deep state

this node schizo

SEE DEEP STATE BULL BS

see career civil servant (aha-let buffer)

see FBI wray collusion

5/18 meme has infected bloodstream officially if at gop debate primary

prolly neglected, boosted by mueller?

used to be black helos?

started with bannon?

a demon term for norms? bureaucracy =gov't=evil (or at least incompetent)

aha doh trump wanted a stassi and lashed out at disloyal:

an 1 23

former President Donald Trump in 2018 had an infamous press conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin in the Finnish capital of Helsinki in which he signaled that believed Putin's denials about having interfered in the 2016 election despite assessments to the contrary from American intelligence agencies.

Four-and-a-half years later, Trump is now touting his trust of Putin over American intelligence agencies as a source of pride.

In a post on his Truth Social account, the former president attacked former officials at the FBI and CIA whom he accused of trying to undermine his presidency by investigating his campaign's multiple contacts with Russian agents during the 2016 presidential race.

"Remember in Helsinki when a 3rd rate reporter asked me, essentially, who I trusted more, President Putin of Russia, or our'Intelligence' lowlifes," he wrote. "My instinct at the time was that we had really bad people in the form of James Comey, McCabe (whose wife was being helped out by Crooked Hillarywhile Crooked was under investigation!), Brennan, Peter Strzok (whose wife is at the SEC) & his lover, Lisa Page. Now add McGonigal [bought by Deripaska] & other slime to the list. Who would you choose, Putin or these Misfits?"

Trump has repeatedly heaped praise on Putin over the years, and even called him a "genius" last year after he launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine that has faced multiple setbacks over the past 11 months while costing the lives of tens of thousands of Ukrainians.

==

1020 an

Trump’s inner circle ‘furious’ with FBI’s Wray for undercutting Biden smear: report

===

1020

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/john-ratcliffe-back-his-bullshit-and-fox-news-loves-it

John Ratcliffe, President Donald Trump’s handpicked director of national intelligence, is selectively declassifying documents related to Russian interference in the 2016 election. His politically motivated disinformation campaign puts bolstering the president’s faltering reelection chances above U.S. national security. And he has found eager partners at Fox News. The network’s hosts are lapping up the story and baselessly claiming that it vindicates their conspiracy theories that the federal investigation into Russia’s actions was an anti-Trump witch hunt.

For years, Fox has been trying to delegitimize the voluminous evidence that Russia helped Trump win the 2016 election. Russian President Vladimir Putin personally “ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed” at helping Trump defeat his opponent, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, according to the U.S. intelligence community. That campaign included a Putin-directed effort to hack and release Democratic emails and an array of interactions between Trump associates and Russians with ties to the Kremlin. Special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Russian operation led to the successful prosecutions of various close supporters of the president. But for Fox’s propagandists, the real story has been “Obamagate,” the right’s spittle-flecked conspiracy theory postulating that “deep state” elements in the U.S. government dreamed up a Russia “hoax” in order to stop Trump.

Trump, a Fox obsessive, is an eager “Obamagate” proponent, and over the last few years, he has replaced key figures in his administration with partisan Fox favorites who are willing to use their positions to prop up the network’s unhinged conspiracy theory. He removed Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who recused himself from the Mueller probe, in favor of William Barr, who has worked to stymie Mueller-related prosecutions while ordering and overseeing a federal criminal probe into the origins of the Russia investigation. He used the same playbook at the top of the intelligence community, ousting Joseph Maguire, whose office had warned of Russian interference in the 2020 election, and subbing in Richard Grenell, a former Fox contributor who used the office to create fodder for pro-Trump conspiracy theorists. 

And now Ratcliffe, who replaced Grenell in May after gaining Trump’s favor despite a lack of experience in intelligence because the president liked his anti-Mueller rants on Fox, has levied his own salvo. On Tuesday, he selectively declassified and released two heavily redacted documents: a set of handwritten notes former CIA Director John Brennan took after briefing President Barack Obama in July 2016 and a memo the CIA prepared for the FBI summarizing intelligence. Those documents undergird a Russian intelligence assessment Ratcliffe described in a letter he sent last month to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-SC). Fox, unsurprisingly, was given the exclusive on the documents, and it credulously reported that they reveal that Brennan briefed Obama on Clinton’s “purported ‘plan’ to tie then-candidate Donald Trump to Russia as ‘a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server’ ahead of the 2016 presidential election.”

If Ratcliffe’s aim was to create political ammunition for the president and his Fox propagandists, he succeeded. The story led the network’s website on Tuesday night and was treated as a “bombshell” by Fox’s pro-Trump prime-time and morning hosts, who alleged that it proved that Clinton had “invented the Russia hoax” to deflect attention from her email server. And Trump furiously tweeted about the story on Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, demanding arrests for what he baselessly termed had been an attempted “COUP."

This is nonsense.

The Russia probe did not begin due to anything Clinton did in July 2016. It was initiated based on earlier intel that George Papadopoulos, a Trump campaign adviser, had disclosed that Russia had political dirt on Clinton.Papadopoulos, a bipartisan Senate report later assessed, was a “potential vector for malign Russian influence” who learned about the Russian hacking campaign from an individual with Russian ties and almost certainly informed the Trump campaign.

The notion that Clinton was secretly scheming to link Trump to Russia to avoid talking about her email server doesn’t meet the laugh test. At the time Brennan was briefing Obama, that hacking campaign was ongoing. WikiLeaks had just released thousands of Democratic National Committee emails, it was widely believed that those emails had been stolen by Russian hackers, and Clinton’s campaign was publicly denouncing Trump for calling on the Russian government to produce her emails while also denying that government’s involvement.

Ratcliffe’s selective redactions were also deceptive.“Four people familiar with the matter said the Russians’ assessment of Clinton was only one part of a larger intelligence report that was billed as an initial examination of Russian cyberattacks targeting the 2016 election, and was not the reason that it was referred to the bureau,” Politico reported Tuesday. Likewise, Brennan explained to CNN that the notes Ratcliffe released showed him “giving examples of the type of access that the US intelligence community had to Russian information and what the Russians were talking about and alleging.”

Moreover, the Russian intelligence assessment Ratcliffe produced had previously been rejected on a bipartisan basis as likely Russian disinformation intended to distract from their hacking of the Democratic National Committee as those documents were released.

This pipeline from the DNI’s office to Fox will continue as long as Trump is president. Ratcliffe is doing exactly what Trump wants him to do, using the power of the director of national intelligence to boost his reelection. And Fox is doing what they always do, serving as a propaganda outlet for the Republican Party.

Meanwhile, the Russian effort to help Trump win the 2020 election continues.

Rep. John Ratcliffe loves Fox's Russia probe conspiracy theories. He was just confirmed to oversee U.S. intelligence.

07/29/19 1:02 PM EDT

The Foxification of the intelligence community follows the DOJ script

02/21/20 2:04 PM EST

“Obamagate” is just a rebrand of the right’s bogus “deep state” conspiracy theory

https://www.mediamatters.org/trumprussia/obamagate-just-rebrand-rights-bogus-deep-state-conspiracy-theory

05/18/20 no vids pix

last weekend, President Donald Trump unleashed a series of Mother's Day tweets accusing former President Barack Obama of an unspecified crime, referring to it as “Obamagate.” Trump later went as far as to suggest that Obama and the Democratic presidential front-runner, former Vice President Joe Biden, should be in prison.

However, Trump has hardly been clear on what crimes Obama allegedly committed. When a Washington Post reporter asked, Trump responded, “You know what the crime is. The crime is very obvious to everybody. All you have to do is read the newspapers -- except yours.”

While the president has not offered details, anyone who has watched Fox News host Sean Hannity’s show over the past three years can recognize that Trump’s “Obamagate” is just an attempted rebrand of the right’s years-in-the-making “deep state” conspiracy theory, sometimes called Russiagate. Media Matters has documented the origins of the conspiracy theory, the role of Attorney General Bill Barr’s politicized Justice Department, and key players in right-wing media who have spread its baseless claims.

What is “Obamagate?”

“Obamagate” is just another version of the right’s “deep state” conspiracy theory

According to right-wing media, over the last several years government bureaucrats who held their positions during previous administrations comprise a “deep state” that has worked to undermine the Trump administration. This deep state conspiracy theory has evolved into a reflexive defense of Trump in a wide array of circumstances, from the Ukraine scandal that led to his impeachment to his administration’s handling of the coronavirus.

[vid]

the core allegation made by Trump and his right-wing media allies is that in 2016, the Obama administration and the FBI, led by then-Director James Comey, sought to prevent Trump from becoming president. When that didn’t work, conservative media claim, the Obama administration and FBI officials sought to enact a backup plan to stop Trump in the form of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russia.

Since 2017, right-wing media have consistently and repeatedly called for retaliatory investigations against a slew of top FBI and Obama administration officials who they view as aiming to end Trump’s presidency, including Obama and Comey. Some Republican politicians have also joined in or at least publicly attempted to sow doubt about the legitimacy of the Mueller investigation. Reps. Jim Jordan (R-OH), Matt Gaetz (R-FL), and Devin Nunes (R-CA) have each appeared on Fox repeatedly to push deep state conspiracy theories, especially on Hannity, and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-SC) is conducting his own investigation into the FBI’s Russia probe. 

