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The 40-Year Itch
It has been 40 plus years since we last took a firehose to the stables of the “intelligence community.” Human being are still fallen, not new and improved. Our institutions, our creations, reflect our individual and collective limitations, our flaws. All conservatives used to know this, with the phrase “if men were angels…” not so far in the back of mind. Yet, for the past two decades, we have been treated to the doubtful claim that we can trust all our government employees to be faithful and wise servants.* The past few years, at least since the IRS assault on the Tea Party, have provided significant evidence to the contrary, and suggest that we need something like new Church Committee hearings.
The acting Director of National Intelligence, Joseph Maguire, implausibly testified to Congress that the “whistleblower” had integrity and no political intent. Anyone who read the declassified complaint, even without reading the telephone conversation memorialization, knew this was disingenuous nonsense. As has been laid out since Maguire’s testimony, this complaint was obviously fabricated by a lawyer or team of lawyers, not an ordinary CIA officer.
A former senior intelligence official, Fred Fleitz, puts it this way:
I am very familiar with transcripts of presidential phone calls since I edited and processed dozens of them when I worked for the NSC. I also know a lot about intelligence whistleblowers from my time with the CIA.
My suspicions grew this morning when I saw the declassified whistleblowing complaint. It appears to be written by a law professor and includes legal references and detailed footnotes. It also has an unusual legalistic reference on how this complaint should be classified.
From my experience, such an extremely polished whistleblowing complaint is unheard of. This document looks as if this leaker had outside help, possibly from congressional members or staff.
It would have been more honest, and wiser, for Maguire to publicly withhold judgment on the question “Was the “Whistleblower” Part of a Plan?” John Hinderaker looks at the publicly available evidence and concludes it likely is:
This was not just a Nancy Pelosi operation, it was coordinated by the Democratic Party more broadly.
That coordination may have included the Democratic Party loyalist who made the Ukraine complaint. It may be, as Fred Fleitz suggests, that Democratic committee staff or Democratic lawyers helped him write it. In any event, it seems clear that the Democrats were aware of the complaint and coordinated their strategy to build impeachment proceedings around it.
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The purpose of the multiple “inquiries” through which we are about to suffer is not, of course, to learn anything about events in Ukraine. It is, rather, to generate as many headlines as possible from friendly newspapers (i.e., all of them) that pair the words “Trump” and “impeachment.” If the Steele dossier couldn’t stop Trump from being elected in 2016, the Democrats are hopeful that the equally baseless Ukraine complaint will prevent him from being re-elected in 2020.
While acting DNI Maguire did not identify the “whistleblower” leaker, the New York Times effectively outed their party’s agent as a CIA officer assigned to the White House. A CIA officer engaging in domestic espionage for a political party, with the intent of shaping who holds office? Shades of the 1960s and early 1970s! See the “Intelligence Related Commissions, Other Select or Special Committees and Special Reports” page on the official Senate website.
What was remarkable was not the New York Times blowing a CIA officer’s cover, they’re known for politically motivated publication of intelligence secrets, but their leftist readers’ furious response. I’m old enough to remember when leftists hated and distrusted the CIA. The fury here was at the possibility that their political operation would be jeopardized if the rest of America got the news. If their agent is blown, their White House #resistance network might also be blown. Of course, the spy was a CIA employee.
It is time to scratch a 40 year itch. It is time to have an intelligence community-wide stand down, with the acting DNI required to sit in the very front row, to drum into their subversive skulls that:
- There is no executive authority except in the person of the elected president,
- President Trump is their boss because he is the legitimately elected president,
- Any attempt to dress up their personal politics, even hatred of the president and his voters, in national security or supposed legal concerns will be subject to close scrutiny, based on a very bad track record by unelected officials over multiple administrations. Intelligence agency employees’ motives will be scrutinized for possible criminality.
Make the point with object lessons. Start with the CIA deep state operative in the White House. Isolate him or her. Dump all his official commo devices and computer. Then, based on the likely evidence there, get warrants on “personal” phones, communication apps… Strip away all the phony “I’m really sincere and complying with all laws” cover. Then, when AG Barr finds a crime, any crime will do, perp-walk the spy in through the front door of federal court.
As Congressman Deven Nunes says: “Someone has to go to jail.”
* See Anthony Codevilla’s recent article “Shamelessness and Ignorance Unlimited:”
Published in PoliticsContrary to the nonsense conservatives hear on Fox News, the CIA has always been more interested in, and capable of, influencing U.S. policy and politics, as well as in spreading progressivism, than it is in learning about foreigners’ secrets. From the beginning, it has been addicted to cronyism and allergic to quality control. It takes what comes over the transom, and calls it good. Over the years, its combination of professional incompetence and political presumption spread to the FBI.
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Passing off its opinions as facts and refusing to support them by claiming to be constrained by security is its stock-in-trade. Junior persons in the media fall for that. But veterans at the Washington Post and the New York Times know the game and support it.
The deep state and the media are on the same side of a political scam. They worked together to limit Ronald Reagan and to scare George W. Bush. But their assault on Donald Trump waged from behind the pretense of security is little short of a coup d’état.
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The intelligence community’s bureaucrats have no right whatever to try substituting their judgment for that of anyone elected by the American people. Fundamentally, their pretenses of sovereignty are aimed at all Americans.
They consider themselves our superiors. They are not. Ever more openly, they show themselves to be our enemies.
Yes, yes, yes. The time has come to show them they are not above the law any more than we are.
I like it. We need to get people into government jobs that realize that everyone is accountable to an elected official and thus the voters. There is only one person in the Executive Branch that gets power from the electorate and everyone else is subservient to him. Clean house!
This is also a situation where GOP politicians are either vocally part of the solution or they are part of the problem (looking at you Mitt). My normally vocal Congress critters are too quiet. I plan on calling them out.
Are you thinking of the Church Commission when you cite 40 years? That was such a mixed time. On the one hand you had genuine rottenness within the CIA exposed for all the world to see, but at the same time a lot of useful and vital CIA work was also blown out of the water, arguably setting us back several years (though also clearing the decks for reappraisals of how things needed to be done).
That’s the trouble of airing dirty laundry – it’s the only way to get it cleaned (or tossed out), but it also ruins the reputations of even good men in the process.
It’s a shame it has to come to this.
We should look to how the military runs things, as they have managed to partly avoid the politicization nightmare of the CIA and other intelligence community agencies.
I had the same false memory of the name. It was, in fact, the “Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, 1975-76 (Church Committee).”
So, it was not a commission but a select committee.
Yes, I am hearing the silence of Republicans being noted. Time for a number of primary challenges focused on “do nothing” and cowardly Congress critters.
This one is just too easy. It is such an obvious fraud and so clearly subversive on the part of mere civil “servants,” officers with only delegated authority from the president under Article II.
I think we need to simply fire everyone at the FBI and CIA and start all over. Reform will be impossible.
The DIA at the Defense department can handle anything the CIA does. The CIA has been a worthless politicized agency that gives and has given bad advice since the beginning. We simply don’t need it when we have the DIA. As for the FBI, it has been thoroughly corrupted and the Russian Collusion mess has shown it will never come clean. That there are no serious “whistleblowers” of the FBI/CIA crimes indicates that there is no hope of reforming either department. Just fire them all, prosecute the evil doers and start all over.
Timely post btw Clifford.
Tis a gift to be simple, tis a gift to be free.
Simplifying, greatly reducing the “IC” and federal agencies with power to investigate and initiate prosecutions is likely to make us more free, and safer in our liberty.