Do You Believe In The Deep State Now?

Authored by Robert Merry via The American Conservative blog,

The revelation that top Justice officials considered unseating Trump should answer that question for good…

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

That’s a natural reaction to the revelation of Andrew G. McCabe, the former deputy FBI director, that top Justice Department officials, alarmed by Donald Trump’s firing of former Bureau director James Comey, explored a plan to invoke the 25th Amendment and kick the duly elected president out of office.

According to New York Times reporters Adam Goldman and Matthew Haag, McCabe made the statement in an NBC 60 Minutes interview to be aired on Sunday. He also reportedly said that McCabe wanted the so-called Russia collusion investigation to go after Trump for obstructing justice in firing Comey and for any instances they could turn up of his working in behalf of Russia.

The idea of invoking the 25th Amendment was discussed, it seems, at two meetings on May 16, 2017. According to McCabe, top law enforcement officials pondered how they might recruit Vice President Pence and a majority of cabinet members to declare in writing, to the Senate’s president pro tempore and the House speaker, that the president was “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” That would be enough, under the 25th Amendment, to install the vice president as acting president, pushing aside Trump.

But to understand what kind of constitutional crisis this would unleash and the precedent it would set, it’s necessary to ponder the rest of this section of the 25th Amendment. The text prescribes that, if the president, after being removed, transmits to the same congressional figures that he is indeed capable of discharging his duties, he shall once again be president after four days. But if the vice president and the cabinet majority reiterate their declaration within those four days that the guy can’t govern, Congress is charged with deciding the issue. It then takes a two-thirds vote of both houses to keep the president removed, which would have to be done within 21 days, during which time the elected president would be sidelined and the vice president would govern. If Congress can’t muster the two-thirds majority within the prescribed time period, the president “shall resume the powers and duties of his office.”

It’s almost impossible to contemplate the political conflagration that would ensue under this plan. Citizens would watch those in Washington struggle with the monumental question of the fate of their elected leader under an initiative that had never before been invoked, or even considered, in such circumstances. Debates would flare up over whether this comported with the original intent of the amendment; whether it was crafted to deal with physical or mental “incapacitation,” as opposed to controversial actions or unsubstantiated allegations or even erratic decision making; whether such an action, if established as precedent, would destabilize the American republic for all time; and whether unelected bureaucrats should arrogate to themselves the power to set in motion the downfall of a president, circumventing the impeachment language of the Constitution.

For the past two years, the country has been struggling to understand the two competing narratives of the criminal investigation of the president.

One narrative—let’s call it Narrative A—has it that honorable and dedicated federal law enforcement officials developed concerns over a tainted election in which nefarious Russian agents had sought to tilt the balloting towards the candidate who wanted to improve U.S.-Russian relations and who seemed generally unseemly. Thus did the notion emerge, quite understandably, that Trump had “colluded” with Russian officials to cadge a victory that otherwise would have gone to his opponent. This narrative is supported and protected by Democratic figures and organizations, by adherents of the “Russia as Threat” preoccupation, and by anti-Trumpers everywhere, particularly news outlets such as CNN, The Washington Post, and The New York Times

The other view—Narrative B—posits that certain bureaucratic mandarins of the national security state and the outgoing Obama administration resolved early on to thwart Trump’s candidacy. After his election, they determined to undermine his political standing, and particularly his proposed policy toward Russia, through a relentless and expansive investigation characterized by initial misrepresentations, selective media leaks, brutal law enforcement tactics, and a barrage of innuendo. This is the narrative of most Trump supporters, conservative commentators, Fox News, and The Wall Street Journal editorial page, notably columnist Kimberley Strassel.

The McCabe revelation won’t affect the battle of the two narratives. As ominous and outrageous as this “deep state” behavior may seem to those who embrace Narrative B, it will be seen by Narrative A adherents as evidence that those law enforcement officials were out there heroically on the front lines protecting the republic from Donald J. Trump.

And those Narrative A folks won’t have any difficulty tossing aside the fact that McCabe was fired as deputy FBI director for violating agency policy in leaking unauthorized information to the news media. He then allegedly violated the law in lying about it to federal investigators on four occasions, including three times while under oath.

Indeed, Narrative A people have no difficulty at all brushing aside serious questions posed by Narrative B people. McCabe is a likely liar and perjurer? Doesn’t matter. Peter Strzok, head of the FBI’s counterespionage section, demonstrated his anti-Trump animus in tweets and emails to Justice official Lisa Page? Irrelevant. Christopher Steele’s dossier of dirt on Trump, including an allegation that the Russians were seeking to blackmail and bribe him, was compiled by a man who had demonstrated to a Justice Department official that he was “desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and…passionate about him not being president”? Not important. The dossier was paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party? Immaterial. Nothing in the dossier was ever substantiated? So what?

