Is George W.
Bush part of a "deep state" conspiracy against Donald Trump?
The
Bush family did not make it’s fortune on oil but through banking. Prescott
Bush, deceased and a former Senator from Connecticut, ran USB in the 1930s. USB
was a US bank closely associated with Hilter and at the advent of war the US
government seized the assets of the bank, though those assets were returned
after the war.
The
Bush family has been associated with Nazis, Planned Parenthood, the King of
Saudi Arabia, the Bin Ladens, the New World Order and 911. George H.W. Bush was
a former CIA operative and director of the CIA. Stefan Helper, just recently
involved with Carter Page, the FBI, etc. as an “informant” is a long time Bush
operative going back to the 1980s, maybe the 70s. He also had ties to the CIA.
There
are several Trump administration officials with strong ties to the Bush family.
Bush family associates are up to their eyeballs in the Council of Foreign
Relations. And even Charles Schumer, the Democrat leader and Senator from New
York has commented on the deep state.
People
who work for the government in Washington DC know each other. Their kids play
Little League together and it is not uncommon for an official in the
Agriculture Department to have a brother-in-law at Commerce and the like. There
are people in different parts of government that are lovers. It is clear that
Andrew McCabe (FBI), Peter Strzok (FBI) and Lisa Page (DOJ) discussed the
possibility of a Trump presidency and mentioned an insurance policy whatever that
was to be.
While
there are many people at DOJ and the FBI trying to limit the public relations
damage, it is clear that there are members of Congress and DJT himself that are
outraged that this conduct exists in the Federal government especially the DOJ.
Wiki defines the deep state: “In the US the term "deep state"
is used by political scientists to describe influential decision-making bodies
believed to be within government who are relatively permanent and whose
policies and long-term plans are unaffected by changing administrations.” Then
there are the think tanks which have the potential to undermine the government
at will, much more dangerous than lobbyists. Then there is the media, it was
known in the 1960s that many members of the media were paid by the CIA. It is
my opinion this practice is carried on in today’s media.
James
Wolfe appears to be a partisan long-term employee, a security director of a
Senate Intelligence Committee. Washington DC does not like its apple cart over
turned. They don’t like being called the “deep state”. They don’t like being
called “the swamp”. And, they don’t like an outsider like Donald Trump calling
them out on it. What ever you call it: there are people in government that have
never been elected by the people, they wield a lot of power because of their
anonymity, they are dangerous, they are long-term political hacks with an
agenda and an axe to grind that do not serve the best interests of this
country.
Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely and anonymous
power is invisible; truly a danger to our democracy. The CIA, NSA and the FBI
aren’t there to protect us from a foreign adversary but to protect this country
from whatever “whacky” ideas the man in the White House wants to implement,
like border security, a robust economy, low unemployment, stuff like that. And
they will do everything possible to stop him.
Trump, Nixon, and the Deep State
“ Is there a deep state in the
United States?” asked George Beebe in a recent essay. Yes, the former
chief of Russia analysis at CIA concluded, if the definition of “deep state”
holds that elements of the national security apparatus possess “the capability,
albeit not the legal authority, to abuse intelligence to alter the outcomes of
national elections or distort public-policy debates.”
Curbing
the power of this shadowy group, Beebe suggested, could be accomplished through
robust congressional oversight. Yet, in the minds of most analysts inclined to
afford the question any serious thought, the Deep State is usually considered
immune to the incursions of oversight committees. The group’s members are
thought to enjoy the same power over elected officials that blackjack dealers
hold over casino visitors: The house always wins.
Does
that Deep State exist?
A
logical preliminary question, posed with the same zoological dispassion we
would reserve for contemplation of any elusive species, such as the Loch Ness
Monster, would first inquire whether such a beast has ever been documented to
exist. After all, anyone affirming the existence, let alone the primacy, of the
Deep State in Trump-era Washington would presumably concede the impossibility
of such fearsome power amassing overnight, or in swift reaction to the
ascendancy of a specific political actor deemed an intolerable threat. Would it
be a creature solely of our time, the age of Big Data, or was there a Deep
State before computers were widely used?
One
elected official who could have been forgiven for believing as much was former
President Richard Nixon. While the 37th president effectively admitted to David
Frost that he obstructed justice in a Watergate coverup, the academic
scholarship published since 1977 has documented in exhaustive detail how the
critical wings of the Nixon White House, the National Security Council, the
covert operations unit dubbed “the Plumbers,” and Nixon’s campaign arm, the
Committee for the Re-Election of the President, were all infiltrated by rival
power centers in the capital and exploited for intelligence. The people
burrowing in came from the military, the intelligence community, and the news
media (reports that the Soviet Union also placed moles in the Nixon White House
have not been confirmed).
