking points,” let’s look at what “the Deep State” has meant historically.
Perhaps the best example of “the deep state” acting to take down a President is in David Talbot’s book on Allen Dulles called, “The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, The CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government.” JFK assassination buffs will love Talbot’s book, as it makes a cogent case that the director of the CIA was the mastermind behind the assassination in Dealey Plaza on Nov. 22, 1963. There was, as the prosecutors say, motive, means, and opportunity. The Secret Service stood down. George H.W. Bush was there that day, as well as E. Gordon Liddy, and plenty of Mafiosi, as well. In fact, Talbot suggests that anyone who was anyone in the CIA or the mafia was there that day. That included CIA operative Lee Harvey Oswald. It was, in effect, a “coup ‘d etat,” or, as Buchanan would say, “regicide.”
A “deep state” consists of hidden figures, unaccountable, who are actually controlling politics in a given nation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_state
Russia’s KGB and Britain’s civil service are candidates, though Britain’s civil service does not (as far as we know) engage in extra-judicial killings. U.S. intelligence agencies such as the CIA, might well be part of “the deep state,” as alleged in Talbot’s book on Allen Dulles, where JFK was “taken out” by the deep state. But the President at times has called the Department of Justice (DOJ) the “deep state,” before Bill Barr became Attorney General. He said the same about the FBI and even Robert Mueller, before claiming Bill Barr’s memo on the Mueller report “exonerated” him completely.
Here, it is exceedingly difficult to see a complaint filed through proper channels as a “deep state” coup d’etat. No one has been unseated, and President Trump is almost certain to survive impeachment; no President has ever been convicted in a Senate impeachment trial.
The kind of alarmist, conspiracy laced rhetoric (the current “talking points”) by Rudy Giuliani and Steven Miller about a “deep state” conspiracy will resonate with a certain part of the citizenry, but this is more dangerous to the actual state of public governance than a measured impeachment inquiry that serves to find more facts about what actually happened. Those White House efforts to deeply bury the truth of the President’s efforts to enlist foreign help for his personal political gain is a shallow and self-interested move that “deeply” undermines the good governance in this nation.
“White House admits lawyers hid transcripts of damning Trump call in secret server.” Daily News, Sept. 27. 2019.
“It’s not clear what legitimate explanation the White House could come up with to explain away the effort to hide the transcript. The top-secret server is supposed to be used only for the most sensitive matters of national security, not politically embarrassing presidential phone calls.