Recent events led to an escalation in “Obamagate”

Attorney General Bill Barr has increasingly politicized the Justice Department in pursuit of Trump’s political goals, and his efforts came to a boiling point recently when the DOJ moved to throw out the case of Trump ally Michael Flynn, who pleaded guilty in 2017 to charges of lying to the FBI.

Supposedly vindicated by the attempted dismissal of Flynn’s case, right-wing media are now intensely focused on the January 2017 eventspreceding Flynn’s FBI interview that ultimately resulted in his guilty plea -- an interview that the right claims was engineered, in part by Obama, to trap Flynn into lying to the FBI.

Recently uncovered documents in Flynn’s case have also served as fodder for right-wing media in claiming that the FBI and Obama administration officials were trying to undermine Trump’s presidency. Newly released transcripts from interviews conducted by the House Intelligence Committee during its Russia probe also have brought accusations from the right against top FBI officials and House Democrats.

On May 13, GOP Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Ron Johnson (R-WI) releasedwhat the right is interpreting as a list of people who may have unmasked Flynn’s identity in the transcripts of his December 2016 conversations with then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Right-wing media and their allies believe if they can identify who unmasked Flynn and prove that the official (or officials) illegally leaked Flynn’s identity to the press, then that proves the Obama administration tried to sabotage the Trump administration. In reality, the list has little significance and isn’t nearly the bombshell that right-wing media are trying to make it out to be. It is unlikely the original Flynn unmasking is even on the list. [don jr claims biden personally unmasked him in booktv lib priv 10/20?]

While there are some legitimate problems with the FBI’s conduct over the course of the Mueller investigation, Trump and his media allies' efforts to muddy the waters by cherry-picking information to weave complex, self-serving theories will ultimately make any significant reform difficult by further demoralizing an already overly politicized agency.

How the DOJ is being used to carry out the political goals of the deep state conspiracy theory

Bill Barr’s role

Trump’s media allies have held Attorney General Bill Barr up as the man who will be able to carry out their retaliatory investigative goals. The attorney general has been trying to undercut any investigation into the president’s connections with Russia during the 2016 election even before he was nominated to his post. Moving to drop the charges against Flynn is only the latest example in a long list of actions Barr has taken to increasingly politicize the Justice Department to help Trump and his allies:

• Late 2018: Barr sent a memo to members of the Trump administration detailing his view that Trump’s firing of and later fervent ridiculing of Comey were not obstructions of justice.
• February 2019: Barr was sworn in as U.S. attorney general.
• March 2019: Barr took steps to mislead the public and undercut the conclusions of the Mueller investigation, issuing a summary memo with cherry-picked conclusions before the redacted version of the report was released.
• May 2019: Barr announced an administrative review into the origins of the Mueller investigation led by John Durham, United States attorney for the District of Connecticut.
• October 2019: It was reported that the Durham review into the origins of the FBI investigation was now a criminal investigation.
• January 2020: Barr moved to interfere in cases close to Trump, including by changing the DOJ’s sentencing recommendations in the Flynn case. 
• February 2020: Barr moved to interfere in the Roger Stone case, another criminal case against a close Trump ally, replacing the DOJ attorneys overseeing the case.
• May 2020: The DOJ attempted to drop charges against Flynn and released documents pertaining to the January 5, 2017, Oval Office meeting that is at the center of the Obamagate conspiracy theory. The judge has not formally dropped the charges and is asking for third party amicus briefs for advice on the situation.

Right-wing media figures have heaped praise on Barr for going after the “deep state.” They are also doubling down on claims that Flynn was a victim and never did anything wrong.

[vid]

Durham probe’s role

Since October 2019, when he was appointed by Barr, U.S. Attorney John Durham has been leading a criminal inquiry into the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation. That probe was reportedlyexpanded again in May. Now, right-wing media are focusing on identifying which Obama administration officials were aware of the calls between Flynn and the Russian ambassador, which has become a key question in Durham’s probe.

On April 24, The New York Times reported that Durham was looking into a 2017 column written by The Washington Post’s David Ignatius about Flynn’s call to Kislyak -- revealing that Durham was examining not only the origins of the FBI investigation, but also whether Ignatius’ source was intentionally trying to damage the Trump administration.

The predecessor to the Durham probe, DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s investigation into the Mueller investigation, fell shortof reaching the right-wing media’s desired conclusion: incriminating Trump’s enemies. But Hannity and others have remained optimistic that Durham, and Barr, will deliver the retaliatory results that they have been looking for.

Key figures involved in pushing the years long deep state conspiracy theory

Sean Hannity

Fox News prime-time host Sean Hannity has played an outsized role in the promotion of the “deep state” theory, using his three-hour daily radio show and nightly Fox program as a conduit to hammer the supposed details and call for retaliation against perceived “deep state” operatives. Hannity frequently hosts guests who have been consistent drivers of the “deep state” conspiracy theory since 2016, and his show’s influence on Trump is well-documented.

Since leaving office, Obama has remained a frequent target of Hannity’s ire -- for instance, in August 2019, the Fox host said that “it’s time for Obama to be put under oath” about his role in Flynn’s case. And now, Hannity has quickly latched onto the president’s rebranding of Russiagate as “Obamagate.” Last week, Hannity suggested that Obama was sending coded messages “to deep state operatives to go out and do more dirty work."[vid]

Jarrett

Gregg Jarrettis a Fox News legal and political analyst and Hannity regular who is known for pushing deep state conspiracy theories about the Mueller investigation. Trump has even promoted Jarrett’s book The Russia Hoax: The Illicit Scheme to Clear Hillary Clinton and Frame Donald Trump.

Jarrett has regularly called for retaliation against those involved in Obama’s administration and the Mueller investigation; he has described Trump as the real “victim” of Russian collusion; and in March 2018, Jarrett called for Obama to be subpoenaed.

Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing

Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing are a husband-and-wife legal duo who have frequently pushed deep state conspiracy theories on Fox and were implicated along with Rudy Giuliani in trying to dig up dirt on Biden as part of the Trump-Ukraine scandal.

The pair have close ties to Barr going back years and have frequently assured Hannity and others that Trump’s attorney general will successfully carry out the retaliatory aims of the deep state conspiracy theory against Obama and FBI officials. In one example, after Barr announced counter investigations into the Mueller investigation, diGenova reassured Hannity that Barr will “conclude” that “it all started in the White House. Barack Obama knew about this from day one.” In the same appearance on Hannity, Toensing predicted that several Obama officials would be implicated, including Biden and Obama himself. [vid]

Solomon

John Solomonis a former opinion columnist and vice president at politics outlet The Hill who was instrumental in pushing the Biden-Ukraine conspiracy theory. He pushed misinformation so often and had so many conflicts of interest that The Hill reviewed his writings, added disclaimers to his pieces on Ukraine, and announced changes in internal policy to avoid similar problems in the future. Solomon became a Fox News contributor in October 2019, and now frequently appears on Hannity. He is also legally represented by Toensing and diGenova, and some of the legal duo’s other clients have ended up as sources for Solomon’s “reporting.”

Solomon has demonized the Mueller investigation for years; in 2017, when he was the chief operating officer for Sinclair Broadcast Group’s Circa website, he and his colleague Sara Carter primarily focused on undermining the origins of the Mueller investigation.

In 2017, Solomon also emerged as a key anti-Mueller figure on Fox News -- especially Hannity -- where he continued to spread misinformation and call for retaliation against Obama and FBI officials. Solomon’s slanted reporting has been a fundamental part of Hannity’s conspiracy theories, and Hannity has called for Solomon to receive the Pulitzer Prize.

Sara Carter

Sara Carter is a Fox News contributor who, along with Solomon, has played an outsized role in promoting the deep state conspiracy theory on Hannity’s show over the last several years. In 2018, Carter called the Mueller investigation a “bloodless coup.”

Carter has regularly promised that indictments against FBI and Obama officials are imminent, usually basing her information on unnamed sources.

After Barr announced counter-investigations into the Mueller report in 2019, Carter predicted that there are “a number of indictments that are on the way” and claimed that the investigations will “lead all the way back to the White House. … And I’m talking about the Obama administration." [vid]

Dan Bongino is a Fox News contributor who frequently appears on Hannity’s show to rail against the Muellerinvestigation and call for retaliation against FBI and Obama officials, whom he has accused of trying to launch a “coup” to get rid of Trump.

Lou Dobbs

Lou Dobbs is a Fox Business host whose sycophantic, pro-Trump commentary makes his show a hot spot for anti-Mueller deep state narratives.

In 2018, Dobbs called the Mueller investigation an “ideologically inspired jihad” and he has been calling for Obama to be investigated since 2017. Last week, Dobbs accused Obama of orchestrating a plot to “overthrow” Trump.

Jeanine Pirro

Jeanine Pirro is a Fox News host and former judge who is known for her extremist rhetoric and for having a close relationship with the president.

Pirro has been railing against the Mueller investigation since 2017, when she called it a “fishing expedition” and demanded a “cleansing” of FBI and DOJ officials “who should not just be fired, but who need to be taken out in handcuffs." Since then, Pirro has consistently called for retaliation against various officials in the Obama administration, FBI, and DOJ. Recently, Pirro accused the judge in Flynn’s case of being part of a political conspiracy, claiming that Judge Emmet Sullivan is an “activist judge” and part of “the left coming in” to the justice system.

Tom Fitton and Judicial Watch

Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton has remained a key figure in promoting the right-wing media’s deep state conspiracy theory, arguing for years that the Mueller investigation was a plot to destroy Trump’s presidency.

