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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:

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:

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

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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Anatomy of a Smear: How Trump’s Ukraine Conspiracy Got Going]

“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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