We're in a permanent coup <https://taibbi.substack.com/p/were-in-a-permanent-coup>
Americans might soon wish they just waited to vote their way out of the Trump era Ive lived through a few coups. Theyre insane, random, and terrifying, like watching sports, except your political future depends on the score. The kickoff begins when a key official decides to buck the executive. From that moment, government becomes a high-speed head-counting exercise. Whos got the power plant, the airport, the police in the capital? How many department chiefs are answering their phones? Whos writing tonights newscast? When the KGB in 1991 tried to reassume control of the crumbling Soviet Union by placing Mikhail Gorbachev under arrest and attempting to seize Moscow, logistics ruled. Boris Yeltsins crew drove to the Russian White House in ordinary cars <https://www.apnews.com/571f9aada84048798036d60d268aa6d2> , beating KGB coup plotters who were trying to reach the seat of Russian government in armored vehicles. A key moment came when one of Yeltsins men, Alexander Rutskoi who two years later would himself lead a coup against Yeltsin <https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/10/20-years-ago-russ ia-had-its-biggest-political-crisis-since-the-bolshevik-revolution/280237/> prevailed upon a Major in a tank unit to defy KGB orders and turn on the criminals. We have long been spared this madness in America. Our head-counting ceremony was Election Day. We did it once every four years. Thats all over, in the Trump era. On Thursday, news broke that two businessmen said to have peddled supposedly explosive information about corruption involving Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden were arrested at Dulles airport on <https://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/article235903397.html# storylink=cpy> campaign finance violations. The two figures are alleged to be bagmen bearing dirt on Democrats, solicited by Trump and his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani. Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman will be asked to give depositions to impeachment investigators. Theyre reportedly going to refuse. Their lawyer John Dowd also says they will refuse to appear before House Committees investigating President Donald Trump. Fruman and Parnas meanwhile claim they had real derogatory information about Biden and other politicians, but the U.S. government had shown little interest in receiving it through official channels. For Americans not familiar with the language of the Third World, thats two contrasting denials of political legitimacy. The men who are the proxies for Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani in this story are asserting that official channels have been corrupted. The forces backing impeachment, meanwhile, are telling us those same defendants are obstructing a lawful impeachment inquiry. This latest incident, set against the impeachment mania and the reportedly expanding Russiagate investigation of U.S. Attorney John Durham, accelerates our timeline to chaos. We are speeding toward a situation when someone in one of these camps refuses to obey a major decree, arrest order, or court decision, at which point Americans will get to experience the joys of their political futures being decided by phone calls to generals and police chiefs. My discomfort in the last few years, first with Russiagate and now with Ukrainegate and impeachment, stems from the belief that the people pushing hardest for Trumps early removal are more dangerous than Trump. Many Americans dont see this because theyre not used to waking up in a country where youre not sure who the president will be by nightfall. They dont understand that this predicament is worse than having a bad president. The Trump presidency is the first to reveal a full-blown schism between the intelligence community and the White House. Senior figures in the CIA, NSA, FBI and other agencies made an open break from their would-be boss before Trumps inauguration, commencing a public war of leaks that has not stopped. The first big shot was fired in early January, 2017, via a CNN.com headline, Intel chiefs presented Trump with claims of Russian efforts to compromise him <https://www.cnn.com/2017/01/10/politics/donald-trump-intelligence-report-ru ssia/index.html> . This tale, about the January 7th presentation of former British spy Christopher Steeles report to then-President-elect Trump, began as follows: Classified documents presented last week to President Obama and President-elect Trump included allegations that Russian operatives claim to have compromising personal and financial information about Mr. Trump, multiple US officials with direct knowledge of the briefings tell CNN. Four intelligence chiefs in the FBIs James Comey, the CIAs John Brennan, the NSAs Mike Rogers, and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, presented an incoming president with a politically disastrous piece of information, in this case a piece of a private opposition research report. Among other things because the news dropped at the same time Buzzfeed