In 2018, Fitton called on the president to pardon anyone brought up on charges related to the Mueller investigation, saying that Trump should “just pardon everybody, you know, just have a field day,” including people Fitton admitted may actually be guilty.

Fitton has also been trying to link Obama to the deep state conspiracy theory for years. In February 2018, Fitton claimed on Fox News that he “always wondered why President Obama has skated really free from any serious inquiries about his involvement in the Russia investigations.”

When the DOJ moved to throw out Flynn’s case, Fitton’s statement at Judicial Watch claimed that “the targeting of General Flynn was a key part of the Obama/Clinton/Deep State coup against President Trump.”

The Federalist

Ben Domenech, Sean Davis, and Mollie Hemingway

The Federalist and its publisher Ben Domenech, co-founder Sean Davis, and senior editor Mollie Hemingway have also spent years hammering the idea that the Trump administration was the target of a deep state plot that goes all the way to Obama himself.

In a recent article summarizing Obamagate, which it calls “the biggest political scandal of our time,” The Federalist referred to the Mueller investigation as an “organized effort by the Obama administration to nullify the results of the 2016 presidential election,” claiming that it was “in effect an attempted coup.”

Key officials targeted by the deep state theory

Barack Obama

Although it did not originally bear his name, Obama and members of his administration have been the main target of this conspiracy theory as right-wing media try to rebrand the Russia investigation as illegitimate or as a setup by the Obama administration to undermine Trump. Other accusations against Obama have included claims that he was actively enabling Russian interference in the 2016 election and that a “deep state” consisting of Obama-era officials is still working in government and taking orders from the former president.

The deep state theory’s evolution, Obamagate, has focused on a January 5, 2017, Oval Office meeting that has come under criticism on the right because during that meeting, Obama expressed knowledge of Flynn’s contacts with the Russian ambassador. The conspiracy theory generally accuses Obamaof having been aware of plans by FBI and DOJ officials to launch an investigation into Flynn and other Trump associates and to destroy Trump’s presidency. Former Obama-era officials have disputed whether Flynn came up at all in the meeting. Regardless, right-wing media allege that Flynn needed to be gone or he’d find out what Obama and his administration had been up to, so the former administration set Flynn up. This theory gained even more traction last week, when House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff (D-CA) released a series of transcripts from the Mueller investigation, including interviews with some Obama-era officials who testified they had no evidence of collusion in the interactions between the Trump campaign and Russia.

Joe Biden

The former vice president got caught up in the deep state conspiracy theory when right-wing media started accusing Crowdstrike, the company that secured the Democratic National Committee’s servers when they were hacked in 2016 by Russians, of being Ukrainian-owned and helping to falsely accuse Russia of the hack. Neither of these things are true, but right-wing investigations into Ukraine spun off into falsely accusing Biden of trying to get a Ukrainian prosecutor fired to protect his son, a scandal which backfired and ultimately led to Trump’s impeachment.

Biden also attended the January 5, 2017, Oval Office intelligence briefing and, according to a memo from former national security adviser Susan Rice, Biden stayed behind after the meeting along with Comey and a few others. Right-wing media claim Obama at that point told him about the Flynn-Kislyak calls. The right has been increasingly hammering Biden’s supposed connection to the deep state since he became the presumed Democratic presidential nominee.

Sally Yates

In the past, former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates has been a right-wing media target for allegedly leaking information to the press and pushing the infamous dossier of opposition research compiled by Fusion GPS’ Christopher Steele, even though she supposedly knew it was full of “Russian lies,” that ultimately led to the wiretap of Trump adviser Carter Page.

Yates also attended the January 5, 2017, Oval Office intelligence briefing and was part of the group that was told to stay behind after the briefing by Obama, who then told them about Flynn’s contacts with the Russian ambassador. According to documents released as part of the DOJ’s attempt to drop the case against Flynn, she was surprised that the president knew that Flynn and Kislyak had talked in December 2016. Yates later said she was concerned Flynn was susceptible to blackmail. Right-wing media argue that makes her pivotal in what they view as a setup against Flynn.

Susan Rice

Right-wing media often accuse former Obama national security adviser Susan Rice of unlawfully “unmasking” or revealing the identity of American citizens on tapped calls with foreign entities. Trump allies claim that Flynn was unmasked illegally, which supposedly led to him being set up by the FBI. Rice has also been accused of leaking information to reporters toward the end of Obama’s administration.

Rice also attended the January 5, 2017, Oval Office intelligence briefing and later wrote in a recently released memo that she and Biden were in attendance after the main briefing when they learned about Flynn’s contacts with the Russian ambassador. Right-wing media have seized on her memo as providing further details about what they were told in the meeting, including that Obama supposedly cautioned Comey and Yates to consider withholding information about Russia from the incoming administration.

James Comey

Right-wing media view Comey as a major driver of the FBI corruption that they claim tried to destroy Trump’s presidency, and they falsely accuse him of leaking information to the press. The former FBI director oversaw the start of the investigation into Flynn, which right-wing media argued was illegitimate even before Barr’s DOJ moved to throw it out.

Comey also attended the recently uncovered January 5, 2017, Oval Office intelligence briefing and stayed behind to talk to Obama about Flynn. In court documents, Yates recalled that Comey suggested that Flynn may have violated the Logan Act, a law meant to prevent private citizens from interfering in foreign policy disputes (following DOJ’s move to drop the Flynn case, some conservatives have argued the law should be repealed).

James Clapper

Russiagate promoters accuse the former director of national intelligence under Obama of leaking classified information and pursuing illegitimate investigations. The right has also frequently mischaracterized his statement that there was “no evidence” of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

Clapper also attended the January 5, 2017, Oval office intelligence briefing, and recent revelations have now led to speculation from right-wing media that Clapper lied to Congress in July 2017 about whether he personally briefed Obama on the phone calls between Flynn and Kislyak.

Andrew McCabe

Right-wing media blame the former deputy FBI director for pushing the Steele dossieralong with Comey and allege that he lied to FBI investigators about classified leaks to the media.

In February, the Justice Department moved to drop an investigation ordered by Barr into whether McCabe lied to the FBI, infuriating the right and renewing claims of a DOJ bureaucratic “deep state.”

John Brennan

Right-wing media allege that DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report on the origins of the Trump/Russia investigation confirmed that former CIA Director John Brennan lied to Congress about whether the Steele dossier was used in the Obama administration’s intelligence community assessment on Russian election interference.

Peter Strzok and Lisa Page

Peter Strzok is a former FBI agent who became a right-wing media target because leaked texts between himself and Lisa Page, a former FBI attorney, allegedly showed an anti-Trump bias in the special counsel investigation. The texts also revealed they were having an affair, which led to vicious attacks from both right-wing media and the president.

According to recently declassified documents, Strzok moved to keep the Flynn probe open on January 4, 2017, after it was set to be closed. Right-wing media have characterized this move as interference to illegitimately continue an investigation and said the Logan Act was potentially used as justification.

Nellie and Bruce Ohr

Nellie Ohr worked as a contractor for Fusion GPS, the firm that dug up information that led to the infamous Steele dossier. Many on the right point to the fact that her husband, former Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr, is a high-ranking DOJ official as further evidence of the “deep state,” and Hannity has called for retaliatory investigations against both.

Samantha Power

The former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations is one of a handful of officials that right-wing media suspect of leaking sensitive information to the press toward the end of Obama’s presidency and conspiring to stop Trump’s presidency. Like Yates, she has often been accused of illegally unmasking American citizens, especially by Hannity.

Rod Rosenstein

Right-wing media have previously alleged that former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein knowingly lied to the FISA court to illegally target Trump aide Carter Page by using Clinton’s “phony dossier that was full of Russian lies” without informing the court of its origins or noting that it was unverified. They falsely claim this is vindicated by the Horowitz report.

Trump administration and Fox News are trying to gin up a scandal that would do to the 2020 election what Hillary Clinton's emails did to the 2016 election. There's no reason that anyone has to play along with the deceit.

The short version:

• President Donald Trump's handpicked director of national intelligence, John Ratcliffe, is selectively leaking documents to pro-Trump outlets, usually Fox News.
• These documents relate to Russian interference in the 2016 election.
• Pro-Trump personalities at Fox use the documents to claim that Russian interference was a hoax, usually saying that Hillary Clinton herself ginned up the hoax.
• There is no reliable evidence for these claims. To the contrary, a bipartisan Senate committee found numerous ways that Russia interfered -- even more than Robert Mueller uncovered in his investigation.
• The Russia probe began based on intel that Trump 2016 campaign adviser George Papadopoulos has disclosed that Russia had political dirt on Clinton.
• None of this reality is reflected at Fox News, which keeps up talk of "Obamagate" as the election draws near.
• Numerous sources have told media outlets that Ratcliffe's redactions were deceptive.

Objectively speaking, there is no reason to be talking aboutClinton's emails in 2020. She's not on the ballot, and a multi-year investigation by the State Department concluded in 2019 that there had been no mishandling of classified information.

