People may ask about THE DEEP STATE news blog, is this a platform for President Trump’s conspiracy theories? The answer is no.
Trump has tweeted about the “deep state” seven times since June 2017. They show that the president’s complaints about the “deep state” have little to do with the legitimate reasons people fear secret intelligence agencies: mass surveillance, bad intelligence leading to failing wars, torture, disinformation, interference in foreign elections and the like.
Trump’s seven bogus tweets show his “deep state” rhetoric is designed to exploit public suspicions and ignorance of the U.S. intelligence community in order to protect himself from democratic accountability and law enforcement.
In June 2017, Trump tweeted about a Sean Hannity monologue on the “deep state’s allies in the media.” That was the day Trump admitted he was under investigation for obstruction of justice.
And so Trump and his allies began a systematic effort to identify the functioning of U.S. law enforcement as the actions of an ominous “deep state.” The idea was to discredit Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller and the FBI. It still is.
In November 2017, Trump asked why “deep state authorities” were not looking into Hillary Clinton’s emails.
The answer is they already had. The FBI investigated Clinton’s emails and concluded in June 2016 that there was no crime. If Trump had any additional evidence, he could have produced it. He didn’t.
Trump then welcomed House Intelligence Committee investigation into “surveillance” of his associates. “Big stuff. Deep State,” he said.
Not really. The committee declassified the FISA warrant seeking permission for NSA to listen in on the foreign conversations of his aide, Carter Page. The warrants contained an abundance of evidence. (Read them for yourself here.) The warrants were approved by Republican-appointed judges. Trump dropped the subject
Last May Trump said the “criminal Deep State” is caught up in “a major Spy scandal the likes of which this country may have never seen before.”
The scandal was so major that Trump has not referred to it since.
In July, he wondered “where is DNC server and why didn’t the FBI take possession of it? Deep State?”
The FBI didn’t take possession of the DNC server because there were 140 of them, not one. In any case, the Bureau extracted all the information it needed from them. That information became the basis for the indictment of 12 officers of the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence service. The indictments showed that “Guccifer 2.0,” the supposed lone hacker behind the DNC hack, was in fact managed by the GRU and other Russians–who aided the Trump campaign.
In September Trump said “the Deep State and their vehicle, the Fake News media are going crazy.” He suggested “maybe Declassification to find additional corruption.”
The declassification has yet to happen because Christopher Wray, the FBI director he appointed, has pointed out that U.S. law forbids the release of investigatory material.
On September 19, Trump touted Rep. Jason Chaffetz’s book The Deep State, which claims that the lack of scandals in the Obama administration can be attributed to “a politicized civil service.”
Chaffetz’s book makes no mention of the alleged work of the “deep state:” the indictment of Trump’s former campaign manager, his former national security adviser, his personal lawyer and 29 other people associated with his campaign.
In short, the president’s “deep state” rhetoric is factually unfounded, a diversionary tactic intended to discredit and obstruct investigation of the connections between his campaign and a foreign power.
