August-September 2018
In the absence of an impartial/dutiful Fourth Estate, Judicial Watch has now assumed the media's role as America's premier watchdog. Through constant legal challenges and Freedom of Information requests, it has been instrumental in uncovering and revealing official documents and records by compelling their production by the government. Exposing Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server for classified government business is just one of their many successes in holding the governing class to account.
On 15 September 2017, its Director of Investigations and Research, Christopher Farrell, hosted a special panel of four guests who discussed the Deep State from their professional perspectives. The following contributions were made by: Dr. Sebastian Gorka, the former Deputy Assistant to President Trump and a renowned counter-terrorism expert; and Diana West, journalist and author of American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character.
Although Dr. Gorka restricts his observations of shadow government to the permanent bureaucracy alone, his extraordinary first-hand account of the subversive power of that single element of the establishment speaks to the enormity of the problems faced by the President, who must deal with the entirety of the shadow government apparatus that Kevin Shipp is unravelling for us in our ongoing series. For her part, Diana West places Dr. Gorka's experience within the broader and deeper truth. (Our transcript. Original emphases.)
Scrutinising the Swamp
SEBASTIAN GORKA: Let me start with a caveat if I may. I love conspiracy theories. But I love them as entertainment. I have a bookshelf of conspiracy theories at home. But there's a very important part to that phrase and it's the second word, which is theories. They're not facts. So, conspiracy theories and the belief in them undermines clear-sighted analysis. So I'm not here to talk about the outrés accusations that have been made against those who are not in favour of the current administration. I want to talk about what actually happened, so far. I'd left the administration three weeks ago today, so I've seen the worst of the worst. The first seven months of how the bureaucracy responded to the administration of Donald J. Trump.
Let me start by saying I actually prefer the phrase, “permanent state,” to deep state. Because it's not necessarily a function of something that's hidden or deep. It was in our faces. It was arrogant. It was right there in the surface of our policy discussions at the highest level of the White House. So it's not hidden. It can be, but in many cases, it's overt and it's been there for a long time. This isn't just a reaction to a New York mogul who became president. This has been brewing, for decades. Truly decades.
And what does it look like?
Well, let's look at the factual things.
One-hundred-and-twenty-five national security leaks in the first one-hundred-and-twenty-six days of the administration. So that's practically one a day. Not only is that a shocking number by itself, if you compare it to prior administrations, it is seven times the number of national security leaks under the Bush administration or the Obama administration taken as an average in the first six months. Not twice, not three times. Seven times the number of leaks.
According to Congress, of those initial leaks, at least sixty of them were of serious national security matters. Every administration leaks. Usually higher ups are executing some kind of knife fight against each other. But we're talking about national security classified secrets. The idea that the president of the United States, the most powerful man in the world can't have a confidential conversation with one of his counterparts, another head of state, is the normalcy, and that is very bad for the safety of the nation.
Secondly, let me talk about the more subtle aspect of the permanent state. And here, I'm going to talk about something I haven't spoken of before. It's not classified but I think it illustrates the level of the issue.
I'm a former professor so I've taught a lot of young men and women in the national security arena. And when I came on board to work for Steve Bannon as a strategist to the president, I wanted to bring over some of my former students to work with us in the White House who were already in government, who had graduated years ago and were members of the intelligence community. And I identified the three best individuals and requested as a Deputy Assistant to the President that these people be detailed over to me at the White House to work on key projects of import to Steve and the President.
In the six months I was in office, not one of those people was detailed over to me from an unnamed sister agency. And, I found out, not only did the sister agency stop their detailing, every single individual was taken off their current duty roster and punished and put into menial tasks outside of the real national security remit, through no fault of their own. Why? Because the seventh floor of that agency, to quote a senior individual, “looks at the White House as the enemy.”
Now, let's just let that sink in for a moment.
We seem to forget, or it's easy to forget, every single branch of the executive, every single branch, whether it's the Department of Agriculture or the NSA, works for the President of the United States. These aren't alternative competing companies in the free market. They work for the White House, and you are there to serve the interests of the President, who has been duly elected by the Electoral College, which represents the American people. The idea that we are “the enemy” — that leads to very, very dangerous things.