1119 bibi corruption charges

https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-deep-state-conspiracy-is-about-to-go-into-overdrive?ref=scroll

Deep State Conspiracy Is About to Go Into Overdrive

by Ronald Radosh

The American right has advanced nutty conspiracy theories for decades. But the one we’re about to see play out will make Joe McCarthy look like an amateur.

no lnx

IT CAN HAPPEN HERE

The Deep State Conspiracy Is About to Go Into Overdrive

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/us-intel-on-threat-of-coronavirus-shared-with-israel-and-nato-in-november-report

==

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/trump-fires-people-for-telling-the-truth-president-blasted-for-dead-of-night-decision-to-fire-intel-watchdog/

‘Trump fires people for telling the truth’: President blasted for ‘dead of night decision’ to fire intel watchdog

President Donald Trump was harshly criticized on Friday for firing intelligence communityInspector General Michael Atkinson.

House Intel Chair Adam Schiff (D-CA) and Senate Intel Ranking Member Mark Warner (D-VA) were among the lawmakers who took to Twitter to criticize Trump on his favorite social media platform.

Here’s some of what people were saying about Trump’s decision:

Adam Schiff

?

@RepAdamSchiff

Trump’s dead of night decision to fire ICIG Michael Atkinson is another blatant attempt to gut the independence of the Intelligence Community and retaliate against those who dare to expose presidential wrongdoing.

It puts our country and national security at even greater risk.

...

Mark Warner

@MarkWarner

• 15h

In the midst of a national emergency, it is unconscionable that the President is once again attempting to undermine the integrity of the intelligence community by firing yet another intelligence official, the ICIG, simply for doing his job.

Mark Warner

?

@MarkWarner

The work of the intelligence community has never been about loyalty to a single individual -- it’s about keeping us all safe from those who wish to do our country harm. We should all be deeply disturbed by ongoing attempts to politicize the nation’s intelligence agencies.

Rep. Gerry Connolly

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@GerryConnolly

Donald Trump tramples the Constitution again. This time, late on a Friday night under the cover of global crisis.

Congress may be at home, but we can see you, Mr. President. And we’re the one group of people you can’t fire. https://twitter.com/kylegriffin1/status/1246262473977561088 …

Kyle Griffin

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@kylegriffin1

Breaking: Trump has fired the intelligence community's chief watchdog, Michael Atkinson, who was the first to sound the alarm to Congress about an "urgent" complaint he'd received from an intelligence official involving Trump's communications with Ukraine. https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/03/trump-fires-intelligence-community-inspector-general-164287 …

244

7:55 PM - Apr 3, 2020

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David Cicilline

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@davidcicilline

How many civil servants will be victimized by this President before Republicans wake the hell up?

1,779

7:52 PM - Apr 3, 2020

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531 people are talking about this

Jim Himes

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@jahimes

Captain Crozier and Inspector General Atkinson. Decent patriotic men of service doing their jobs with honor. And of course @realDonaldTrump can’t abide that.

Both fired in one week.

There is no bottom to this administration.

Chuck Schumer

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@SenSchumer

Whether it’s LTC Vindman, Captain Crozier, or Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Atkinson:

President Trump fires people for telling the truth. https://twitter.com/NatashaBertrand/status/1246261657086672896 …

Natasha Bertrand

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@NatashaBertrand

BREAKING: Trump has fired the intelligence community’s chief watchdog, Michael Atkinson, saying he no longer has confidence in him. He will be removed 30 days from now. https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/03/trump-fires-intelligence-community-inspector-general-164287 …

Chuck Schumer

@SenSchumer

Michael Atkinson is a man of integrity who has served our nation for almost two decades. Being fired for having the courage to speak truth to power makes him a patriot. https://twitter.com/NatashaBertrand/status/1246261657086672896 …

Natasha Bertrand

?

@NatashaBertrand

BREAKING: Trump has fired the intelligence community’s chief watchdog, Michael Atkinson, saying he no longer has confidence in him. He will be removed 30 days from now. https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/03/trump-fires-intelligence-community-inspector-general-164287 …

Rep. Eric Swalwell

@RepSwalwell

America, time to fire @realDonaldTrump https://twitter.com/natashabertrand/status/1246261657086672896 …

Natasha Bertrand

?

@NatashaBertrand

BREAKING: Trump has fired the intelligence community’s chief watchdog, Michael Atkinson, saying he no longer has confidence in him. He will be removed 30 days from now.

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/03/trump-fires-intelligence-community-inspector-general-164287 …

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• Gateway Pundit's Jim Hoft told Alex Jones that coronavirus in the U.S. is “the deep state” trying to take out Trump.
• Fox News and right-wing media have seized on coronavirus crisis to attack abortion.
• Erick Erickson tweeted and then deleted a celebration of an Asian American reporter's offense at racist coronavirus comment.
• Fox’s Dan Bongino said that you can’t be racist about China because “China is not a race.”
• Rush Limbaugh guest host Mark Steyn said that San Francisco faces a COVID-19 shutdown because it's “a big gay town.” (In case you are wondering, Limbaugh was off all week.)

Fox News, led by Sean Hannity, has been begging Attorney General Bill Barr to investigate or arrest a list of government officials

WRITTEN BY COURTNEY HAGLE

PUBLISHED 02/19/20 10:54 AM EST

President Donald Trump triggered turmoil in the Department of Justice (DOJ) last week after he tweeted public complaints about the sentencing recommendations for his longtime associate Roger Stone, after which Attorney General Bill Barr appeared to step in and interfere in the case. The incident rattled the legal community as fears escalated that an emboldened Trump -- with Barr’s help -- is politicizing the Justice Department for personal gain, prompting more than 2,000 former Department of Justice officials to sign a letter calling for Barr’s resignation and the Federal Judges Association to call an unprecedented emergency meeting.

Additional reporting revealed that Stone’s case was not the first time Barr’s Justice Department has intervened in legal matters close to Trump; NBC News reported on February 11 that Barr also intervened in the criminal investigations into former acting FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI. On February 14, the Justice Department announced that McCabe would not be charged with lying to investigators, which Stone’s right-wing media defenders angrily insisted was an example of DOJ hypocrisy and further evidence of the “deep state” conspiracy theory against Trump.

Fox News host Sean Hannity, along with a slew of his network cohorts, has spent years advancing that conspiracy theory while relentlessly calling on Barr and the Justice Department to investigate and arrest Trump’s political opponents. Some of these Fox News figures calling for new investigations were implicated in Trump’s Ukraine scandal, such as contributor John Solomon and the GOP legal duo Victoria Toensing and Joe diGenova. Others include Fox regulars Gregg Jarrett, Sara Carter, Dan Bongino, and Tom Fitton. The details among these calls vary, but they all carry the same theme: “Investigate the investigators,” or anyone else who has dared look into Trump’s misconduct over the last several years.

At the core of Hannity’s grievance is an overwhelming obsession with the idea that a bureaucratic “deep state” has been seeking to undermine Trump’s presidency since before the 2016 election. Every attempt to hold Trump accountable since then -- the Mueller report, the Ukraine scandal that led to impeachment, and any other inconvenient fact about Trump that surfaces -- has supposedly been evidence of the “deep state” trying to take down the president.

Given Trump’s long history of taking cues from Fox News and widespread concerns about the attorney general’s recent politicization of the Justice Department, it's worth documenting the list of people whom Fox News has been relentlessly calling on Barr to investigate, arrest, or convict as part of this “deep state” conspiracy theory:

• Former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton
• Former FBI Director James Comey
• Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe
• Former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates
• Former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein
• Former Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr
• Former Fusion GPS contractor Nellie Ohr
• Former FBI agent Peter Strzok
• Former FBI lawyer Lisa Page
• Former FBI lawyer James Baker
• Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper
• Former national security adviserSusan Rice
• Former Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power
• Former CIA Director John Brennan
• Former Attorney General Loretta Lynch
• Former President Barack Obama

And here is more on the supposed reasons for investigating them, from Hannity himself.

Fox News on Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and officials in the “deep state”

Former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has long served as a boogeyman for right-wing circles to attack, but Trump’s 2016 election brought a newfound desire to “lock her up,” as evidenced in Trump supporters’ infamous rally chant. Specifically, Hannity now wants her arrested for the “phony dossier that was full of Russian lies” -- commonly known as the Steele dossier -- that her 2016 campaign obtained from opposition research firm Fusion GPS. Hannity claims this was the basis of the FISA warrant to monitor Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. (It wasn’t.) Nellie Ohr worked as a contractor for Fusion GPS; many on the right point to the fact that her husband, former Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr, is a high-ranking DOJ official as further evidence of the “deep state,” and Hannity has called for retaliatory investigations against both.

Fox News’ grievances against Clinton also include complaints that the Uranium One and email server scandals -- flimsy right-wing conspiracy theories that have already been investigated and resulted in Clinton’s exoneration -- were looked into by sham investigations led by former FBI Director James Comey. Hannity has called for Barr to reopen these investigations, often claiming that it’s hypocritical that Clinton hasn’t been treated as badly as he feels Trump has.

Hannity’s obsession with the “deep state” has led to his fixation on seeing punishment for the FBI investigators and anyone involved in Mueller’s investigation or in the events leading up to it. Hannity’s show spent months hyping up the DOJ’s internal inspector general report that looked into the investigators of the Mueller probe, compiled by Inspector General Michael Horowitz, in hopes that he would punish the people they’re hoping for. While the IG report did find some evidence of wrongdoing in the Mueller investigation, the conclusions were nowhere near the dramatic, nefarious conspiracy theory Hannity spent months weaving for his viewers. Refusing to falter, Hannity then turned his hopes to Barr, in his new role as attorney general, and federal prosecutor John Durham, who is currently leading a criminal inquiry into the origins of the Mueller investigation.