Now we have a report from a participant of those meetings that top officials of the country’s premier law enforcement entity sat around and pondered how to bring down a sitting president they didn’t like. The Times even says that McCabe “confirmed” an earlier report that deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein suggested wearing a wire in meetings with Trump to incriminate him and make him more vulnerable to the plot.

There is no suggestion in McCabe’s interview pronouncements or in the words of Scott Pelley, who conducted the interview and spoke to CBS This Morning about it, that these federal officials ever took action to further the aim of unseating the president. There doesn’t seem to be any evidence that they approached cabinet members or the vice president about it. “They…were speculating, ‘This person would be with us, this person would not be,’ and they were counting noses in that effort,” said Pelley. He added, apparently in response to Rosenstein’s insistence that his comments about wearing a wire were meant as a joke, “This was not perceived to be a joke.”

What are we to make of this? Around the time of the meetings to discuss the 25th Amendment plot, senior FBI officials also discussed initiating a national security investigation of the president as a stooge of the Russians or perhaps even a Russian agent. These talks were revealed by The New York Times and CNN in January, based on closed-door congressional testimony by former FBI general counsel James Baker. You don’t have to read very carefully to see that the reporters on these stories brought to them a Narrative A sensibility. The Times headline: “F.B.I. Opened Inquiry into Whether Trump Was Secretly Working on Behalf of Russia.” CNN’s: “Transcripts detail how FBI debated whether Trump was ‘following directions’ of Russia.” And of course, whoever leaked those hearing transcripts almost surely did so to bolster the Narrative A version of events.

The independent journalist Gareth Porter, writing at Consortium News, offers a penetrating exposition of the inconsistencies, fallacies, and fatuities of the Narrative A matrix, as reflected in how the Times and CNN handled the stories that resulted from what were clearly self-interested leaks.

Porter notes that a particularly sinister expression in May 2017 by former CIA director John O. Brennan, a leading Trump antagonist, has precipitated echoes in the news media ever since, particularly in the Times. Asked in a committee hearing if he had intelligence indicating that anyone in the Trump campaign was “colluding with Moscow,” Brennan dodged the question. He said his experience had taught him that “the Russians try to suborn individuals, and they try to get them to act on their behalf either wittingly or unwittingly.”

Of course you can’t collude with anybody unwittingly. But Brennan’s fancy expression has the effect of expanding what can be thrown at political adversaries, to include not just conscious and nefarious collaboration but also policy advocacy that could be viewed as wrongheaded or injurious to U.S. interests. As Porter puts it, “The real purpose…is to confer on national security officials and their media allies the power to cast suspicion on individuals on the basis of undesirable policy views of Russia rather than on any evidence of actual collaboration with the Russian government.”

That seems to be what’s going on here. There’s no doubt that McCabe and Rosenstein and Strzok and Brennan and Page and many others despised Trump and his resolve to thaw relations with Russia. They viewed him as a president “who needed to be reined in,” as a CNN report described the sentiment among top FBI officials after the Comey firing.

So they expanded the definition of collusion to include “unwitting” collaboration in order to justify their machinations. It’s difficult to believe that people in such positions would take such a cavalier attitude toward the kind of damage they could wreak on the body politic.

Now we learn that they actually sat around and plotted how to distort the Constitution, just as they distorted the rules of official behavior designed to hold them in check, in order to destroy a presidential administration placed in power by the American people. It’s getting more and more difficult to dismiss Narrative B.

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22winmag - Unreconstructedsouthernedbygraceofgod
22winmag - Unreconstructedsouthernedbygraceofgod

Politicizing what amounts to a mental health diagnosis by non-professionals? Yeah, that ought to go well.

Present day mental healthcare and the DSM-IV and DSM-V are a fucking joke, so who should the 25th Amendment, as applied, not be the grandest joke of all?

I mean, why should some dirtbags conspiring to use the 25th against a fellow dirtbag even raise an eyebrow?

The concept that America is governed by laws and not by men is a joke without equal. All I see is a bunch of minor league dirtbags, all on the same team, pretending to attack each other, while an ever-shrinking group of major league evil men rule over America, FROM ABROAD.

The way I see it, they either install a set of TITS in the Oral Office in 2020 (the ultimate insult) or we get the 25th or impeachment or resignation later this year followed by up to 9.5 years of Mike “Globalist Toolshed” Pence. Either way we’re fucked, as usual.

Sources:
http://mileswmathis.com/matrix.pdf
http://mileswmathis.com/trump2.pdf

old white guy
old white guy

True, mental healthcare is a joke. The so called experts can’t tell male from female and think that there are more than two sexes. These people are not capable of making any decisions about just how America should be governed.