Accordingly,
no national election has so directly had its outcome “altered,” in Beebe’s
genteel formulation, as the presidential contest of Nov. 7, 1972. The
incumbent, Richard Nixon, appearing on the national ticket for the fifth time,
a feat equaled only by Franklin Roosevelt, won reelection with a 49-state
landslide, yet was forced to resign the presidency less than two years later
and was spared criminal prosecution only by Proclamation 4311. Issued by
successor Gerald R. Ford, that document pardoned Nixon for all crimes he
“committed or may have committed” in the White House.
Sen.
Howard Baker, R-Tenn., the ranking Republican on the Senate Watergate committee
and later President Ronald Reagan’s chief of staff, never spoke explicitly of a
Deep State. But he alluded to it once, in suitably cryptic terms. Reeling from
his discovery that the Pentagon had spied on Nixon, and struggling to grasp the
large role of the Central Intelligence Agency in Watergate, Baker said: “There
are elephants crashing around in the forest.”
* * *
The
Joint Chiefs of Staff had been increasingly frustrated by strains with civilian
superiors over the conduct of the Vietnam War, and these deepened as American
military involvement increased. Because of these frustrations, the top military
brass developed an apparatus to help them stay informed during President Lyndon
Johnson’s secretive decision-making process.
The
instrument the military men used was the JCS-NSC liaison office, housed in the
Executive Office Building and run by a pair of admirals. The late Melvin Laird,
the longtime Wisconsin representative selected by Nixon to run the Pentagon,
told me in a 1997 interview that before becoming defense secretary in January
1969, he had observed the chiefs building what was, in literal terms, a covert
intelligence capability against the White House.
“The
Johnson administration had had such a problem there, and I knew about it,”
Laird told me. “I don’t think [defense secretaries] Clark Clifford or [Robert]
McNamara really realized it, but I knew what they were doing. … So early on, I
said [to Nixon’s aides], ‘You better watch that very carefully.’”
The
warning was well-founded. By December 1971, the White House Special
Investigations Group, a covert unit called the "Plumbers" formed to
plug leaks of classified material to the news media, had uncovered the
activities of Navy Yeoman Charles Radford, a stenographer and courier detailed
to the JCS-NSC liaison office. After intensive polygraph examination, Radford
admitted to having stolen some 5,000 classified documents in 1970-71 from White
House National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger and his aides. He'd even rifled
through Kissinger’s briefcase while he slept on his official airplane. Radford
admitted having passed top-secret documents, via the liaison office, to Joint
Chiefs Chairman Adm. Thomas Moorer.
The
“Moorer-Radford affair,” as scholars later dubbed it, ranks among the most
serious constitutional crises of the Cold War. For 13 months in wartime, the
nation’s top uniformed commanders presided over a spy ring targeting the
commander in chief and his national security adviser. As I detailed in a 2002
article for The Atlantic, based on my access to previously unheard tapes of
Nixon’s meetings and telephone calls at this critical juncture, the president
wanted to prosecute Moorer for “espionage,” but was steered toward a quieter
response by Attorney General John Mitchell.
The
latter had been Nixon’s law partner and campaign manager in 1968, and was the
president’s closest confidant in government. As attorney general, Mitchell
became the face of “law and order” in Nixon’s America, a reviled figure among
the drug lords, revolutionaries, and domestic terrorists of the late '60s.
Along with his wife, Martha, best known for phoning reporters late at night
when drunk, Mitchell received so many death threats that they became the first
Cabinet couple to receive round-the-clock FBI protection.
J. Edgar
Hoover, the aging FBI Director, who'd spent decades amassing blackmail against
his bosses and others in official Washington, seized the opportunity to spy on
the attorney general, who was his nominal boss. The FBI agents who drove the
Mitchells around installed burglar alarms in their plush duplex in Watergate
East, and otherwise ministered to their needs, and typed up every word the
Mitchells uttered in their presence. These dispatches were forwarded up the
chain to Hoover himself, who scrawled instructions and catty notes in the
margins, capped with his trademark “H.” Such intimate surveillance of an
attorney general, Nixon’s most trusted adviser, was unprecedented. I uncovered
it when I used the Freedom of Information Act to gain access to the Mitchells’
FBI files, published for the first time in my 2008 biography of the attorney
general.