Hannity’s accusations are muddled and flimsy, but the core idea is that former and current officials associated with the FBI colluded with Clinton’s campaign to help her win, and when that didn’t succeed, they launched a sham investigation (the Mueller investigation) into Trump to undermine his presidency. In Hannity’s view, former FBI Director James Comey, former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, and former Deputy Attorneys General Sally Yates and Rod Rosenstein knowingly lied to the FISA court by using Clinton’s “phony dossier that was full of Russian lies” to illegally target Carter Page without informing the court that it was unverified and came from Clinton.

Fox figures have also accused Comey of leaking classified information, which has since been disproven. Hannity also claims Comey, McCabe, Bruce Ohr, former FBI agent Peter Strzok, and former FBI lawyer Lisa Page used their positions to “persecute those they disagreed with politically, all trying to get Hillary Clinton elected.” Hannity also claims McCabe lied to the inspector general and committed perjury.

According to Fox News personalities, former FBI lawyer James Baker, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former national security adviser Susan Rice, former Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power, former CIA Director John Brennan, former Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and possibly former President Barack Obama himself also supposedly played a role in illegally leaking information toward the end of Obama’s presidency.

Here is just a small sample of the times Fox News figures have called for Barr to investigate individuals associated with the FBI, the Clintons, and the Obama administration:

• • Last May, former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski predicted on Lou Dobbs Tonight that “in March or April of next year, James Comey, Andy McCabe, Strzok and Page will be on trial for the crimes they committed.”
  • On a December 2017 edition of Fox News @ Night, Judicial Watch’s Tom Fitton suggested that the FBI had been “compromised” and “turned into a KGB-type operation by the Obama administration.”

• A few months later, in February 2018, Fitton accused Obama of “presidential involvement in these sensitive criminal investigations,” referring to the investigation into Clinton’s emails and Mueller’s Russia investigation. Fitton added that he’s “always wondered why President Obama has skated really free from any serious inquiries about his involvement in the Russia investigations.”
• After the release of the Mueller report in March 2019, Hannity said that his “sources” were telling him “it’s all about to come cascading down” on those he claimed had “rigged the investigation into Hillary’s emails scandal” when there was “clear, compelling, incontrovertible evidence.” Hannity went on to call for the Trump administration to “fully expose every single one of these deep state actors,” saying, “James Comey, let’s start with him. Let’s start with Sally Yates. They need to be investigated. McCabe needs to be investigated.” He added, “Susan Rice, Samantha Powers, John Brennan, Clapper, Lynch -- … they all must now be put under oath [and] investigated."
• On February 7, 2019, Hannity asked, “When is anybody going to be held accountable” for the Mueller investigation. His guest Gregg Jarrett predicted on Hannity that Barr would open investigations into Clinton and others after being sworn in as attorney general.

• One week later, a *Hannity* panel consisting of Jarrett, Carter, and guest David Schoen argued that at least a “dozen” individuals essentially “sought a coup d'etat to overthrow the President of the United States.” The panel named McCabe, Rosenstein, Brennan, Clapper, Bruce and Nellie Ohr, and others.
• In March 2019, Hannity called out the supposed “rigged investigation into Hillary'' by Comey, Baker, and others. He asked “how is it possible with all that evidence” that Mueller isn’t investigating FBI officials, Obama officials, and the Clintons. DiGenova responded that “it is quite obvious that there were crimes committed by people associated with the Clinton campaign” and others that “have been ignored.”
  • August 2019, Hannity told Republican members of Congress that a “little birdie” told him that “apparently the FBI … didn’t treat [Clinton’s] campaign the way they treated Donald Trump.” Hannity also attacked the Steele dossier, Comey, and FBI officials.
  • After it was reported that the DOJ would not be charging McCabe, Hannity said that if there aren’t successful investigations against the senior officials involved in investigating Russian interference, “we’re not going to have a constitutional republic anymore.” He added, “There is a five-alarm fire going on, … and it affects every single player that we have now talked about, and all of the crimes we’ve exposed, and all of the corruption we’ve exposed, and all the abuse of power we’ve exposed.”
  • After Barr announced counter-investigations into the Mueller investigation in April 2019, Hannity declared that “to date, we have been right about everything that has transpired surrounding the deep state’s abuse of power” and warned that “if we don’t investigate investigators, lock up the bad actors, this country will be over as we know it.” Joe diGenova called Comey a “dirty cop” and said that Barr will “conclude” that “it all started in the White House. Barack Obama knew about this from day one.” Victoria Toensing predicted Obama, Biden, Yates, Rice, and Comey may be implicated.
  • fox News has been calling on Bill Barr to carry out retaliatory investigations

For more than a year, various Fox News personalities have assured viewers that there is one man who is capable of taking down everyone who they feel has wronged Trump: Bill Barr.

• • In a segment from December 2018 attacking the Clintons, Strzok, Page, and Obama, Toensing assured Dan Bongino, who was a guest host on Hannity, that “if we get Bill Barr in as the attorney general,” their concerns “will be addressed.”
  • during Barr’s confirmation hearing in February 2019, Hannity presented a “road map of corruption” of all the crimes he wanted Barr to investigate regarding the Mueller report, saying that there is “no shortage of corrupt Trump-haters to investigate.”

• In April 2019, Barr announced counter-investigations into the Mueller report. Fox contributor Sara Carter predicted that an “avalanche” of information would be revealed by Barr’s investigations, and there are “a number of indictments that are on the way.” She claimed that the investigations will “lead all the way back to the White House. … And I’m talking about the Obama administration."
  • in September, Fox Business host Lou Dobbs asked diGenova and Toensing, “How much are we going to be thanking Bill Barr ourselves?” DiGenova assured Dobbs that “Barr is a strong-willed individual” who “will not be afraid to bring cases that need to be brought.” DiGenova added that “the one thing he is going to do, I assure you,” is “to lower the hammer in a public way that’s going to be quite revealing to the American people.”

yikes

https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/trump-to-name-bombastic-loyalist-a-top-intel-chief-despite-lack-of-qualifications-report/

no lnx

Trump to name bombastic loyalist as top intel chief despite lack of qualifications: report

Ambassador Richard Grenell with California Wine Representative

Written by David Badash / The New Civil Rights Movement February 19, 2020

President Donald Trump is expected to install Richard Grenell, his current Ambassador to Germany, as his next Acting Director of National Intelligence, according to The New York Times. Grenell is known as a bombastic Trump loyalist who has not been well received in Berlin.

Some eyebrows are being raised, not due to Grenell’s harsh attitudes but his disturbing lack of qualifications for the job of Director of National Intelligence, also known as the DNI.

The DNI is a Cabinet-level official who sits at the very top of the entire Intelligence Community, serving as the head of the 17 federal agencies that comprise it. They also serve as the President’s chief advisor on national security, and produce the top-secret President’s Daily Brief (PDB).

Federal law states quite clearly, “Any individual nominated for appointment as Director of National Intelligence shall have extensive national security expertise.”

Ambassador to Germany does not qualify. Grenell previously has served as the spokesperson for the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. He has run a public affairs consultancy, has been a Fox News contributor, and for a few days was presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s national security spokesperson, but was forced to step down after conservatives blasted the former governor over Grenell’s sexual orientation.

In November the german magazine Der Spiegel ran a damning profile of Grenell titled, “Trump’s Ambassador Finds Few Friends in Germany.” (Ironically, one of the reasons Trump gave for firing his venerated Ambassador to Ukraine was that she was not well-liked in the country, which was false.)

“Since arriving in Berlin as U.S. ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell has flouted diplomatic conventions and attempted to interfere in domestic politics. He has since become politically isolated in the German capital,” Der Spiegel reported.

In the extremely “unflattering” article, Grenell is compared to “a right-wing extremist colonial officer.”

“The powerful avoid him. Doors have been shut. Few politicians to the left of the right-wing populist Alternative for Germany (AFD) and the populist-conservative Christian Social Union (CSU), the Bavarian sister party of Merkel’s center-right Christian Democrats (CDU), want to be seen with him.”

It gets worse.

Der Spiegel writes they spoke with 30 sources before publishing their report.

“Almost all of these sources paint an unflattering portrait of the ambassador, one remarkably similar to Donald Trump, the man who sent him to Berlin. A majority of them describe Grenell as a vain, narcissistic person who dishes out aggressively, but can barely handle criticism. His brash demeanor, some claim, hides a deep insecurity, and they say he thirsts for the approval of others.”

All that aside, again, Grenell is not qualified, neither by law nor by common sense.

Some experts agree:...

https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/white-house-targeting-of-truth-tellers-is-turning-the-intelligence-community-into-a-crowd-of-cowards/

revenge witch hunt authoritarian // wm barr mueller probe collusion

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/senate-republicans-defend-fbi-director-wray-against-trumps-angry-attacks-i-think-hes-excellent/

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driver on trump seal pardon? war crimes 2x called them warriors ~ deep state?!