MarshRabbit
MarshRabbit

You sound like you have Oppositional Defiant Disorder.
(DSM-V, ICD code F913) lol

grace country pastor

I am ODD too…

old white guy
old white guy

When everyone on the left is a liar, just who is one to believe?

Crawfisher
Crawfisher

Cant believe our elected leaders, can’t believe bank and business leaders, can’t believe religious leaders’ pronouncements, can’t believe un-elected govt bureaucrats, and certainly entertainers.
All are proven liars, notice I did not single out the Left. I guess the problem is not that they lie, to me the problem is there is no accountability. I bet the black, gay actor doe not go to jail, same as with all the Dems who lied during the Supreme Court hearing.

SmallerGovNow
SmallerGovNow

Correct, it is certainly not just the left. RINO’s are part of the uniparty of Republicrats. Big One World Government lovers that are psychopaths… Chip

SmallerGovNow
SmallerGovNow

40 something RINO Senators signed the traitorous budget bill. Add them to your list of liars… Chip

Ned
Ned

Only thing this article leaves out is Trump is controlled by the deep state as well. US president Donald Trump is not a truly independent political leader but merely a puppet of US corporations, military and intelligence, and who serves their interests. Trump pursues “no own policies” but only executes the decisions made by the “intelligence agencies, the Pentagon, the big arms manufacturers, oil companies, and financial institutions. So while the deep state may be trying to get rid of him, in the meantime they are controlling him to a large degree.

Anonym
Anonym

Ned, you nailed it, this whole investigation is just a simple tool to keep DJT in check. If they did not keep him in check, then the theory goes, “he will be building Trump towers in the countries we deem our enemies, and that will destroy our entire boogeyman narrative, and destroy our MIC financed retirement plans”

it is all kabuki theater, we don’t have elected representatives, we have bought and paid for weasels, working for their own benefit, on our dime.

Barry G.
Barry G.

Ned said ‘So while the deep state may be trying to get rid of him, in the meantime they are controlling him to a large degree.’

If they’re controlling him to a large degree, why the fuck would they want to get rid of him?

Ned
Ned

Because a large degree is not large enough for the deep staters. They want a full spectrum dominance.

overthecliff
overthecliff

A magnificent distraction. It is all show for boobus Americanus. If this wasn’t a show ,Trump would walk over to DOJ and have the military police arrest Rosenstein and company. Trump won’t do shit because he is to busy being Schumers butt boy and Pelosis bitch.

Michael Thomas
Michael Thomas

The sole reason for the discussion on using the 25th was just another aspect of the insurance policy/coup against Trump. These criminals knew the discussion would be leaked and would further damage Trump.

I suspect Trump is waiting until Mueller declares he’s done before Trump declassifies the materials that prove there was a coup perpetrated by Obama and his minions, as well as the Deep State after Soetoro left. Without declassification, Trump is a one-termer. The American public isn’t capable of discerning the facts through the DNC/Media false narrative smoke screen.

Anonymous
Anonymous

Yet with 90+% negative news stories last week Trump’s approval hit a high of 52%. Almost never admitted is that his polls are and have always been higher than Obama’s at the same length of time in office. I haven’t believed any of the MSM trash. He is going to walk to re-election.
Too little optimism around here some days.
Harrington Richardson

Anonymous
Anonymous

No mention of the $124 million the Clinton Foundation received from Russian sources while she was Suckretary of State? I won’t bore anyone with the arms length list of the other Dem/Clinton connections, payments and sellouts. Narrative B is the only answer and this writer didn’t even do a halfassed job of presenting that case.
Harrington Richardson

MarshRabbit
MarshRabbit

What’s ironic is that Trump is the deep state.
“Former acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe said that President Trump dismissed intelligence on North Korea given to him by U.S. officials, telling them, “I don’t care, I believe Putin.”
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/430437-mccabe-trump-said-i-dont-care-i-believe-putin-when-confronted-with-us

Not Sure

Always learning and from this article, the “A’s” will never give in the the “B’s” narrative, so polarization will continue, no matter how the “B” narrative becomes the obvious reality. Got it.

Now comes the next important question; why are the “A” folks trying so desperately to get rid of the president, if the dems and Republicans are cut from the same cloth? It would seem the Republicans are stomping around yelling “convict,” but at the crucial moment, slink back to their corner and capitulate. This is a discernible pattern that has been consistent since the president took office in 2016. So then the probability of kabuki theater becomes more and more likely as time goes on, with the ever less probable possibility the Trump will pounce at some point in the future.
So nothing to do but wait; which may have been the plan of the uniparty all along; Wait until we are surrounded and devoid of any hope of turning things around.
One thing I know, I’ve been sitting on the edge of this drop off for so long, I’m getting to the point where I don’t care if I fall off or not.

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