Can Tulsi and Gaetz Disinfect the Deep State?

The Deep State is a pejorative shorthand for the Establishment power brokers, the permanent bureaucracy. Other pejoratives are the Shadow Government or the Blob. It obviously exists in some form. Just try advancing a real reform and see what happens, not just at the federal level but at the state and local levels.

At the federal level, the real problem is the national security agencies and the military, which receive many billions a year of our tax dollars and want to keep that flowing, while keeping, even advancing, their grip on power both domestically and globally. That’s why once and future President Trump’s appointments so far are significant – if he, and they, can actually advance reform. After the 1962 Bay of Pigs fiasco, Kennedy promised to “break the CIA into a thousand pieces,” and look at what happened to him.

When the simpleton Bush proposed the new Director of National Intelligence bureaucracy after 9/11, at the Orange County Register we strongly opposed it as duplicative of the more than a dozen already existing intel agencies. Didn’t we already have a Central Intelligence Agency? Did we need a DNI and a CIA? Wasn’t the critique of how the government wasn’t ready for 9/11 that there were too many agencies stumbling over one another? The rationale was the DNI somehow would coordinate everything.

Trump just appointed former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard as the new DNI. That’s shortly after the outgoing DNI, Avril Haines – also a former CIA director, see how D.C. is just a revolving door? – oversaw Tulsi being put on the Quiet Skies List for suspected terrorists just three months ago. Even though Tulsi is a former member of Congress and is a decorated veteran of the Iraq War. She told Laura Ingraham:

Laura, this is a pure act of political retaliation. There’s no other way to put it. The very next day, after my conversation with you on the air warning the American people about how dangerous a Kamala Harris presidency could be, I was placed on this domestic terror watchlist, which is called the “Quiet Skies” list under the Department of Homeland Security.… To now have my own government now turn around and put me on a domestic terror watch list, it hits to the core and is the ultimate sense of betrayal.

And the anti-Trumpers are charging him with seeking revenge? Here’s what current DNI Haines oversees in the bureaucracy Blob. Note the DHS Office of Intelligence Analysis in the middle:

What a sclerotic bureaucratic mess.

Tulsi needs to clean out every one of the agencies from the vengeful Deep Staters who attacked her and so many others, including Trump. We need files released on what has happened at these rotten agencies the past two decades. Especially on the lying by former DNI James Clapper. In 2013, he swore before Congress the NSA did not spy on every American. Shortly after whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed, indeed, the NSA does spy on every American’s phone calls and every keystroke of every message.

Indeed, it’s worse now because computing power has grown exponentially the past 11 years, with Artificial Intelligence now giving the government even more massive snooping capabilities. Clapper ought to have been jailed for lying to Congress, but wasn’t. He went on to be involved in the Russiagate Hoax that prevented Trump, in his first term, from working out deals with Putin on nuclear arms control and preventing the horrific Ukraine War.

For his troubles, Snowden went into exile in Russia, the only place from which the U.S. could not extradite or kidnap him.

Trump also appointed Rep. Matt Gaetz to be attorney general. Gaetz has called for pardoning Snowden, so we better get that. Snowden said he wants to return to the Land of the Free (past and, we hope, future). He would become a major asset for cleaning up the intel mess, appearing before Congress to tell us what’s going on and showing up on YouTube podcasters’ channels, such as Joe Rogan.

Yes, I know the problems with Gaetz, allegedly with underage girls. He says it’s a frame-up by the FBI, a rotten bureau which he now will oversee. We’ll be finding out more than we want to know about the allegations at the confirmation hearings.

But here’s what he said about Snowden in 2020:

As of today, the case has never been stronger that Edward Snowden deserves a pardon from President Trump. I would support a pardon for Edward Snowden. If it were not for Snowden, we might not know today that our own government was engaged in an activity that now a federal appellate court has deemed illegal.

To which then-Rep. Liz Cheney retorted on Dec. 13, 2020: “Edward Snowden is a traitor. He is responsible for the largest and most damaging release of classified info in US history. He handed over US secrets to Russian and Chinese intelligence putting our troops and our nation at risk. Pardoning him would be unconscionable.”

Actually, Snowden was careful to redact any information that would have helped Russia and China. And how are we supposed to find out about government perfidy unless whistleblowers come forward?

Of course, Cheney’s tweet was just before the Jan. 6 Capitol “insurrection” and her attacks on Trump on the Jan. 6 Committee. So Trump now is likely to do the opposite of what she demanded, pardoning Snowden.

For the first time since the 1975-76 Church Committee, we have a chance to find out what’s really going in these abusive, supersecret, totalitarian agencies – and maybe do something to clean them up.