Deep state

FBI agent who helped launch Russia investigation says Trump was 'compromised'

He was the FBI agent so central to the Trump-Russia investigation that he came up with the code name: Crossfire Hurricane, from the lyrics of a Rolling Stones song that happened to be in his head.

And he was the same FBI agent whose anti-Trump texts on a government phone — exchanged in "intimate" conversations with an FBI lawyer who wasn't his wife — gave President Donald Trump and his allies powerful ammunition they used in their efforts to discredit the investigation.

Now Peter Strzok, a decorated counterintelligence agent who was fired by the bureau he loved, is telling his story in a new book, "Compromised: Counterintelligence and the Threat of Donald J. Trump."

Despite the cinematic title, Strzok reveals no new evidence that the president acted as a tool of Russia. But his insider account provides a detailed refutation of the notion that a group of anti-Trump denizens of the deep state cooked up the Russia "hoax," as Trump likes to call it, to take down a president they didn't support.

Deep state

The CIA, the FBI and the myth of America’s Deep State

The conviction that pointy-headed intellectuals in the US national security establishment are covertly imposing their worldview on American foreign policy hardly originated with the Trump White House. Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communist crusade in the 1950s was largely premised on the same paranoia about some establishment “deep state”. Similar views were voiced — with lesser degrees of conspiratorial conviction — by the Reagan and Nixon administrations. And as national security correspondent David Rohde notes in his new book on presidential battles with the US security services, such fears are not the exclusive province of the political right. The idea of a military-industrial complex secretly running US foreign policy outside the prying eyes of right-thinking Americans was a standard trope of the left for much of the Vietnam war era, one that hasn’t altogether disappeared from parts of the Democratic party.

Deep state

Deep State snakes slither back after FBI, CIA swamp draining: Goodwin

“History repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce,” Karl Marx said. We can be forgiven for assuming he had the outrageous behavior of the Deep State in mind.

It was tragic when it became apparent that the FBI, CIA and other government agencies abused their powers to interfere in the 2016 presidential election and try to help Hillary Clinton win. Now it is farce that some of the same agencies are up to their old tricks again in the 2020 election.

The evidence of foul play comes via two of the strangest newspaper stories ever published. The first was in The New York Times, which reported breathlessly Friday that “intelligence officials warned House lawmakers last week that Russia was interfering in the 2020 campaign to get President Trump re-elected.”

The first reaction was a universal “here we go again.” If you suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome, you assumed he was once again colluding with Vladimir ­Putin to steal the election.

Deep state

Rand Paul: Bolton is a 'malign influence'

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), a close ally of President Trump who has supported the president’s desire to pull U.S. troops out of the Middle East, says national security adviser John Bolton is a “malign influence.”

Paul, who believes the U.S. should reduce its military presence in Syria and Afghanistan, says he is alarmed by the recent mobilization of U.S. combat troops to counter what some Trump officials see as a rising threat posed by Iran.

Asked about Bolton’s role in the recent deployment of an aircraft carrier strike group and an Air Force bomber task force, Paul said, “I fear that he’s a malignancy, a malignant influence on the administration."

Paul believes that Bolton is in a camp of hawks who may be pushing Trump in the direction of war.

The New York Times reported Monday that acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan presented a military plan to Trump at a meeting last week calling for the deployment of 120,000 troops to the Middle East, at Bolton's request.

Deep state

Former National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster: Some Trump Advisers Are a ‘Danger to the Constitution’

Former national security adviser H.R. McMaster has accused some unnamed White House advisers of being “a danger to the Constitution” by trying to manipulate President Trump to achieve their own ulterior motives.

McMaster, who was rumored to be at loggerheads with Trump for months before his departure in March 2018, stopped short of offering his own assessment of the president while making the remarks Wednesday at an event hosted by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. But he suggested that at least two distinct groups of advisers to the president are secretly running point on agendas that are at odds with those of Trump himself.

One group, he said, consists of those “who are not there to give the president options—they’re there to try to manipulate the situation based on their own agenda, not the president’s agenda.”

The other group “cast themselves in the role of saving the country, even the world, from the president,” he said.

“I think those latter two categories of people are actually a danger to the Constitution of the United States,” he said.

Deep state

If You Fear the Deep State, History Explains Why

In july 1987, Oliver North was living proof of what could happen when obscure government staffers exercise power on their own. North, a Marine lieutenant colonel who’d been assigned to work on Ronald Reagan’s National Security Council staff, sat upright in his olive-green uniform before a joint congressional committee. As television cameras rolled, the staffer recounted his role in the scheme to sell weapons to Iran and funnel the proceeds to Contras battling a socialist government in Nicaragua.

On paper, North and others at the NSC were supposed to support the president’s policy-making process, but Reagan staffers had cooked up their own plans and then carried them out. Amid what became known as the Iran-Contra affair, North and the rest of the NSC looked to many like, in the words of one observer, “reckless cowboys, off on their own on a wild ride.” Today conspiracy theorists would have simply called them part of a “deep state”—shadowy, unelected officials controlling government even as presidents come and go.