Let me just touch upon the more subtle aspect as well of what I call the permanent state. I've mentioned this before but it bears reiteration here. I wasn't a member of the NSC but because of the projects I was working on I went to frequent meetings of the NSC, on issues to do with Qatar, Syria, ISIS, what have you.
When you sit in a meeting of the National Security Council — which is the highest decision-making body on policy in the United States government, the NSC policy coordination — when you sit there for an hour-and-a-half with every high-ranking representative of the administration, whether it's State Department, DoD, CIA, NSA, and you listen through a discussion for more than an hour, and not one person in the room, or on the out-stations on the video teleconference, ever mentions the name of the President, what his objectives are, or what he said yesterday in Riyadh, or Warsaw, or in front of the joint session of Congress, we have a very serious problem. Because they are there not to serve their own understanding of what the nation needs, but to serve the vision of the new CEO, if you will.
And if you were in a private company and you disagreed with the new CEO on a key policy of that company, you have two very simple options: change your mind and support the CEO, or resign, get your box, and fill your box with your articles, and leave the building. Today, we have a very large number of people in the US government, not just SES [Senior Executive Service] but GS [general civil service] individuals, who think, ‘I've been here for 15 years, I'll be here when the President leaves, I know better.’ That's not democracy, and that's not the American way.
CHRIS FARRELL: Thank you, Seb. I tell you, that is a level of insight and detail that I have not heard articulated anywhere else in the way that you have. It's very important, I think, that our viewers understand that, and that they hear it from you, three weeks fresh from the White House. Very disturbing, but frankly in a sense, confirming.
Diana, I can remember reading some of your work, and you're talking about Washington in the sense of being occupied. And that occupation sounds a little bit like the permanent class that Seb was just talking about. So, please, let's hear from you and your thoughts on this.
DIANA WEST: Yes, I'm very fascinated by Sebastian's remarks. And, I would say that for him it's up front and personal. For us on the outside, however, it still seems very murky, very unformed. So when we talk about ‘deep state’ — which I also am a little uncomfortable with the term, it's very amorphous — so I'll just tell you what I think about: I think about unConstitutional powers exercised by strange, illegitimate branchlets of the government, that are in no way restrained by the balance of powers. There are no balance of powers, in our country today.
Just this week, we watched Senator Rand Paul in the Senate have his bill to restore the war-making powers of the Senate to the Senate, blocked by his Senate colleagues. I mean, this is absurd and tragic but it's the norm. A couple of years ago, we saw the same thing happen with the Senate's treaty-making powers, voted away by the Senate, 98 to 1. This is what we're looking at in terms of no balance of powers.
President Trump, now I would say, not having worked for the White House — again, I'm looking at this from a different point of view — 'reversing'-candidate Trump has empowered a bevy of defeated generals including such high administration officials as H.R. McMaster and the Defence Secretary Mattis, co-author of the failed counter-insurgency doctrine to send Americans back to the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan without him or anyone else ever holding them accountable. And this is after more than a decade of colossal American losses rooted in bankrupt Islamic apologetics.
They just perpetuate this apologetics, as we saw when the President told us to remember 9/11, but forgot to tell us it was nineteen devout Muslims on a jihad, including fifteen Saudis, who attacked us. This is all related in this mass abdication of responsibility and accountability in our national life, that I think is part of the decline of self-government. It's a serious as that. And, it enables this unConstitutional power known as the ‘deep state.’ So we're talking about Washington, but this is a cultural problem.
The same force is unaccountable to the people. It is the power that resides in what Sebastian's calling ‘permanent state,’ in the bureaucracies, in the political parties. We have to think about the internet-surveillance state, such as Google and Amazon, and particularly in the national security super-state, that has long, long run amok, and is worse than ever, flouting our Fourth Amendment protections daily, without oversight, and with amends and frightening powers. Then we look at the media and the culture and the education system, and we see them all enhancing the same kind of illegitimate power-complex, mainly as, not altogether but mainly as mouth-pieces. But even with all of that, I do think we only see a little below the surface.
