Volume 6 Number 225
It happened fast. Immediately after Lt. Colonel Alexander Vindman, a decorated Iraq war hero, and a National Security official, testified to Congress on October 29, 2019, the smearing began. This was because Vindman had reported concerns that the president Trump’s Ukraine pressure campaign was a national security risk. It was Fox News at its worst, with Laura Ingraham accusing him of being a spy for Ukraine and Lou Dobbs calling him an arrogant member of the “deep state”.
Sounds familiar. The American far right has depended on conspiracy theories to blame progressives for everything wrong with this country going back to the McCarthy era of the 1950s and the “red menace.” That began on February 9, 1950, when Senator Joseph McCarthy, a relatively unknown junior Republican Senator from Wisconsin, said in a speech in Wheeling West Virginia while waving a few pages, “I have here in my hand a list of 205 people that were known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping the policy of the State Department.”
It turned out that the paper was blank and there was no list. But this was a springboard that really launched the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Aided by the notorious Roy Cohn and even Robert Kennedy, a staff member, the country was in a frenzy trying to ferret out the Communist traitors in government and all walks of life.
True, this was 1950, and many people had been Communist in our country, going back to the Depression era of the 1930s. It was okay to join up, as capitalism was failing, and many idealistic younger people did. It has been said, “A lot of guys joined the Communist Party because that’s where the girls with the big boobs were.” While it made a lot of noise, the Party never had more than about 200,000 members, although it had many more sympathizers. After Stalin’s sell-out to Hitler and World War II, most dropped out and put that phase of their lives behind them. Today it is estimated that there are only 2-3,000 Communist Party members in the United States.
Remember there was, and is, no law against being a Communist, just as long as one doesn’t engage in any anti-governmental activities. But Party membership came back to haunt many with the “red menace” scare of the 1950s. But the only real villain the minions of the right came up was Alger Hiss, a State Department official who was accused of passing on government documents to one Whittaker Chambers, a Communist turned witness.
This investigation was led by, who else, Senator Richard M. Nixon. Hiss was found guilty largely because it was claimed that Chambers knew Hiss, since he was able to describe the interior of the Hiss home to the FBI. Hiss was sentenced to five years for perjury, all the while maintaining his innocence. It was learnt years later that Chambers was able to describe the contents of the Hiss home because the FBI agents had fed him that information.
The HUAC was finally disbanded in 1975. That’s it. That’s all they got from years worth of investigation, one bogus conviction and thousands of lives wrecked and in ruin by the ruthless actions of a committee that investigated thousands of innocent people. There were politicians, movie stars, teachers, authors, lawyers, union officials and people from all walks of life, needlessly investigated. Some lost their jobs, marriage were torn apart and some even committed suicide, all for naught.
So the “deep state” is an updated version of the “red menace.” The accusation of being a member of the “deep state” is defined as, “A form of clandestine government made up of hidden or covert networks of power operating independently of a state’s political leadership, in pursuit of their own agenda and goals.”
The thought of clandestine groups infiltrating and bending government to their will is a fairly recent one. It has been around in the United States dating back to the Communist scare, the JFK assassination and later to the Vietnam incursion, 9/11 and the Iraq invasion. These were sometime seen by some as the influences of big business, the oil industry, the military complex, the mafia, the press and ideological extremists among members of the government administration. Take your pick.
While the concept was there, the term “deep state” was not used much until the Trump era when Steve Bannon’s Breitbart News site depicted it in a blog, a month after Election Day. Here “deep state” was described as “a massive informal government comprising untold thousands of bureaucrats, technocrats and plutocrats committed to driving president-elect Trump from power.” Mr. Bannon took this concept right into the White House when he became president Trump’s chief strategist. This purported invasion included some of the two million career civil servants that the newly elected president inherited.
Right after Mr. Trump was inaugurated we heard Sean Spicer, the newly minted press secretary, saying in the Daily Beast of March17, 2017, “There are people that burrowed into government during the eight years of the last administration and may have believed in that agenda and want to continue to seek it.”
“Deep state” talk is always accompanied by fear regarding the lack of transparency. It is based on the distrust of government. The very nature of some of the branches of government like the FBI, CIA and the military amplifies their fear of deep conspiracies because they depend somewhat on secrecy. As the Trump era has unfolded to the right, fueled by the likes of Fox News and Breitbart, “deep state” stands for some kind of creepy, sinister conspiracy determined to sabotage the Trump agenda. Pro-Trump advocate Dan Bongino said of the Russian investigation of 2016, “They want a scalp, and believe me when I tell you the “deep state” is going to get one.”
