deep state

Recently, the Intelligence Community made clear it will be a player in the 2020 presidential election. No one should be surprised. On Feb. 13, the House Intelligence Committee held a meeting at which intelligence officials briefed lawmakers on foreign efforts to influence U.S. elections. By several accounts, the officials told the committee that Russia is working to reelect President Trump. Later, just to make matters more difficult, there were leaks that Russia is also trying to help elect Bernie Sanders. The leak left many experts baffled, except to the extent that, with the Trump leak, it seemed to target the Intelligence Community's two least-favorite candidates. Trump was angry after the news broke.

As Attorney General William Barr looks into how it all started, some voices that were part of that frenzy are changing their tune about the value of investigations. They now express concern about investigations, concern that Barr is politicizing the Justice Department to go after perceived political enemies. An investigation lasting seemingly forever and putting one's family through hell? Imagine that! Coming from Andrew McCabe, the lack of self-awareness is so pronounced that it would be darkly funny, were not the events of the last three years so serious. More complaints are sure to come as Barr, and Barr's appointees, investigate the questionable acts of the investigators.

It would be nice to restore some faith in that lofty-sounding ideal chiseled into the pediment of the Supreme Court. I do believe that William Barr is endeavoring to recover the impartiality without which any Justice Department mutates into an injustice department. It was good news, for example, that the Justice Department announced Friday that it had engaged an outside prosecutor to review the government’s case against former National Security Advisor General Michael Flynn. Flynn recently withdrew his guilty plea. It is anyone’s guess what Jeff Jensen, the U.S. attorney assigned with looking into Flynn’s case, will discover. I hope that he is exonerated and lavishly compensated.

Impeachment has been redefined as a mere vote of no confidence and will become a rank political ploy for years to come once an opposition party gains a majority in the House. It is taking on the flavor of a preemptory device, a vaccination, rather than a medicine, as if to prevent future hypothetical crimes in the absence of current impeachable offenses. The most baleful legacy of the current Trump hatred is a new model of out-of-power administrations that never quite leave. Instead, apparently from now on, the retired, the fired, the voted out, the emeriti, and the transitioned will become opposition activists who seek to destroy their successors whose record they cannot abide and whose agendas they deathly fear.

There’s nothing that says the Administration has to run out and obligate the funds Congress appropriates on the first day of the Fiscal Year. The Pentagon spends more than $2 billion every day, and plenty of Americans would like to see that number go down. To claim the President broke the law because the Pentagon couldn’t spend $35 million in 19 days is nothing but a political smear.

Trump's tweet artfully sums up the Trump era from the perspective of the president and his supporters. With a likeness to the Uncle Sam “I want you” poster, the disrupter-in-chief reaffirms in 14 words the belief of Trump Nation that the political establishment, the media, the permanent bureaucracy and yes, the deep state are trying to crush him and them. Trump’s oblique reference to a weaponized and powerful adversary is hardly ­unfounded, with a partisan, flimsy impeachment the latest example. The tweet’s siren call to believers is a shorthand way of saying that impeachment is just a continuation of the endless attacks against us. Schumer’s warning hit the bull’s-eye.

The Democrats, media, deep state, and Never Trumpers fomented this fiction to stymie the duly elected president of the United States. They’re still doing it. Never has a president had to endure such relentless harassment. A man of business, Trump came to the presidency as a political naif and has reaped the wrath of a government leviathan hell-bent on protecting its power and ill-gotten gain. The president isn’t naive any longer. President Trump wants an impeachment trial in the Senate. He wants blood. He wants to call every witness and reduce them to rubble. Whether that’s the best political strategy or not is questionable. But Trump’s instincts so far have rarely been wrong.

Turning the Hollywood stunt of having Leftwing actors read the Mueller Report on its head, our friends Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney are producing a must listen series of podcasts featuring “Full Metal Jacket” star Adam Baldwin doing dramatic readings from Inspector General Michael Horowitz’ report outlining the origins of the FBI’s investigation into the Trump campaign.

We urge CHQ readers and friends of civil liberties of whatever political stripe to call Senator Lindsey Graham, the toll-free Capitol Switchboard number (1-866-220-0044), tell him that you want him to undertake an investigation to establish who at the Obama White House was involved in Operation Crossfire Hurricane and what Obama knew and when did he know it.

