WARNING 🚨 The Final Showdown -Trump, Bush Family ,Nixon, And The Deep State

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.”

18 Huge Numbers Show That The US Economy Is Starting To Fall Apart Very Rapidly

Virtually every piece of hard economic data is telling us that the U.S. economy is slowing down dramatically. Here are several of the latest examples…Virtually every piece of hard economic data is telling us that the U.S. economy is slowing down dramatically.  Many of the pundits have been warning that we could officially enter recession territory later this year or next year, but these numbers seem to indicate that it could happen a whole lot sooner than that.  But the stock market has been surging over the last two months, and at this point stocks are off to their best start to a year since 1987, and as long as stock prices are rising a lot of people are simply not going to pay much attention to the economic alarm bells that are ringing.  But everyone should be paying attention, because things are really starting to get bad out there.  The following are 18 really big numbers that show that the U.S. economy is starting to fall apart very rapidly…

#1 Farm loan delinquencies just hit the highest level that we have seen in 9 years.

#2 We just learned that U.S. exports declined by 4 billion dollars during the month of December.

#3 J.C. Penney just announced that they will be closing another 24 stores.

#4 Victoria’s Secret has just announced plans to close 53 stores.

#5 On Thursday, Gap announced that it will be closing 230 stores over the next two years.

#6 Payless ShoeSource has declared bankruptcy and is closing all 2,100 stores.

#7 Tesla is also closing all of their physical sales locations and will now only sell vehicles online.

#8 PepsiCo has started laying off workers and has committed to “millions of dollars in severance pay”.

#9 The Baltic Dry Index has dropped to the lowest level in more than two years.

#10 This is the worst slump for core U.S. factory orders in three years.

#11 We just witnessed the largest decline in the Philly Fed Business Index in more than 7 years.

#12 In January, sales of existing homes fell 8.9 percent from a year earlier.  That was the third month in a row that we have seen a decline of at least 8 percent.  This is an absolutely catastrophic trend for the real estate industry.

#13 U.S. housing starts were down 11.2 percent in December compared to the previous month.

#14 Compared to a year earlier, home sales in southern California were down 17 percent in January.

#15 In December, home sales in Sacramento County fell a whopping 22.5 percent compared to a year earlier.

#16 Pending home sales in the United States have now fallen on a year over year basis for 13 months in a row.

#17 More than 166 billion dollars in student loan debt is now “seriously delinquent”.  That is an all-time record.

#18 More than 7 million Americans are behind on their auto loan payments.  That is also a new all-time record, and it is far higher than anything that we witnessed during the last recession.

It appears that “the recovery” has finally come to an end.  After seeing all of those numbers, there is no way that anyone can possibly claim that economic conditions are “getting better”.

And even though the official government numbers are highly manipulated, we never even had one “boom year” throughout the entire “recovery”.

The final numbers for 2018 are now in, and last year was the 13th year in a rowwhen U.S. GDP growth was below 3 percent.

The last time we had a “boom year” when economic growth was above 3 percent was all the way back in 2005.  That was in the middle of the Bush administration.

We have never seen a bad streak like this before in modern American history.  The following comes from CNS News…

But prior to the current 13-year period when real GDP has failed to grow by 3.0 percent in any year, there has been no stretch (in the years since 1930) when the United States went as long as five straight years with real GDP failing to grow by at least 3 percent.

Even though the Federal Reserve pumped trillions of dollars into the financial system over the last decade, and even though we added nearly 12 trillion dollars to the national debt, the best that the authorities have been able to do is to stabilize the system for a while.  Now it is starting to sputter once again, and many believe that the next crisis will be far worse than the last one.

By contrast, the Great Depression of the 1930s featured some really bad years, but following those bad years the U.S. experienced a tremendous economic boom…

By contrast, after the stock market crash in 1929, the United States saw four years of negative annual GDP—1930 (-8.5), 1931 (-6.4), 1932 (-12.9) and 1933 (-1.2). But then in the nine full years from 1934 through 1942, real GDP grew by an average of 9.75 percent.

We should have had some boom years too, but we didn’t, and now things are going to get bad again.

The Democrats are going to blame the Republicans and the Republicans are going to blame the Democrats, but all of that arguing isn’t going to solve anything.

What is coming next has been a central focus of my work for a very long time.  The last recession was very painful, but it did not fundamentally alter life in America.

This next crisis will.

The “Everything Bubble” is bursting, the “Perfect Storm” is coming, and all of our lives will never be the same again.

But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t hope.  In fact, once things really start getting crazy hope is going to be one of the major themes in my work because people are really going to need it.

There will be great challenges, and life will be very different, but that doesn’t mean that life is over.

America is about to experience the consequences of decades of exceedingly foolish decisions, and the pain will be extreme.  But difficult times also offer an opportunity for dramatic change, and that is something that we will need to embrace.