The
Central Intelligence Agency also trained its resources on the Nixon White
House. By the time the Plumbers became operational in June 1971, and
burglarizing the Los Angeles office of the psychiatrist to Daniel Ellsberg, the
former Defense Department analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New
York Times, the agency had installed a longtime officer with a history in
covert operations, E. Howard Hunt, on the team. Langley’s own NSC liaison, an
officer named Rob Roy Ratliff, swore in a 1974 affidavit that Hunt, ostensibly
retired from the CIA and working as a consultant in the White House, was
regularly using secure couriers to send sealed pouches back to CIA Director
Richard Helms, continuing right up until shortly before the Watergate arrests. Sources
told investigative reporter Jim Hougan, author of Secret Agenda(1984),
that the pouches contained sexual “gossip” about White House officials.
When the
Watergate arrests occurred in the predawn hours of June 17, 1972, touching off
the great scandal that would topple Nixon, among the Cubans in the break-in
team fielded by the Committee for the Re-Election of the President was Eugenio
Martinez. He was the only one of the Watergate burglars on the CIA payroll. For
months, Martinez had been sending his case officer reports on the team’s
activities; uniquely among the burglars, he carried on his person at the time
of the arrests a key to the desk in the Democratic National Committee
headquarters that was the true target of the ill-fated break-in. So highly prized
an asset was the sinewy Bay of Pigs veteran that CIA’s top lawyer adamantly
rebuffed a request from lawyers on the Watergate Special Prosecution Force by
saying: “Under no circumstances would the Agency give up all records relating
to the Agency’s relationship with Martinez.”
Nor was
that all Langley did to keep tabs on Nixon. Secret Agenda reported
that the agency was aggressively “lending” technicians to the Secret Service
unit that managed the president’s taping system. One of the technicians told
Hougan: “I don’t know what they were up to, but the fact of the matter is you
had these guys from [CIA’s] Office of Security working in the White House under
Secret Service cover.” Indeed, the CIA’s inspector general reported in 1975,
after Nixon had resigned, that CIA agents had been placed in “intimate
components of the Office of the President.”
The
Joint Chiefs, the FBI, the CIA: There are few more powerful institutions in
Washington; all three were systematically spying on the Nixon White House and
campaign committee during the president’s first term. This, aside from sounding
an awful lot like a Deep State, has not received the attention it deserves from
historians, political scientists, and other students of Watergate and the
modern presidency. The problem of subversion from within the FBI would grow
with the predations of Mark Felt, the No. 2 FBI official whose leaks during
Watergate to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post earned him
the nickname “Deep Throat.”
Why
would these institutions have wanted to spy on Nixon? Mitchell had a theory. As
he told Len Colodny, co-author of Silent Coup (1991): “It was
his [Nixon’s] personality and his mode of operation that did him in.”
The
Joint Chiefs rebelled at the secrecy with which Nixon and Kissinger, even worse
than LBJ and McNamara, excluded the Pentagon from war policymaking. At CIA, the
formation of the Plumbers triggered a predictable response. For the nation’s
premier spy agency to allow this new White House covert operations unit to operate
unchecked, to stand by while the squad staged break-ins and surveillance
operations on sensitive targets, would have violated all principles of
bureaucratic behavior, and of the spy game in particular.
And for
Hoover and the FBI, the chance to spy on the Mitchells was a simple target of
opportunity.
* * *
Yet,
there was more to Hoover’s decision than opportunism, and here, we find a
striking similarity with the Trump era.
During
the 1968 campaign, Nixon and Mitchell quietly used a diplomatic backchannel to
encourage the South Vietnamese government to withhold concessions at the Paris
peace talks then underway to end the Vietnam War. The Nixon campaign feared
that the Democratic nominee, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, would benefit from
a last-minute bombing halt or peace announcement by LBJ, and wanted to avert
such developments by persuading Saigon that its interests would be better
served under a Nixon presidency.
The
conduit the Nixon campaign used was Anna Chennault, a glamorous member of the
capital’s “China lobby” with contacts in Saigon. Her conversations with those
contacts were swiftly detected under foreign surveillance maintained by the FBI
and CIA. And from this episode, which scholars have called the “Chennault
affair,” selected elements of the intelligence community, the Deep State of
1969, concluded that even by the loose norms of their profession, Nixon and
Mitchell were men who needed to be watched.
Top
officials of the Nixon campaign team told me decades later that Chennault was
an over-the-transom type with little influence in Washington or Southeast Asia
and that, in any event, the South Vietnamese government needed little prodding
from Nixon and Mitchell to recognize that the Paris talks would disadvantage
Saigon. But the men in power at the time viewed the matter differently.
McNamara
told me he considered the Chennault affair a bona fide “October Surprise,” a
crime: specifically, a violation of the Logan Act, which forbids private
citizens from interfering with U.S. foreign policy.