, U.S. Navy Secretary Richard V. Spencer (no relation to the white nationalist of the same name) was forced outafter losing a power struggle with Fox News host Pete Hegseth. Hegseth has been aggressively lobbying the Trump administration to intervene in the cases of multiple convicted war criminals, including Eddie Gallagher, a Navy SEAL who had been accused of war crimes during a 2017 deployment to Iraq. Hegseth devoted numerous Fox & Friends segments to their causes, repeatedly hosted their family members and lawyers to ask the president for pardons, and privately urged the president to do so.⁠

Gallagher was acquitted in July on charges related to the murder of a teenage prisoner of war, but was demoted after being convicted of posing for photos with the body. While Trump pardoned the Navy SEAL and restored his rank, Navy officials subsequently sought to convene a review board to remove Gallagher from his elite unit and strip him of his Trident pin. This process reportedly continued even after Trump tweeted his disapproval of the move.

Following several attacks from Hegseth on Spencer and the Navy during the course of Sunday morning’s Fox & Friends broadcast, Trump announced his displeasure with the Navy and Spencer’s termination on Twitter.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/inside-the-secret-deep-state-army-thats-quietly-uncovering-trumps-corruption/

https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/at-american-priority-conference-speakers-sowed-distrust-peddled-conspiracy-theories-and-called-for-civil-war

Joshua Feuerstein took the main stage at the American Priorities Festival and Conference at the Trump Doral National Miami resort to deliver a message: the Civil War was here.

Feuerstein, a former evangelical pastor, used his sermon voice to recall the original Civil War, which he called the “turning point of America,” the battle of Gettysburg, which he deemed the “turning point of the war,” and the men who fought in Pickett’s Charge, which he labeled “the turning point of Gettysburg.” He paced the stage in his navy blue suit, passing by the large red “AMP” letters on the screen behind him, and painted a picture of heroic men and hand-to-hand combat during Pickett’s Charge. “Those men did not think it anything special,” he said.

“I need you to know that 2020 is a civil war that will change the face of America forever,” Feurestein said, his voice rising, as the crowd began to applaud. “And it’s God, ladies and gentlemen, it’s God that calls the qualified, that qualifies those that are called, that are willing to step up in the moment that matters, that has greatness thrust upon them. And tonight, together here in this place to say that we are willing to fight, we may think ourselves insignificant, but that we will stand together in 2020, and we will win the war that will change the face of America.”

Feurestein’s declaration of war wasn’t the only one at the conference. Earlier in the evening, evangelicalPastor Mark Burns had called for war; “We’ve come to declare war!” he said, and attendees in the back of the ballroom replied with “War! War!” 

Over three days, speakers at the pro-Trump conference sowed seeds of distrust in nearly every American institution imaginable and cited conspiracy theories to bolster their case for the use of such civil war rhetoric, as they perpetuated sentiments of victimization and loathing. The conference could have been dismissed as a meeting of the fringe, but big-ticket speakers like Don Trump Jr. and Sarah Huckabee Sanders lent legitimacy to the conference,as did more respectable Republican groups like the Leadership Institute, which held a series of trainings in side rooms. By the time Don Trump Jr. took the stage on Friday evening, he simply invoked themes hammered into the audience throughout the day using subtler language, and it worked the crowd into a frenzy.

In this Trumpian, upside-down world, it’s hard to understand where one has landed until you take one conspiracy at face value: the “deep state.” The so-called deep state is supposedly comprised of supporters of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in high-rank positions in different government agencies who aim to sabotage Trump at every opportunity and eventually overthrow him. Originating on the fringe, the conspiracy theory has now entered the mainstream GOP and has become a staple of right-wing media messaging. At the American Priority Conference, the speakers legitimized the deep state, and layered more conspiracy theories on top. 

Perhaps most telling was the “Unmasking the Russian Hoax” panel with Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch, a right-wing “investigative” organization, conservative activist Ned Ryun, George Papadopolous, who went to federal prison for making false statements to FBI agents about the timing of his contact with Russian intermediaries in 2016, and Corey Lewandowski, former Trump campaign manager and author ofTrump’s Enemies: How the Deep State Is Undermining the Presidency. Tracy Beanz, abooster of the QAnon conspiracy theory, moderated the panel.

In Fitton’s world, bad actors had been planning a coup before Trump was even elected.

“Anytime you heard the word impeachment, you can substitute the word coup, because that’s what’s going on here,” Fitton said. “It began during the campaign, when they weaponized intelligence agency against Trump, people like George [Papadopoulos], and who knows who else, to protect Hillary Clinton, to protect Barack Obama, and as Mr. Strzok said, to have an insurance policy if Mr. Trump won.”

The “insurance policy” Fitton references isa conspiracy theorybirthed on 4chan message boards that Democrats had a ready-to-go scheme to impeach Trump if he won.Amplified by right-wing media, the conspiracy theory has reached the White House and influenced the president’s policy making.

“They [Congress] weren’t getting the traction they needed, so the intelligence agencies, it looks like, that were targeting him to begin with, came up with another smear operation,” Fitton continued. “They had a leak they wanted to get out on this Ukrainian conversation, but they recognized doing it would be illegal, so they gussied it up in a whistleblower complaint and illegally communicated classified information, it looks like, with Adam Schiff and lied about it. And now it’s led to the coup operation of President Trump.“

Papadopoulos floated the deep state theory as well. “Some of the same spies that went after Michael Flynn in 2015 were after me in 2016,” he said. As for the whistleblower report, Papadopoulos noted that it came out when WIlliam Barr was, he said, trying to investigate the previous administration. “This was a preemptive strike by the deep state,” Papadopoulos said, suggesting that it was an effort by deep state actors to protect themselves.

Lewandowski focused on the FBI.“I look at the fact that they spied on American citizens who were participating in the political process, because they didn’t like our politics,” Lewandowski said.  “What we know see over the course of the last three and a half years is that Jim Comey, and Andy McCabe, and the lovers, Dr. Page, which Trump talked about last night, James Baker who is the general counsel at the FBI, they use their badges and guns to go after American citizens because they don’t like our politics.” 

The bad actors need to punished, the panelists agreed. “People have to go to jail,” Ryun said, to which an audience member yelled: “Barack Obama!” 

According to the panelists, the media was among the bad actors, conspiring with Democrats. “The media intentionally wanted to brainwash all of you. They wanted to create chaos and division, and attempt a silent coup,” Papadopoulos said.

Later that evening, Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA  warmed up the stage for Don Trump Jr.He zoomed in on the Jussie Smollett story, an actor who apparentlystaged a hate crime against himself, claiming it was indicative of the Democratic situation and “Democratic privilege,” where Democrats, like Smollett, are never prosecuted for wrongdoings. Kirk used the Smollett story to sow doubt—if Smollett fabricated a hate crime, what else could they lie to you about?—and bolster another debunked conspiracy theory that Adam Schiff changed the whistleblower laws just before the whistleblower filed his complaint.

“Guess what happens when we don’t hold them accountable? What happens is Congressman Adam Schiff then flies his staffer up to Ukraine, changes the whistleblower laws, uses a friend that he has in the CIA, and then do it all over again, just with a different country,” Kirk said. 

Kirk then moved on to other supposed deep state actors. “If [Trump] would’ve won and did the typical Republican thing … maybe the deep state actors would’ve just stayed at bay. But the fact that they’re relentlessly going after him should give you renewal and confidence that this president actually doing what he said he was going to do,” Kirk said.

When Don Trump Jr. walked out onto the stage Friday night following Kirk, he wasted no time in getting to the Smollett story and attacking Schiff and the media.“Adam Schiff is the Jussie Smollett of Congress on steroids,” he said as his girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle, stared at him adoringly from her chair on stage. “And he gets away with it because people in the media protect him.”

“On paper, 2020 should be over, but it’s not, because we’re not in a fair fight,” Trump Jr. said, claiming that “the mainstream media has made a conscious decision to be the marketing team of the opposing party.”

While Trump Jr. didn’t go as far as to call for civil war or double down on the deep state, he didn’t need to. His presence lent legitimacy the conspiracy theories floated all day.  It’s this very type of environment that civil war rhetoric on the right has grown. In early October, it appeared to reach Trump himself, who went as far as toquote Fox News contributor Pastor Robert Jeffress on Twitter saying, “If the Democrats are successful in removing the President from office (which they will never be), it will cause a Civil War like fracture in this Nation from which our Country will never heal.” 

In an upside-down world, where a deep state is conniving to imprison administration officials just doing their jobs, continues to get away with spying and crimes, and stages a coup against a democratically elected president, calling for a civil war doesn’t seem like that big of a leap.

==

https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/bill-barrs-alternate-universe-investigation-has-a-goal-right-wing-authoritarian-rule

no lnx

Bill Barr’s alternate universe ‘investigation’ has a goal: Right-wing authoritarian rule

Written by Heather DigbyParton October 25, 2019

Students of the modern conservative movement often date the recent supercharged radicalization of the Republican Party to the rise of Newt Gingrich and the Republican Revolution in the early 1990s. It’s true that the GOP went seriously off the rails during that period and the craziness has been picking up speed ever since. But in reality, the conservative movement has been radical from its beginnings, starting with the anti-communist crusade after World War II all the way through Goldwater to Reagan, Gingrich and now Trump. Now it has finally shed all trappings of a sophisticated political ideology, culminating in this surreal parody of a presidency in 2019. The conservative “three legged stool” of small government, traditional values and global military leadership has completely disintegrated.