decided to publish <https://money.cnn.com/2017/01/10/media/buzzfeed-trump-report/> the entire bombshell Steele dossier, reporters spent that week obsessing not about the mode of the storys release, but about the claims. In particular, audiences were rapt by allegations that Russians were trying to blackmail Trump with evidence of a golden shower party commissioned on a bed once slept upon by Barack Obama himself. Twitter exploded <https://www.complex.com/life/2017/01/donald-trump-golden-shower-russian-mem os-twitter-reacts> . No other news story mattered. For the next two years, the claims of compromise and a continuing Trump-Russian exchange hung over the White House like a sword of Damocles. Few were interested in the motives for making this story public. As it turned out, there were two explanations, one that was made public, and one that only came out later. The public justification as outlined in the CNN piece, was to make the President-elect aware that such allegations involving him [were] circulating among intelligence agencies. However, we know from Comey <https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4442900-Ex-FBI-Director-James-Comey -s-memos.html> s January 7, 2017 memo to deputy Andrew McCabe and FBI General Counsel James Baker there was another explanation. Comey wrote: I said I wasnt saying this was true, only that I wanted [Trump] to know both that it had been reported and that the reports were in many hands. I said media like CNN had them and were looking for a news hook. I said it was important that we not give them the excuse to write that the FBI has the material or [redacted] and that we were keeping it very close-hold. Imagine if a similar situation had taken place in January of 2009, involving president-elect Barack Obama. Picture a meeting between Obama and the heads of the CIA, NSA, and FBI, along with the DIA, in which the newly-elected president is presented with a report complied by, say, Judicial Watch, accusing him of links to al-Qaeda. Imagine further that they tell Obama they are presenting him with this information to make him aware of a blackmail threat, and to reassure him they wont give news agencies a hook to publish the news. Now imagine if that news came out on Fox days later. Imagine further that within a year, one of the four officials became a paid Fox contributor. Democrats would lose their minds in this set of circumstances. The country mostly did not lose its mind, however, because the episode did not involve a traditionally presidential figure like Obama, nor was it understood to have been directed at the institution of the White House in the abstract. Instead, it was a story about an infamously corrupt individual, Donald Trump, a pussy-grabbing scammer who bragged about using bankruptcy to escape debt and publicly praised Vladimir Putin. Audiences believed the allegations against this person and saw the intelligence/counterintelligence community as acting patriotically, doing their best to keep us informed about a still-breaking investigation of a rogue president. But a parallel story was ignored. Leaks from the intelligence community most often pertain to foreign policy. The leak of the January, 2017 meeting between the four chiefs and Trump which without question damaged both the presidency and Americas standing abroad was an unprecedented act of insubordination. It was also a bold new foray into domestic politics by intelligence agencies that in recent decades began asserting all sorts of frightening new authority. They were kidnapping foreigners, assassinating by drone, conducting paramilitary operations without congressional notice, building an international archipelago of secret prisons, and engaging in mass warrantless surveillance of Americans. We found out in a court case just last week how extensive the illegal domestic surveillance has been, with the FBI engaging in tens of thousands of warrantless searches <https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/fbis-search-for-informatio n-on-americans-was-in-violation-of-the-law-judge-says/2019/10/08/c8570720-e9 fc-11e9-9c6d-436a0df4f31d_story.html> involving American emails and phone numbers under the guise of combating foreign subversion. The agencies new trick is inserting themselves into domestic politics using leaks and media pressure. The intel chiefs meeting was just the first in a series of similar stories, many following the pattern in which a document was created, passed from department to department, and leaked. A sample: * February 14, 2017: four current and former officials tell the <https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/14/us/politics/russia-intelligence-communic ations-trump.html> New York Times <https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/14/us/politics/russia-intelligence-communic ations-trump.html> the Trump campaign had repeated contacts with Russian intelligence. * March 1, 2017: Justice Department officials tell the Washington Post Attorney General Jeff Sessions spoke twice with Russias ambassador and did not disclose the contacts ahead of his confirmation hearing. * March 