But where is it? The closest thing we have to it is the texts exchanged by two FBI agents, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, who shared texts negative to the candidate, saying that “We’ll stop Donald Trump from getting elected president”, and the firing of Andrew McCabe of the FBI.
Despite their negative emails no evidence was found that that the two agents’ attitudes affected their work. Page resigned shortly after it got out, Strzok was reassigned by Robert S. Mueller and later fired by Trump. Despite the “deep state” type accusations, Strzok was never charged or indicted for anything. All he did was dislike Mr. Trump, and he has sued the government over his firing. He claims that he was the victim of the president, who inappropriately bullied law officials into firing him. Mr. Strzok accuses the DOJ of violating his right of free speech guaranteed by First and Fifth amendments and depriving him of due process to challenge his expulsion.
In March, 2018 Andrew McCabe, the FBI deputy director, was fired two days before his lucrative retirement would kick in. The reason why, cited by the administration, was that during an internal investigation of the handling of the Clinton investigation he “lacked candor on multiple occasions” and that was a fireable offense. Mr. McCabe says he answered all the questions put to him honestly and when he was misunderstood he reached out to the investigators to correct the record.
Mr. McCabe had authorized two FBI spokespeople to speak to reporters to rebut suggestions that he had put the brakes on the Clinton investigation, which was not allowable. This was what is commonly known as a “background call,” usually used to correct inaccuracies or provide details and nuances before reporters make information public. It was no way damaging to the president.
Mr. McCabe says the firing was a setup because his wife Jill, a Democrat, ran for a Virginia State Senate seat and received donations from an ally of Mrs. Clinton. That, to president Trump, showed a pro-Clinton bias within the FBI and explains why Mrs. Clinton was never charged. It was a questionable offense and not worthy of a firing after many years of service to our country. These two situations seem questionable, at best, and not at all indicative of a vast conspiracy “deep state” network.
Meanwhile, in a continued vain search, in May, 2019 the president appointed Attorney General William Barr and the Department of Justice to “investigate the investigation.” That is, to look at the whole 2016 campaign investigation that was authorized by Congress as part of a vast unwarranted spying investigation. In this ludicrous investigation Mr. Barr and the DOJ, six months after turning up nothing, gave John H. Durham, a respected prosecutor, the power to subpoena witnesses and documents, to convene a grand jury and to file criminal charges.
It was not made clear what potential crimes Mr. Durham is investigating or what prompted the new investigation. The closest we have to an answer is that in May, 2019, on Fox News, Mr. Trump told Sean Hannity that the FBI officials who originally opened the Russian investigation had “committed treason.” This sure sounds like president Trump is using the Justice Department to go after his perceived enemies in the “deep state.”
Prosecutor Durham will probably find that, as has been shown by The Mueller Report, the initial investigation stemmed from the FBI receiving information from the Australian government. This came about through an Australian official who was told this by Corey Lewandowski, a low level Trump worker, over drinks in a London pub in the summer of 2016. Lewandowski blabbed that the Republican campaign had been approached with an offer of stolen emails that could damage the Clinton campaign. These emails were subsequently released by the Russians and along with ties between Trump advisors and Russia set off fears that the Trump campaign was conspiring with Russia interference. Agency views of Russia election operation crystallized by mid-August after CIA director John Brennan shared intelligence with then FBI Director James Comey. That is what Mr. Donnelley will find out, not some far-out “deep state” adventure.
If one thinks about it, the whole “deep state” thing is ridiculous. The government is made up of people. Many of them are career officials. They make the wheels of government turn. Some of them serve for many years, through Democratic and Republican administrations. While most of them have political leanings, they know they must act impartially because they work for the United States, not a political party. They overwhelmingly understand their role and whether they like the policies or not they follow the lead of administrations. That is what they sign up for when they take the job and that is what they do.
Referring to career civil servants as some form of “deep state” is a clear attempt to delegitimize civil service employees. It carries fear baiting and rumor mongering and is a dark conspiratorial term that does not correspond to reality. The only ways that the alt-right talks about “deep state” is in the abstract or when someone in government comes forward to point out some misconduct by the president. Other then pointing out that individual as a member of the “deep state,” they offer no proof of their “vast conspiracy allegations.”
So just as recent Republican forays such as the Benghazi hearings, the 2016 election polling fraud investigation and Clinton’s 30,000 emails found nothing, so will this latest “investigating the investigators” find zero–except to prove that the conspiracy frauds live on in the form of “deep state.” Don’t be surprised if the investigation fades away just like the other “deep state” type endeavors.
“It’s not the deep state that hurts Trump — it’s the shallow state.”
–Mara Liasson, American journalist