But one aspect of that earlier conservative movement has continued to chug along with its long-term project to transform the U.S. into an undemocratic, quasi-authoritarian plutocracy. That would be the group of far-right lawyers who started the Federalist Society,with the goal of packing the judiciary with true believers, along with a certain group of Reagan-era legal wunderkinds who came to believe that the GOP could dominate the presidency for decades to come. They developed the theory of the “unitary executive,” originally advanced by Reagan’s odious attorney general Ed Meese ( recently awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom)which holds that massive, unaccountable power is vested in the president of the United States.

Attorney General William Barr was one of those lawyers, along with White House counsel Pat Cipollone, former appeals court judge Michael Luttig and others who encouraged Barr to take the job, particularly after his famous memo declaring that what any normal person would see as obstruction of justice doesn’t apply to the president. (In a nutshell, Barr agrees with former President Richard Nixon, who said, “If the president does it, it’s not illegal.”)

Barr is described as supremely confident in his beliefs, which is to say that his overweening arrogance is not an act put on someone who is overcompensating to hide insecurity. He believes in this theory and when it became obvious that former Attorney General Jeff Sessions was not long for the  job, Barr and his legal cabal appear to have seen the clueless and corrupt Donald Trump as a perfect instrument to test their theory, and perhaps set legal precedents that would enable future right-wing presidents to use the full power of the presidency to dominate American politics without regard to democratic norms or congressional checks and balances.Indeed, they had been setting the stage for such a man for decades.

It’s also obviously the case that Barr, and perhaps his Reaganite cronies as well, are suffering from the malady known as Fox News Brain Rot, the symptoms of which are an extreme susceptibility to absurd right-wing conspiracy theories and an inability to believe anything that contradicts them. (Barr once said that there was more evidence for the bogus Uranium One charges than the Russian interference in the 2016 election, which confirms the diagnosis.)

That is the toxic combination of views has the Attorney General of the United States running all over the world seeking evidence to back up a ridiculous conspiracy theory in which Ukraine, the “deep state,” the Intelligence agencies of Italy, the U.K. and Australia, Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee all conspired to frame Russia and Donald Trump in the 2016 election. They call this an investigation into the “origins” of the Russia investigation, which is also being handled by the Department of Justice’s inspector general and special counsel John Durham, appointed by Barr.

Barr’s personal intervention is outside the boundaries of the normal procedures, but that is yet another example of his “unitary executive” theory: He works for the president and the president has the power to assign him to any task, including being an international man of mystery. So far, Barr appears to be coming up goose eggs with the foreign intelligence services. The Wall Street Journal reported that he is “sparking discord in several foreign capitals, going outside usual channels to seek help from allies in reviewing the origins of a U.S. counterintelligence investigation begun during the 2016 presidential campaign.”

On Thursday night the Times set the political world aflame with a report that Durham has officially opened a criminal investigation into the matter.No one is sure what basis there is for this, but reports over the past week or so suggest Durham’s team is focusing intently on the people Donald Trump often rails against in his public statements, including former FBI agent Peter Strzok and possibly high-level intelligence community personnel such as former CIA chief John Brennan and former director of national intelligence James Clapper.

The timing of the story is obviously designed to counter the very bad news coming out of the House impeachment investigation in the House on a daily basis. This isn’t surprising. We’ve been expecting that Senate Judiciary Committee chair Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., would hold parallel hearings into the origins of the Russia investigation, as promised. Graham is now balking because the Senate rules would require that he allow Democratic participation. (The fact that the Senate Intelligence Committee has released two substantial reports on the 2016 election, making clear that they came to the same conclusions as the FBI and the intelligence community regarding Russian interference on Trump’s behalf, also complicates matters for him.)

So Graham has been reduced to introducing a meaningless resolution saying that the House is being unfair, obviously hoping to appease Trump and keep his homegrown followers happy.  According to the Daily Beast, it’s not working. In fact, TrumpWorld wants Graham to call House Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff to testify before Graham’s Senate committee, which would be a serious violation of congressional norms. He seems reluctant for the moment, but who knows what he’ll be willing to do as time goes on?

So for the moment the task of bringing the Fox News alternate-universe conspiracy theory to the mainstream falls to Barr and Durham. They have both reportedly been to Ukraine in recent weeks, presumably searching for that elusive “DNC server” that Trump constantly babbles about.  Maybe they will manage to delight the Trump base by trying to prosecute some FBI and CIA personnel. Barr seems willing to push the boundaries beyond anything we could have imagined, so that’s not as outrageous as it sounds.

The only remedy for this is for Congress to reassert its own prerogatives and impeach the president and, if necessary, his henchmen. If they fail to hold him accountable for the vast abuse of power and corruption of his office, the precedents will be set and the “unitary executive” will become the working model for all Republican presidents, just as Barr intends. The next one will no doubt be more efficient at using it than Donald Trump.

==

https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-deep-state-conspiracy-is-about-to-go-into-overdrive?ref=scroll

Deep State Conspiracy Is About to Go Into Overdrive

by Ronald Radosh

The American right has advanced nutty conspiracy theories for decades. But the one we’re about to see play out will make Joe McCarthy look like an amateur.

no lnx

IT CAN HAPPEN HERE

The Deep State Conspiracy Is About to Go Into Overdrive

The American right has advanced nutty conspiracy theories for decades. But the one we’re about to see play out will make Joe McCarthy look like an amateur.

Ronald Radosh

Updated 10.08.19 5:00AM ET / Published 10.07.19 4:44AM ET

OPINION

For decades the American far right has depended on conspiracy theories to explain why the nation keeps adopting progressive policies of which they disapprove.

Sen. Joseph McCarthy famously argued in 1951 that the World War II hero Gen. George C. Marshall, who had been both Harry Truman’s secretary of state and then secretary of defense, had made decisions that helped the Soviet Communists in their drive to dominate the world. McCarthy did not go as far as branding Marshall a traitor, but he did charge that Marshall—a great war hero who helped lead the planning of D-Day and had been Time Magazine’s Man of the Year in 1943—led “a conspiracy so immense and an infamy so black as to dwarf any previous venture in the history of man.”

Were old Joe McCarthy still with us he would be in awe of the lengths to which Donald Trump and his GOP and “conservative” lackeys have gone to discredit their perceived Democratic enemies. Each day Trump ups the ante by openly seeking the help of foreign governments (Russia, Ukraine and now China) to take action to destroy his main political rival in 2020, former Vice-President Joe Biden.

He has also made it clear what he thinks of those Democrats, especially Rep. Adam Schiff, chair of the House Intelligence Committee, who are daring to begin an impeachment inquiry and to ask all the right questions. The latest nonsense the president has come up with is to argue that it was Ukraine, not Putin’s Russia, that hacked the DNC in 2016—all without any evidence whatsoever indicating that might have happened.

[OATH TAKERS

If Trump Rage Brings ‘Civil War,’ Where Will Soldiers Stand?

Patricia Ravalgi]

Trump is now reactivating and trafficking a theory that started after his election, but that was left to fringe elements on the right and largely ignored. This is the belief that Trump’s opponents, most coming from the camp of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama supporters, and their holdovers still sitting in major government positions in various agencies, are using their positions to slowly undertake a coup d’état, meant to remove from power the legally elected president and destroy his administration.

As the president put it in an Oct.1 tweet, “what is taking place is not an impeachment, it is a COUP,intended to take away the Power of the People, their VOTE, their Freedoms, their Second Amendment, Religion, Military, Border Wall, and their God-given right as a Citizen of the United States of America.” Clearly, he believes that if one favors sane gun restrictions, opposes the border wall and backs a strong separation of church and state, that makes one part of the conspiracy.

This theory began at the start of his presidency, when General Michael Flynn was removed from office by the president. Writing in PJ Media, (a webzine for which I once wrote), Michael Walsh called Flynn’s dismissal “a rolling coup attempt, organized by elements of the intelligence community, particularly CIA and NSA, abetted by Obama-era holdovers in the understaffed Justice Department… and the lickspittles of the leftist media.” The clear intent, Walsh wrote, was to “overturn the results of the November election.”

Others too picked up that argument, but it was still under a cloud, read only by Trumpist true believers who saw it as an explanation for anything Trump was forced to do of which they did not approve. As I wrote earlier in these pages, in June 2018 conspiracy theorist and largely ignored extreme-right writer Jerome Corsi penned an entire book devoted to proving the nature of the “deep state conspiracy to remove Trump from office. He was joined and legitimized to some extent by Trumpist “intellectuals” like Roger Kimball and Victor Davis Hanson, who wrote their own more sophisticated versions of Corsi’s thesis. 

Now, that explanation is again being offered as the best way to show that it’s Trump himself who is the victim of these empowered and deeply embedded “deep state” staffers in the State Department, the CIA and the NSA—and now evidently in the U.S. Foreign Service as well. As David Rhode writes in The New Yorker, “some aides also genuinely believe the conspiracy theories.” Attorney General William Barr is evidently “convinced that there is something nefarious in how the F.B.I. started its investigation, in 2016, of possible ties between Trump campaign aides and Russian officials.”

There is then only one way the right-wing intellectuals of sites like American Greatness, PJ Media and Frontpagemag can continue to support the president. They will argue more vociferously than before that the “deep state” conspiracy is more powerful than ever, and only its dismantling will save America.

In this effort, a new book by journalist Lee Smith, The Plot Against the President: The True Story of how Congressmen Devin Nunes Uncovered the Biggest Political Scandal in the United States,will become its new bible. Unlike Corsi, Smith, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a writer for Tablet magazine, has a sound and well-deserved reputation as an analyst of the Middle East and Iran. In the 2000s, he wrote a book arguing that Osama bin Laden rose from an Arab political culture that was violent by its nature. It was controversial, but it was a serious book.

