This article was written in response to Steve Cash’s piece at Cipher Brief, “Two Existential Threats: CIA’s Reputation vs Democracy’s Survival”.
The battle has been joined. The Deep State recognizes that the Trump administration is serious about reasserting popular control over the American government. It understands that, left unchecked, the MAGA movement will destroy the vast unelected 4th branch of government, which now largely holds the real power in the republic. This is a fight to the death.
The frontline in this battle runs right through the Intelligence Community, and more specifically, CIA. For the oligarchs and elitists, there can be no retreat. They must hold this position at all costs.
Hence, virtually every day we see a new volley fired in the press, all pushing the same point. Trump is a threat to democracy. The fate of the republic is at stake. If we allow the duly elected President of the United States to rule, all is lost. It is, in short, the duty of every right-thinking American to stand against Trump and his supporters.
Mr. Cash’s article is only the latest broadside fired.
“In the past weeks, we have seen an increasing shift in how the President, and his senior advisors, see parts of the U.S. government – as instruments to be used domestically, to (using his phrase) “go after” people, and those people are also his political and personal enemies.”
“This change has taken many forms and is part of a larger trend towards destruction of the institutions and norms which have prevented that rise of an authoritarian president since the founding. In the context of intelligence, we have seen the mass firing of critical parts of the national security community, a fixation on eliminating “wokeness,” and the explicit politicization of intelligence products as demonstrated by the head of the Intelligence Community calling for criminal prosecution of a predecessor, and a former President, accused of vague ‘crimes.’ This conduct is what we have seen in authoritarian countries like Germany (pre- and post-Cold War), Hungary, Serbia, Russia and China. Not here.”
“The CIA’s mandate—to provide unvarnished intelligence to elected leaders—depends entirely on a functioning constitutional order. In an authoritarian America, the CIA would not remain a trusted, apolitical service. It would either be reshaped into a domestic instrument of control, as intelligence services have been in other nations, or it would cease to exist in any recognizable form.”
Pay close attention to the verbiage, because what you are seeing is the moral and legal justification of treason. The leaders of the Intelligence Community, and particularly of CIA, are, you understand, the guardians of the constitutional order. It is their sacred duty, therefore, to do what is required to preserve that order even when that means acting contrary to the Constitution and in opposition to the elected President and his appointees. And, yes, this is precisely the same rationale every junta of military officers in Latin America has ever used to justify their decision to stage a coup and seize power.
Cash is the head of an organization called The Steady State. The Steady State consists of several hundred former intelligence officers, many of whom have lost their security clearances and many of whom have been involved in the successive waves of unconstitutional actions taken over the last eight to nine years. These men and women collectively represent a network that cuts across many agencies and exercises enormous power. They have already wielded that power on a number of occasions since 2016, and they have no intention of changing course now.
Shortly after Steve Bannon and Jack Maxey came into possession of a copy of Hunter Biden’s hard drive in 2020, they contacted me and asked me to come to Washington, DC, to examine the drive’s contents. They did so, as they said explicitly, because before they began to do anything with the material on the drive, they wanted to know it was legitimate. They were not interested in being played. No matter what their political leanings, they were not going to push a false narrative.
I drove to DC from my home in Pennsylvania immediately. I was given complete, unfettered access to the drive. It took me maybe five minutes to understand that what I was looking at was legitimate. I have described my reasons for that conclusion at length many times and will not reiterate them here. Suffice it to say, for our current purposes, that there would physically be no way to fabricate the amount of data on the drive and have it stand up to scrutiny for any significant period of time.
It was crystal clear that the hard drive was real. There was no reasonable possibility that any foreign power had created it. (As we know, at roughly the time I was reaching this conclusion, the FBI, in possession of the original laptop, had made the same determination via examination of the laptop’s backup to the cloud with Apple.)
Hunter’s laptop was legitimate. Its contents were as well, and among other things, those contents raised the very serious concern that Joe Biden was in the pocket of Chinese intelligence. We were faced with a real-world “Manchurian Candidate” scenario.
What every American intelligence and counterintelligence professional worth his or her salt should have done was to raise the alarm. Red lights should have been flashing everywhere. Instead, a whole raft of senior officials, inside and outside the government, did exactly the opposite. They linked arms and determined to peddle a deliberate lie. They told the American people the laptop was “Russian disinformation”.
In pursuit of the objective of burying Donald Trump politically, these men and women chose to ignore perhaps the greatest counterintelligence threat this nation has ever faced. They chose treason over the defense of this nation.
Cash dismisses this action as having been apolitical and motivated by a desire on the part of the signatories to the infamous “51 Spies Who Lied” letter to “warn the public of what, based on their decades of experience, appeared to bear the hallmarks of a foreign information operation.” True, they intervened in an American Presidential election and peddled a completely unsupported fiction. But, they did it, you understand, out of a sincere desire to “protect” the republic.
This is not the first time Cash has spoken about the need for intelligence professionals to inject themselves into the political process and their role as “protectors” of the republic. If anything, he has been more blunt in the past.
Winston Churchill spoke of hinge points in history. We are at one right now. Within our government, there are very powerful men and women who believe they have the right to decide who does and does not rule. They have already attempted on numerous occasions to effectively seize power and disenfranchise the American people. They are not done. They have no intention of going quietly into the night.
Trump is in the White House. His appointees are in place throughout the government. In the halls of power, however, traitors continue to move freely. We will not survive by ignoring them or thinking we can wait them out. The battle is joined, and only decisive action will win the day. We either vanquish the Deep State or it vanquishes us.