This article is intended as a response to a piece written recently by retired CIA officer Theodore J. Singer entitled “The U.S. Doesn’t Have a Deep State. It Never Should.” I wish I didn’t have to write this. I know Ted. We went through training together at “The Farm,” and although we have not seen each other in many years I still consider him a friend. The fact is, though, he is wrong. There is a Deep State, and if we do not rein it in, our republic will go the way of that of Rome.
One of the cardinal principles of intelligence work is that you tell truth to power. You do not involve yourself in policy making. You do not shade your analysis. You find the truth as best you can in a maze of mirrors and you communicate that to the public servants the people elected. It is their job to decide what to do next.
If you don’t agree with the decisions of the elected officials, you search your soul and decide what to do next. If you really can’t live with the policy as it is, you resign. If you feel strongly enough about the need for change you run for office yourself.
If you do anything else, you are lost. We are lost. We are no longer ruled by our elected representatives. We are ruled by unelected officials who have decided they know best what we as a nation should do.
We crossed that Rubicon a long time ago.
On September 11, 2012, two American compounds in the Libyan city of Benghazi were attacked. This attack was launched by an Islamic militia with a history of attacks on Western targets. One of the compounds, occupied by the Department of State, was overrun. The American ambassador to Libya was killed.
The other compound was occupied by CIA. The personnel there held out long enough for an ad hoc relief force from the embassy in Tripoli to arrive and for the CIA personnel to be evacuated. No American military relief force was sent by the Obama administration.
Throughout the attacks on the compounds, a continuous stream of reporting was sent to Washington from the field. All of that reporting told the same story. An assault had been launched on two American compounds by a heavily armed Islamic terrorist group.
Nevertheless, in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, the Obama administration began to peddle the story in Washington that a peaceful demonstration in Benghazi had simply gotten out of hand. This was not an act of terrorism. It was regrettable but nothing more.
The backlash against this transparent lie was immediate. The Obama administration came under scathing criticism. Then Mike Morell stepped in.
Morell was at the time the acting Director of Central Intelligence. He said CIA was at fault. Analysts at CIA headquarters had prepared an assessment claiming there had been a demonstration, and he had passed it on to the White House. Obama and company were blameless. CIA had given them bad intel.
This is and was always absurd. Analysts at CIA headquarters do not review a mountain of reporting about ongoing attacks using heavy machineguns, mortars, and rocket-propelled grenades and then write up an assessment saying, “We think they meant for this to be peaceful.” Of note, no such written piece of analysis has ever been produced.
Morell stepped forward, in his role as Director of Central Intelligence, to take a bullet for Barack Obama. He covered for a blatant lie and injected himself into a domestic political dispute. He did so to protect the sitting Democrat President from political fallout.
How many senior officers at CIA knew that Morell was lying? How many spoke up or resigned?
In the runup to the 2016 Presidential election individuals within Hillary Clinton’s campaign concocted the idea of smearing Donald Trump with false accusations of colluding with Russia. Based on a dossier filled with lies, gossip, and innuendo they fed this fairy tale to federal law enforcement and intelligence officials. When they failed to stop Trump from being elected, they then turned this effort into one aimed at destabilizing the Trump presidency and hopefully removing Trump from office.
The FBI investigation into these absurd allegations was known as Crossfire Hurricane. It was a sham from beginning to end. There was never any credible evidence to suggest Trump was colluding with Russia, and yet this witch hunt went on month after month with the obvious purpose of smearing Trump, making it impossible for him to govern, and, hopefully, driving him from office.
None of this happened without the help of CIA. The extensive investigation of what transpired during Crossfire Hurricane has shown that American intelligence reached out to and involved in the plot several allied intelligence services, most notably the British.
John Brennan, then CIA Director, not only had to know about Crossfire Hurricane and its purpose, he had to approve for any of this to happen. When Brennan stepped down as head of CIA he was replaced by Gina Haspel. She was the Chief of Station in London throughout Crossfire Hurricane and would have had to have been directly involved in all of the interaction with the British services that was part of this plot.
We should also note that when news of Hunter Biden’s laptop from hell threatened to derail Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign for the White House, 51 former intelligence officers came forward and signed on to a now infamous letter branding the laptop as a fake and the product of Russian disinformation. I have seen the contents of Hunter’s laptop. I can assure you it was immediately obvious in looking at the laptop’s contents that it was real and that it suggested strongly that Joe Biden himself was compromised by a number of foreign actors. Chief amongst those would be the Chinese Communist Party.
Five former Directors or acting Directors of CIA were among the 51 signatories to this letter, whose clear purpose was to bury the contents of the laptop and get Joe Biden elected. Both Mike Morell and John Brennan were among those five.
The efforts to undermine the first Trump administration and to bury the laptop did not end there by any means. The FBI knew almost immediately Hunter’s laptop was real because they had access to the cloud backup of the device. The FBI verified its authenticity in November of 2019 by matching the device number against Hunter Biden’s Apple iCloud ID. They sat on that fact. They also knew all about Hunter’s contacts with Chinese intelligence, because they were monitoring all the communications on the Chinese end. Again, they buried that evidence and conspired to feed the American people the lie that this was all part of a Russian plot and that Trump was a Russian puppet.
Trump had hardly sat down in the Oval Office in his first term before the FBI was actively targeting General Flynn, then National Security Advisor. They summoned him to a meeting and then maneuvered him into “lying” about his contacts with the Russian ambassador. When was the last time the FBI presumed to monitor communications of the National Security Advisor with a foreign official on behalf of the President?
The answer is – never.
When you reach the point where the most senior members of the Intelligence and law enforcement communities are presuming to have the right to decide who sits in the White House, you are perilously close to losing the republic.
The so-called mainstream press likes to conjure up the bogeyman of authoritarianism in its effort to damage Donald Trump and undermine him politically. The truth is that the real effort to undermine the republic started a long time ago in Washington, D.C. when unelected public officials decided they had the right to control who would sit in the Oval Office.
Yes, there is a Deep State. I wish there weren’t.