And now? His new book’s Amazon description delivers Smith’s thesis as follows:

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“While popular opinion holds that Russia subverted democratic processes during the 2016 elections, the real damage was done not by Moscow or any other foreign actor. Rather, this was a slow-moving coup engineered by a coterie of the American elite, the ‘deep state,’ targeting not only the president, but also the rest of the country.”

And Rep. Devin Nunes, the ranking Republican member of the House Intelligence Committee, is the only leader available to save the Trump presidency from destruction.

“Predicting an actual Civil War might be overreacting, but it is precisely what many armed groups on the right are saying.”

Where will this all ultimately lead? If Trump is removed from office by either impeachment or losing the 2020 election, will he refuse to accept the outcome, as he and his cadre say it is illegitimate and the result of the coup carried out by the deep state? Will his actions decimate many government agencies, as he carries out a purge of dedicated staffers, all of whom keep our government functioning, but whom he sees as perpetrators of the coup?

Finally, and most frightening, as Thomas Edsall disclosed in The New York Times, many of his followers are taking seriously the idea of Civil War. He cites the words of Prof. David Leege of Notre Dame University, who believes that Trump could gain the support of troops in the barracks to go into action should the deep state coup take place, and that “his best strategy to keep all levels of the military loyal to him rather than to the Constitution would be to embroil us in a major war.”

Predicting an actual Civil War might be overreacting, but it is precisely what many armed groups on the right are saying. The right-wing cheerleaders in the Fox News-Wall Street Journal-New York Post orbit might be enough to give them encouragement to go ahead, should Trump be impeached or defeated in the 2020 election. It can happen here.

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Pirro says that the CIA is “attempting a coup against the United States president”

10/11/19 9:58 AM EDT

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/the-deep-state-strikes-back-trump-spent-3-years-maligning-career-civil-servants-now-theyre-honorably-exposing-his-corruption/

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mma 919

Right-wing media is also insisting that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) is moving forward with impeachment only because she has caved to the progressive left; that the inquiry is merely political theater by Democrats; and that this is just the latest in a long list of attempts by the Democratic Party, the elite, and the “deep state” to oust a successful president. These talking points are nearly identical to the ones issued by the White House to minimize the gravity of the impeachment inquiry.

On Fox & Friends, Jason Chaffetz insisted that “this is the deep state fighting back against a disruptive, unconventional president who is cleaning out this, this swamp.”

Fox News contributor and Federalist senior editor Mollie Hemingway insisted multiple timesthat the complaint is an effort by the mainstream media and Democrats to destroy Trump, comparing it to the Mueller report.

amazon

Rather than conducting an honest investigation, Mueller’s Special Prosecutors reinforced a prefabricated narrative aiming to charge President Trump with Treason. Silent No More: How I Became a Political Prisoner of Mueller’s "Witch Hunt" exposes the inner workings of this governmental escapade, and clearly states why Mueller has no case against the President. 

Dr. Corsi creates a compelling case indicating that the entire matter is an investigation in search of a crime—to force lying testimony from witnesses if that’s what it takes to achieve Deep State political objectives.

wow no blurbs?

 Reviews

About the Author

Jerome R. Corsi received a Ph.D. from Harvard University in Political Science in 1972. He is an investigative journalist and senior staff writer for several conservative websites. Corsi is coauthor of the No. 1 New York Times bestseller Unfit for Command, and is author of the No. 1 New York Times bestseller The Obama Nation. Since then, he has devoted his time to writing on politics and economics, two fields in which he has considerable experience. In his career, he has written numerous other New York Times bestselling nonfiction books.

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josh b

mma tAg

http://www.rightwingwatch.org/people/josh-bernstein/

radical right-wing commentator Josh Bernstein posted last night in which he said that he is praying to God that Attorney General William Barr will teach “scumbags” like Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, and Andrew McCabe a lesson by putting them to death for actions he baselessly alleges to be treason.

Bernstein was outraged by reports that former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort is set to be transferred to New York’s Rikers Island prison facility and responded by once again demanding the execution of supposed members of the so-called “deep state.”

“I’m so, so sick of this double standard B.S., two-tier justice system,” Bernstein fumed. “I hope to God and I pray to God that William Barr does the right thing and puts these ever-loving pieces of crap, deviant, scumbag you-know-whats where they belong.”

“Let’s fry these bastards,” he added. “Let’s get out Old Sparky and sit each one down. Boom, there you go. Who’s next? Boom. Page, you’re next. OK, Strzok, you’re next. McCabe, you’re next. I don’t care … These scumbags—and that’s what they are—need to be taught a lesson.”

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// qanon?

on Fox Business, Corey Lewandowski claims "in March or April of next year, James Comey, Andy McCabe, Strzok and Paige will be on trial for the crimes they committed"

mma

• NOVEMBER 15, 2018 2:05 PM

Corey Lewandowski and Alex Marlow Demand to be Taken Seriously on This ‘Deep State’ Stuff

• corey Lewandowski, a former campaign manager for President Donald Trump turned media talking head, and Breitbart Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow can’t understand why people write off their ramblings about the “deep state.”Lewandowski joined Marlow on yesterday’s edition of Breitbart News Daily on SirusXM to promote a new book he’s written about his theory that a secret shadow government is trying to undermine the Trump administration. Trump supporters have blamed the “deep state” for every thinkable hurdle the Trump administration faces in the eyes of the American public.

Marlow noted to Lewandowski that the term “deep state” was “a phrase that was not very popular” before Trump took office, despite it being “so right-on.” Lewandowski complimented Marlow and Breitbart, who, Lewandowski said, constantly “remind people that the deep state is very real.”

Lewandowski went on to accuse non-political government workers who were hired during the Obama administration and continue to work in the government of “doing everything they can possibly do to subvert the president’s agenda” because “they don’t want to see him be successful.” He goes on to chide Gary Cohn, who allegedly removed a letter from Trump’s desk, for exploiting the president’s apparent lack of object permanence to prevent him from pulling out of a trade agreement.

“The deep state is very real,” Lewandowski said.

“It is very real and to me, Corey, it’s so logical that it would be the case,” Marlow said. “It’s fully logical that there would be a deep state and of course government and bureaucratic employees are going to more likely be Democrat globalists and they’re going to hate a guy like Donald Trump.”

Marlow asked, “Why would folks like you and I be dismissed for talking this way?”

We wonder.

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• NOVEMBER 15, 2018 2:05 PM

Corey Lewandowski and Alex Marlow Demand to be Taken Seriously on This ‘Deep State’ Stuff

• corey Lewandowski, a former campaign manager for President Donald Trump turned media talking head, and Breitbart Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow can’t understand why people write off their ramblings about the “deep state.”Lewandowski joined Marlow on yesterday’s edition of Breitbart News Daily on SirusXM to promote a new book he’s written about his theory that a secret shadow government is trying to undermine the Trump administration. Trump supporters have blamed the “deep state” for every thinkable hurdle the Trump administration faces in the eyes of the American public.

Marlow noted to Lewandowski that the term “deep state” was “a phrase that was not very popular” before Trump took office, despite it being “so right-on.” Lewandowski complimented Marlow and Breitbart, who, Lewandowski said, constantly “remind people that the deep state is very real.”

Lewandowski went on to accuse non-political government workers who were hired during the Obama administration and continue to work in the government of “doing everything they can possibly do to subvert the president’s agenda” because “they don’t want to see him be successful.” He goes on to chide Gary Cohn, who allegedly removed a letter from Trump’s desk, for exploiting the president’s apparent lack of object permanence to prevent him from pulling out of a trade agreement.

“The deep state is very real,” Lewandowski said.

“It is very real and to me, Corey, it’s so logical that it would be the case,” Marlow said. “It’s fully logical that there would be a deep state and of course government and bureaucratic employees are going to more likely be Democrat globalists and they’re going to hate a guy like Donald Trump.”

Marlow asked, “Why would folks like you and I be dismissed for talking this way?”

We wonder.

• NOVEMBER 8, 2018 3:21 PM

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• NOVEMBER 2, 2018 12:32 PM

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• NOVEMBER 1, 2018 5:45 PM

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• NOVEMBER 1, 2018 5:29 PM

Fly Unzipped, Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl Make Laughable Smear Claims Against Mueller

• OCTOBER 30, 2018 4:40 PM

Mueller Accuser Jack Burkman Promoted Baseless Conspiracy Theories, Accused Chief Justice Roberts of Using Opioids

• OCTOBER 24, 2018 12:00 PM

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• OCTOBER 12, 2018 1:30 PM

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• OCTOBER 10, 2018 3:57 PM

Michael Savage: Kavanaugh Opposition Proof of Communist Revolution in America

• OCTOBER 5, 2018 2:28 PM

Donald Trump Channels Anti-Semitic Conspiracy Theory to Explain Kavanaugh Opposition

primary

Trump adoring Republican learned the following.

• There is a deep state, unelected bureaucrats that they must extricate.
• Disregard the mainstream media. Illegal immigrants continue to rush the border. [LIE]
• California is running a massive deficit. [LIE]
• They won't cut Social Security for old folks, but migration to privatization for the future is their policy [2008 anybody?]
• They will uphold the second amendment at all cost.

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