While
two years of investigation by the FBI and special counsel Robert Mueller have
yet to establish any evidence of active collusion between the Trump campaign
and the Kremlin, allegations of such machinations circulated widely during the
2016 election season and undeniably produced, within some precincts of the
intelligence community, a deep and irremediable mistrust of the man who would
become the next president. The evidence of this is preserved in, among other
places, the 10,000 text messages exchanged between FBI agents Peter Strzok and
Lisa Page, thick with contempt for the brash New York billionaire and alluding
to an “insurance policy” in the event that he somehow won the election.
It is
now clear that there was at least sloppiness and, more likely, abuse of process
in the FBI's application to the FISA court to eavesdrop on Carter Page, a
low-level conduit into communications by the Trump election campaign. This is
confirmed not simply by the memo prepared by Rep. Devin Nunes, chairman of the
House Intelligence Committee, but also unintentionally by the panel's senior
Democrat, Rep. Adam Schiff, in his would-be rebuttal. It was additionally
underscored by a letter written by Sens. Chuck Grassley and Lindsey Graham
suggesting a criminal investigation of Christopher Steele, author of the
Trump-Russia dossier.
The FBI
did not tell the court that the dossier was a piece of opposition research for
Hillary Clinton's campaign against Trump, emphasized Steele's reliability even
though the bureau had already fired him for lying, and had failed to interview
Page about his Russia connections even though he had proved a reliable FBI
witness three years earlier.
It is
not certain that this is hostile action by the Deep State against Trump, but it
smells like it, and nothing that has yet become public makes it clear that such
a suspicion is baseless. And, of course, we know that the Deep State has been
around working covertly in the political arena for half a century.
The mere
existence of a special counsel provides another similarity with the Watergate
era, of course, but it doesn’t end there. The expulsion of Strzok from the
Mueller team, once his texts were discovered, hardly dispelled fears of
anti-Trump bias within the Office of the Special Counsel. Andrew Weissman, a
top Justice Department prosecutor under Mueller, was revealed to have sent an
email praising a fellow DOJ official for refusing to implement President
Trump’s travel ban. In the political donations made by Mueller’s staff lawyers,
federal filings show, more than $62,000 went to Democrats, only $2,750 to
Republicans.
Nixon
would have understood. Seven of the top eight lawyers on the Watergate Special
Prosecution Force had served under Robert Kennedy at the Justice Department. In
the early 2000s, again using FOIA, I became the first researcher to mine the
WSPF's 10,000-page archive: 10,000 pages in all. And while those papers did not
contain the kind of sophomoric invective for the incumbent that would later
characterize the Strzok/Page texts, the WSPF archive captured the prejudicial
bias the Watergate special prosecutors harbored toward their prey.
Time and
again, with the same casualness and IBM-Selectric font that the Watergate
conspirators used in their own incriminating memos, the WSPF staff lawyers could
be seen scheming to withhold material exculpatory to the Watergate defendants,
falsifying evidence against them, and deceiving their jurors at trial. In 2015,
Geoff Shepard, a former Nixon White House attorney, published The Real
Watergate Conspiracy (2015). The book featured previously unpublished
memoranda that chronicled, in real time, a series of flagrantly illegal ex
parte meetings held by the presiding judge in the Watergate trials, John J.
Sirica, with WSPF lawyers. Shepard’s archival discoveries led even liberal law
professors to express concern for due process in the treatment of Nixon and his
men.
* * *
The
notion that presidents can find themselves isolated, not only from the public
and the press, but from large and important segments of their own
bureaucracies, including the Pentagon and the intelligence community, remained
a concern long after the Nixon era.
In
November 1995, then-Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., the chairman of the Intelligence
Committee, made a shocking disclosure that is all but forgotten today. “From
1986 to 1994,” the New York Times reported, “the Central Intelligence Agency
passed on to presidents and Pentagon officials a total of ninety-five reports
from foreign agents whom it knew or strongly suspected were controlled by Moscow.
... In no case were Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush or President-elect
Clinton warned that the information came from known or suspected Soviet double
agents. ... Even when the agency was all but certain that the source was a
double agent, it kept passing on the reports without warning.” The Chicago
Tribune headline read: WHITE HOUSE FED FLAWED DATA BY CIA.
In 2005,
while covering the George W. Bush White House for Fox News and working on my
Watergate book, I told a top presidential aide, who is still influential in
politics today, about my research on the Moorer-Radford affair, confiding my
astonishment that the Joint Chiefs of Staff had systematically spied on the
president and his national security adviser in wartime. “I wouldn’t be surprised,”
the official muttered, “if the same thing were happening now.”