18, 2017: people familiar with the matter tell the Wall Street Journal that former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn failed to disclose a contact with a Russian at Cambridge University, an episode that came to the notice of U.S. intelligence. * April 8, 2017, 2017: law enforcement and other U.S. officials tell the <https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/fbi-obtained-fisa-wa rrant-to-monitor-former-trump-adviser-carter-page/2017/04/11/620192ea-1e0e-1 1e7-ad74-3a742a6e93a7_story.html> Washington Post <https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/fbi-obtained-fisa-wa rrant-to-monitor-former-trump-adviser-carter-page/2017/04/11/620192ea-1e0e-1 1e7-ad74-3a742a6e93a7_story.html> the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judge had ruled there was probable cause to believe former Trump aide Carter Page was an agent of a foreign power. * April 13, 2017: a source close to UK intelligence tells Luke Harding at The Guardian that the British analog to the NSA, the GCHQ, passed knowledge of suspicious interactions between figures connected to Trump and known or suspected Russian agents to Americans as part of a routine exchange of information. * December 17, 2017: four current and former American and foreign officials tell the <https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/30/us/politics/how-fbi-russia-investigation -began-george-papadopoulos.html> New York Times <https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/30/us/politics/how-fbi-russia-investigation -began-george-papadopoulos.html> that during the 2016 campaign, an Australian diplomat named Alexander Downer told American counterparts that former Trump aide George Papadopoulos revealed Russia had political dirt on Hillary Clinton. * April 13, 2018: two sources familiar with the matter tell <https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/white-house/article208 870264.html> McClatchy <https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/white-house/article208 870264.html> that Special Counsel Robert Muellers office has evidence Trump lawyer Michael Cohen was in Prague in 2016, confirming part of [Steele] dossier. * November 27, 2018: a well-placed source <https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/nov/27/manafort-held-secret-talks- with-assange-in-ecuadorian-embassy> tells Harding at The Guardian that former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort met with Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy in London. * January 19, 2019: former law enforcement officials and others familiar with the investigation tell the <https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/11/us/politics/fbi-trump-russia-inquiry.htm l> New York Times <https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/11/us/politics/fbi-trump-russia-inquiry.htm l> the FBI opened an inquiry into the explosive implications of whether or not Donald Trump was working on behalf of the Russians. To be sure, people familiar with the matter leaked a lot of true stories in the last few years, but many were clearly problematic even at the time of release. Moreover, all took place in the context of constant, hounding pressure from media figures, congressional allies like Democrats Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell, as well as ex-officials who could make use of their own personal public platforms in addition to being unnamed sources in straight news reports. They used commercial news platforms to argue that Trump had committed treason <https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/25/opinion/mueller-trump-no-collusion.html> , needed to be removed from office, and preferably also indicted <https://www.npr.org/2019/03/12/702538563/adam-schiff-evidence-available-alr eady-shows-that-trump-should-be-indicted> as soon as possible. A shocking number of these voices were former intelligence officers who joined Clapper in becoming paid news contributors <https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/02/06/john-brennan-james-clape r-michael-hayden-former-cia-media-216943> . Op-ed pages and news networks are packed now with ex-spooks editorializing about stories in which they had personal involvement: Michael Morell <https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/michael-morell/> , Michael Hayden <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/28/opinion/sunday/the-end-of-intelligence.h tml> , Asha Rangappa <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDbJRNSdbx4> , and Andrew McCabe <https://www.washingtonpost.com/> among many others, including especially all four of the original intel chiefs: Clapper, Rogers <https://www.cnn.com/profiles/mike-rogers-profile> , Comey <https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/james-comey-no-treason-no-coup-just -lies--and-dumb-lies-at-that/2019/05/28/45f8d802-8175-11e9-bce7-40b4105f7ca0 _story.html> , and MSNBC headliner John Brennan <https://www.thewrap.com/ex-cia-chief-john-brennan-signs-as-msnbc-nbc-as-con tributor/> . Russiagate birthed a whole brand of politics, a government-in-exile, which