What the IG report describes are the middle steps in the circular proof cycle created to justify the surveillance and investigation of the Trump campaign and set-up the Russian collusion narrative. But the report doesn’t examine the predicate steps that brought Trump campaign volunteer George Papadopoulos into contact with Australian diplomat Alexander Downer, so, since the IG failed to do so, we will connect all the dots in the circle.

It is easy for our legal and ethical custodians to hound unpopular politicians whom the media despises, and who incur strident political opposition. Investigators and inquisitors know that any dirt they can dig up will earn them praise. The reason we have auditors in the first place is for precisely the opposite purpose: to examine evidence fairly, even if the final conclusions are likely to exonerate someone deemed boorish and crude by most of federal officialdom. In other words, our investigatory agencies should function like the First Amendment, which primarily serves not to protect free speech that we all admire but to protect unpopular speech that most prefer not to hear.

We urge CHQ readers and friends to call their Representative and Senators (the toll-free Capitol Switchboard is 1-866-220-0044), tell your Representative and Senators that no provision of FISA should be renewed until the public has answers to the questions about how FISA was used to spy on Donald Trump and who in the Obama administration directed and implemented that anti-constitutional spying.

To Trump's critics, “coup” is no longer a dirty word trafficked in by right-wing conspiracists. Instead, it has been normalized. Efforts to oppose Trump are often self-described as “The Resistance,” a reference to the underground French fighters resisting the Nazis in World War II. Trump’s opponents often have praised the deep state precisely because unelected career officials are seen as the most effective way to sabotage and stymie his agenda. A “coup” is no longer proof of right-wing paranoia, but increasingly a part of the general progressive discourse of resistance to Trump. In these upside-down times, patriotism is being redefined as removing a president before a constitutionally mandated election.

If Durham chooses to bring charges against any official who launched the Trump probe, history suggests he is extremely likely to persuade a jury to convict the accused and sustain those convictions upon appeal. And if he does not bring charges, it is extremely unlikely that any other prosecutor could have succeeded; regardless of what the official did, the evidence would not be there to convict or sustain a conviction. John Durham’s career is full of big, high-stakes, politically charged cases, but this one is the biggest, highest-stakes, and most politically charged of all. Luckily, it seems like his whole life has prepared him for this moment.

What we have been witnessing is not American politics as usual, but a sophisticated intelligence operation to destabilize and overthrow the legitimate government of the United States. Each step along the path to impeachment is exactly what the CIA or the intelligence agency of a foreign power would do to destabilize and eventually replace the leader of an unfriendly government.

It’s time Republican Senators got a spine transplant from House Members like Reps. Andy Biggs, Matt Gaetz, Steve Scalise, Devin Nunes and John Ratcliffe. We urge CHQ readers and friends to call Republican Senators, the toll-free Capitol Switchboard number is (1-866-220-0044). Tell them this is a fight to the death for the future of constitutional government and you want them in it on President Trump’s side.

The Twitter hashtag #WheresLindsey has had over 100,000 associated tweets, we urge our friends and followers on Twitter tweet this article using that hashtag. In the alternative, the toll-free Capitol Switchboard number is (1-866-220-0044), please call Sen. Graham and urge him to subpoena all the miscreants he has promised to bring before his Committee, but whom he has so far failed to put under oath in front of the American people.

Our preferred replacement for acting Secretary of Homeland Security Kevin McAleenan is acting Director of the Citizenship and Immigration Services Ken Cuccinelli. Cuccinelli has three things that McAleenan lacked – a commitment to the Trump border security agenda, a willingness to fight Democrats and the Republican establishment to make the President’s agenda a reality, and the effective TV presence necessary to sell it to the American people.

The United States needs an effective and uncorrupted intelligence apparatus to play its part in defending the nation, and Fred Fleitz has shown himself to be an adept and able administrator capable of doing the housecleaning necessary to air out the stench of Leftwing partisan politics in the intelligence community.

In this long article we summarize the tangled backstory conservatives have been able to unravel about the latest Deep State coup against President Trump. The details they have developed reveal a breathtaking assault on the Constitution by a conspiracy of Democrats and Far Left operatives in the intelligence agencies, in Congress and in Soros-funded organizations.