As Trump
surveys the political landscape of 2018, he too can be forgiven for imagining
that the Deep State, or something like it, exists. Like Richard Nixon, our 45th
president took the oath of office keenly aware that influential figures in the
military and intelligence communities deeply distrusted him as an accused
colluder with a foreign power, as someone who was not “one of us,” and as a man
many said was psychologically unfit for the presidency, whatever voters
thought. Both saw their inaugurations marred by rioting. Both would stand
eternally accused, whatever the evidence, of capturing the presidency through
collusion with a foreign power, and thus be stripped, by media elites that despised
them, of all legitimacy. And like Nixon, Trump has been subjected, from the
inception of his presidency, to unprecedented leaks of classified material to
those elites.
In all
this, with the various Russia investigations still unresolved, their ultimate
discoveries and outcomes unknown, Trump would do well to internalize the
central lesson of Watergate, and perhaps thereby avoid some of the many
self-inflicted wounds that Nixon committed during his own death throes against
entrenched forces. This lesson Nixon articulated in the final minutes of his
presidency, in the maudlin and meandering farewell address he delivered to the
White House staff in the East Room on Aug. 9, 1974, shortly before boarding the
helicopter that whisked him away from power.
“Always
remember,” he said, “others may hate you, but those who hate you don’t win
unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.”
Michelle Malkin: Bush Legacy
‘Impoverishes the American Worker’ and ‘Grows the Deep State’
Michelle Malkin described former President George H. W. Bush’s
legacy as an impoverishment of American workers and growing of the “deep
state,” offering her remarks in a Monday interview with Breitbart Senior
Editors-at-Large Rebecca Mansour and Joel Pollak on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Tonight.
Mansour said,
“It seems as if the media is
already using [George H.W. Bush’s] passing as a means to bash President
Trump, just as they did with the funeral of John McCain. … What lessons do you think
Trump could learn from Bush 41?”
Malkin replied, “There are not
many I can think of that I might frame in a positive way, and I absolutely
agree with you that we’ve seen from the senility mongers of the left the usual
vulgar [and] vile behavior. Is there a dead Republican body that the
Democrats and the left won’t use to go after Trump? I don’t think so.”
Malkin
continued, “The
lesson of the Bush regime and the Bush dynasty is something that impoverishes
the American worker. It grows the deep state at the expense of small businesses
and liberty, and even though the grocery
scanner story turned
out to be fake news, as Dan Rather once said in defense of his fake news, ‘It
was fake but accurate.'”
Malkin added, “The elitism of
the Bush wing of the [Republican] party is what Trump defeated, and I think
[Donald Trump] has to remember that’s why he’s in the office — because of the
adamant rejection of that attitude and those policies. I’m distressed that
once again, we have these open borders amnesty Bush Republican Party-type
business as usual tactics in dealing with the border wall funding. They’re
going to wait ’til the Friday before Christmas? This is disgraceful.”
Malkin reflected on YouTube’s
censorship of a 2006 video she produced critiquing
Islamic terrorism while discussing broader political censorship technology
companies such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter imposed.
“I first established [my]
website in 1998 and 1999, and I think one of the smartest moves I ever made was
maintaining my independent eponymous site because I think it really
represents the spirit of the best of what citizen journalism and the
blogosphere is about,” said Malkin. “Especially with all the crackdowns that
are occurring and that Breitbart especially has been covering so well, we’ve
all lived this: the banning, the shadowbanning, the censorship. For me, it goes
back to 2006 when one of my earliest videos critiquing jihad — a tiny
little two-minute homemade video I put together called ‘First They Came’ — was
yanked by YouTube as ‘hate speech.’ That was 2006. In so many ways, so little
has changed, but I wonder: Glenn Reynolds — one of the early godfathers of the
blogosphere — quit Twitter last week in the wake of some of the latest
suppression of conservative and independent voices. I wonder if there’s an
opportunity for a renaissance, back to the golden era of conservative blogging
in the blogosphere, if people are just tired of the easy click-bait and shallow
coverage. Maybe people want to read things again, so I’ve always got my blog.”
After Mansour described Malkin
as “one of the godmothers of new conservative media,” Malkin heralded her
relationship with Breitbart News: “The other part of that ethos is the sense of
camaraderie that so many independent sites have, and that’s why in large part,
after all of these years, I still appreciate the friendship and alliance that I
have with you all at Breitbart. it goes back. It’s O.G.”
Earlier on Monday, Malkin announced her departure from CRTV, headed by Mark
Levin, following the news media outlet’s declared forthcoming merger with Glenn
Beck’s The Blaze.
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