And I would credit Judicial Watch and WikiLeaksas being essential to exposing what we do see of the deep state. But I think it's very important to remember, that it was Donald Trump himself who provoked the deep state to expose itself. And we can see this, when we look just at what we're learning now, about the outrageous efforts by the CIA, the FBI, the NSA to insert themselves into the presidential campaign, into the political process in order to destroy his candidacy and presidency.
And I just have to wonder why are they not under serious investigation. Why is their continued survival not dependent on major reform and new transparency. It is Trump who is imperilled. And this may explain his own state of disarray, which looks to many of his supporters, sometimes, as collapse. The extent to which the deep state is succeeding, the extent to which President Trump has joined forces, too often, to destroy his own agenda, makes it unlikely, it seems, that we will actually expose much more of this mechanism - and much more important, arouse the political and legal will to destroy it, and restore our Constitutional governance. Because exposure alone, is not enough.
But, I think it's crucial to remember, if only maybe for point of reference or point of renewal during this administration, that candidate Trump first provoked the deep state into the open, with a specific set of forbidden issues. Immigration restriction and selectivity, including some block on Muslim immigration; nationalist trade and tariffs; an end to wars that are not fought over American core interest; and the restoration of America's sovereignty.
We the people, were never supposed to vote on these issues — these foundational issues of nationhood — ever again. “Real” and “respectable” presidential candidates, never even mentioned them. These issues had been essentially taken from us, by the powers that always seem to be. They were settled. And then along came Trump.
So I think it's this set of forbidden issues that offers also the most obvious clues to the ideological drivers of the state within the state, that we sense, we see evidence of. It shows itself to be fanatically globalist and anti-nationalist. It is interventionist. It favours mass immigration, and even open borders. It supports free trade, and it is also, to invoke a rather antique concept, perhaps, soft on Islam —– which, I would say, has something to do with the insertion into the Washington food chain of Islamic supremacists, including those related to Muslim Brotherhood organisations.
None of these positions add up to small ‘r’ republicanism. Quite the contrary, these are building blocks of socialist paradise. Regardless of the labels people choose to identify themselves. And I'm not exaggerating. I mean that quite literally. During my own campaign coverage, I was able to find striking similarities between the beliefs of mainstream anti-Trump Republicans, and the program set forth in a 1932 book called, Toward Soviet America. It was written by William Z. Foster, chairman of the Communist Party USA, which means it was approved, if not actually written, in Moscow. These similarities were especially strong when it came to the forbidden Trump issues: Immigration, trade, and what Foster called “bigoted nationalist chauvinism.”
Now I'm not suggesting the Republicans and Democrats — who of course have more in common with the Soviet American programme — are Communist Party members, but just trying to demonstrate the extent to which Communistic ideas have shaped and transformed our politics, and even wholly shifted the spectrum. They also characterise the political impetus, I believe, of this permanent state.
So, we're at this point of exposure, and then the question is what happens? As Judicial Watch can attest, not very often very much happens, and I'm afraid, historically, this is typical. I'm thinking back to the historical deep state that you earlier referenced; once upon a time known as the Communist conspiracy. Exposure wasn't enough even back then. And the reason I say that is the era today is still widely characterised as a ‘red scare’ created by conspiracy theorists. Which means, that the Communist Party line, the old deep state line, has come to — at least as far as popular consciousness — being the one that sets the narrative. This has blinded us to subsequent forces of subversion, of all kinds.
Now this was not ‘conspiracy theory’, as I think Seb would agree. We have hard evidence of hundreds, if not thousands of Soviet agents in and around the halls of power in Washington, by the middle of the last century. And it doesn't even include numerous Communists and fellow travellers around town. These agents met with handlers, they took secret orders from Moscow. That's a conspiracy, and it was Communist. They stole government secrets, but far more important, these unaccountable members of a de-facto shadow government, certainly under Franklin Roosevelt and after, they sought to influence, or even just “mess up”, as Whittaker Chambers once said, “policy-makers and policy-making, war-making too” – which sounds very familiar.
So I look forward to discussing what to do about this. We have a lot to draw on from our past, if we just look at these lessons.
CF: Thank you, Diana. Very insightful. Certainly, I enjoyed your commentary. I found it very intriguing about the idea that the American public was never supposed to vote on this.
DW: Right.
CF: It's a forbidden topic.
DW: Yes.