In just a few short months, the US political establishment has gone from denying the existence of the ‘Deep State’ and calling it a conspiracy theory, to praising it as the bulwark of the Republic against President Donald Trump.
“Thank God for the ‘Deep State,’” declared former CIA director John E. McLaughlin at an event this week, describing the diplomats and intelligence officers testifying before the congressional impeachment inquiry as “people who are doing their duty or responding to a higher call.”
Lavishing praise on the ‘whistleblower’ intelligence officer whose complaint about Trump’s phone call launched the impeachment probe, McLaughlin said the intelligence community is “institutionally committed to objectivity and telling the truth.”
One would think this might be a bit rich, coming from the former deputy director of the CIA at the time of the infamous ‘Iraqi WMDs’ fiasco – and acting director for a time in 2004 – but McLaughlin’s comments were met with applause by the crowd at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government.
He wasn’t the only one to praise the Deep State either. Sitting right next to him was John Brennan, the CIA director under President Barack Obama, whose fingerprints are all over the so-called ‘Steele dossier’ and ‘Russiagate’, and who is now enjoying a rewarding career as a TV pundit accusing Trump of treason.
Brennan argued that the reason Trump “has a contentious relationship with the Deep State people… is because they tell the truth,” and praised the unelected intelligence and law enforcement officials for continuing to “do their work irrespective of what he’s going to do or say.”
Under normal circumstances, these admissions would be rather earth-shattering. It isn’t every day that former bosses of the intelligence apparatus basically admit that yes, they are meddling in the country’s politics, because they feel they have a “higher loyalty” – to borrow a phrase from ex-FBI boss James Comey, another member of this merry cabal – than to the chief executive elected by the American people.
Yet the response has been muted at best, with a silent shrug and the implicit “nothing to see here, move along” from the major outlets. That’s not particularly surprising, given the media’s role in the ‘Russiagate’ conspiracy. Why, just a couple weeks ago, the New York Times published an opinion piece praising the Deep State along the very same lines Brennan and McLaughlin would.
When Trump and his defenders talked about the Deep State during the ‘Russiagate’ hysteria, the very same outlets pooh-poohed them as insane, paranoid, and delusional. Now they say the Deep State is real, it’s always been real, and it’s acting in the best interests of the American Republic – and if you don’t believe it, you’re the one who’s insane, paranoid and delusional. Sense a pattern?
Whatever one may think of Trump, it beggars belief that the very people who cry the loudest about “our democracy” are elevating an unelected bureaucracy, spies and counter-spies as the arbiters of it. It almost makes you think the people responsible for pushing the ‘Russian meddling’ conspiracy theory may have done it as a smokescreen for their own (mis)deeds.
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Nebojsa Malic, senior writer at RT