prosecuted its case against Trump via a constant stream of approved leaks, partisans in congress, and an increasingly unified and thematically consistent set of commercial news outlets. These mechanisms have been transplanted now onto the Ukrainegate drama. Its the same people beating the public drums, with the messaging run out of the same congressional committees, through the same Nadlers, Schiffs, and Swalwells. The same news outlets are on full alert. The sidelined intel chiefs are once again playing central roles in making the public case. Comey says we may now be at a point <https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/25/politics/james-comey-impeachment-tweet/index .html> where impeachment is necessary. Brennan, with unintentional irony, says the United States is no longer a democracy <https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/brennan-us-no-longer-a-democracy-un der-autocrat-trump> . Clapper says the Ukraine whistleblower complaint is one of the most credible <https://www.foxnews.com/politics/clapper-heaps-praise-on-whistleblower-comp laint-as-one-of-the-most-credible-hes-seen> hes seen. As a reporter covering the 20152016 presidential race, I thought Trumps campaign was disturbing on many levels, but logical as a news story. He succeeded for class reasons, because of flaws in the media business that gifted him mass amounts of coverage, and because he took cunning advantage of long-simmering frustrations in the electorate. He also clearly catered to racist fears, and to the collapse in trust in institutions like the news media, the Fed, corporations, NATO, and, yes, the intelligence services. In enormous numbers, voters rejected everything they had ever been told about who was and was not qualified for higher office. Trumps campaign antagonism toward the military and intelligence world was at best a millimeter thick. Like almost everything else he said as a candidate, it was a gimmick, designed to get votes. That he was insincere and full of it and irresponsible, at first at least, when he attacked the deep state and the fake news media, doesnt change the reality of whats happened since. Even paranoiacs have enemies, and even Donald Deep State Trump is a legitimately elected president whose ouster is being actively sought by the intelligence community. Trump stands accused of using the office of the presidency to advance political aims, in particular pressuring Ukraine to investigate potential campaign rival Joe Biden. Hes guilty, but the issue is how guilty, in comparison to his accusers. Trump, at least in so far as we know, has not used section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to monitor political rivals. He hasnt deployed human counterintelligence informants to follow the likes of Hunter Biden. He hasnt maneuvered to secure Special Counsel probes of Democrats. And while Donald Trump conducting foreign policy based on what he sees on Fox and Friends is troubling, its not in the same ballpark as CNN, MSNBC, the Washington Post and the New York Times engaging in de facto coverage partnerships with the FBI and CIA to push highly politicized, phony narratives like Russiagate. Trumps tinpot Twitter threats and cancellation of White House privileges for dolts like Jim Acosta also dont begin to compare to the danger posed by Facebook, Google, and Twitter under pressure from the Senate organizing with groups like the Atlantic Council to fight fake news in the name of preventing the <https://www.tremr.com/rchusid/aclu-joins-other-civil-libertarians-in-warnin g-about-dangers-of-censorship-on-social-media> foment of discord. I dont believe most Americans have thought through what a successful campaign to oust Donald Trump would look like. Most casual news consumers can only think of it in terms of Mike Pence becoming president. The real problem would be the precedent of a de facto intelligence community veto over elections, using the lunatic spookworld brand of politics that has dominated the last three years of anti-Trump agitation. CIA/FBI-backed impeachment could also be a self-fulfilling prophecy. If Donald Trump thinks hes going to be jailed upon leaving office, hell sooner or later figure out that his only real move is to start acting like the dictator MSNBC <https://www.msnbc.com/hardball/watch/kamala-harris-says-trump-no-better-tha n-any-other-dictator-70025797584> and CNN keep insisting he is. Why give up the White House and wait to be arrested, when he still has theoretical authority to send Special Forces troops rappelling through the windows of every last Russiagate/Ukrainegate leaker? That would be the endgame in a third world country, and its where were headed, unless someone calls off this craziness. Welcome to the Permanent Power Struggle. EM -> { Trump for 2020 } On the 49th Parallel Thé Mulindwas Communication Group "With Yoweri Museveni, Ssabassajja and Dr. Kiiza Besigye, Uganda is in anarchy" Kuungana Mulindwa Mawasiliano Kikundi "Pamoja na Yoweri Museveni, Ssabassajja na Dk. Kiiza Besigye, Uganda ni katika machafuko"
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