The Deep
State Goes to War with Trump, Using Unverified
Claims, as Democrats Cheer
By Glenn
Greenwald
January 12,
2017 "Information
Clearing House"
-
"The
Intercept" -
In January, 1961, Dwight Eisenhower delivered
his farewell address after serving two terms as
U.S. president; the five-star general chose to warn
Americans of this specific threat to democracy: “In
the councils of government, we must guard against
the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether
sought or unsought, by the military-industrial
complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of
misplaced power exists and will persist.” That
warning was issued prior to the decadelong
escalation of the Vietnam War, three more decades of
Cold War mania, and the post-9/11 era, all of which
radically expanded that unelected faction’s power
even further.
This is the
faction that is now engaged in open warfare against
the duly elected and
already widely disliked president-elect, Donald
Trump. They are using classic Cold War dirty tactics
and the defining ingredients of what has until
recently been denounced as “Fake News.”
Their most
valuable instrument is the U.S. media, much of which
reflexively reveres, serves, believes, and sides
with hidden intelligence officials. And Democrats,
still reeling from their unexpected and traumatic
election loss as well as
a systemic collapse of their party, seemingly
divorced further and further from reason with each
passing day, are willing — eager — to
embrace any claim, cheer any tactic, align with any
villain, regardless of how unsupported, tawdry and
damaging those behaviors might be.
The serious
dangers posed by a Trump presidency are numerous and
manifest. There are a wide array of legitimate and
effective tactics for combatting those threats: from
bipartisan congressional coalitions and
constitutional legal challenges to citizen uprisings
and sustained and aggressive civil disobedience. All
of those strategies have periodically proven
themselves effective in times of political crisis or
authoritarian overreach.
But
cheering for the CIA and its shadowy allies
to unilaterally subvert the U.S. election and impose
its own policy dictates on the elected president is
both warped and self-destructive. Empowering the
very entities that have produced the most shameful
atrocities and systemic deceit over the last six
decades is desperation of the worst kind. Demanding
that evidence-free, anonymous assertions be
instantly venerated as Truth — despite emanating
from the very precincts designed to propagandize and
lie — is an assault on journalism, democracy, and
basic human rationality. And casually branding
domestic adversaries who refuse to go along as
traitors and disloyal foreign operatives is morally
bankrupt and certain to backfire on those doing it.
Beyond all
that, there is no bigger favor that Trump opponents
can do for him than attacking him with such lowly,
shabby, obvious shams, recruiting large media
outlets to lead the way. When it comes time to
expose actual Trump corruption and criminality, who
is going to believe the people and institutions who
have demonstrated they are willing to endorse any
assertions no matter how factually baseless, who
deploy any journalistic tactic no matter how
unreliable and removed from basic means of ensuring
accuracy?
All of
these toxic ingredients were on full display
yesterday as the Deep State unleashed its tawdriest
and most aggressive assault yet on Trump: vesting
credibility in and then causing the public
disclosure of a completely unvetted and unverified
document, compiled by a paid, anonymous operative
while he was working for both GOP and Democratic
opponents of Trump, accusing Trump of a wide range
of crimes, corrupt acts and salacious private
conduct. The reaction to all of this illustrates
that while the Trump presidency poses grave dangers,
so, too, do those who are increasingly unhinged in
their flailing, slapdash, and destructive attempts
to undermine it.
For months, the CIA, with
unprecedented clarity, overtly threw its weight
behind Hillary Clinton’s candidacy and sought to
defeat Donald Trump. In August, former acting CIA
Director Michael Morell announced
his endorsement of Clinton in the New York Times and
claimed that “Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as
an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.”
The CIA and NSA director under George W. Bush, Gen.
Michael Hayden, also endorsed Clinton, and went
to the Washington Post to warn, in the week
before the election, that “Donald Trump really does
sound a lot like Vladimir Putin,” adding that Trump
is “the useful fool, some naif, manipulated by
Moscow, secretly held in contempt, but whose blind
support is happily accepted and exploited.”
It is not
hard to understand why the CIA preferred Clinton
over Trump. Clinton was critical of Obama for
restraining the CIA’s proxy war in Syria and was
eager to expand that war, while Trump denounced
it. Clinton clearly wanted
a harder line than Obama took against the CIA’s
long-standing foes in Moscow, while Trump wanted
improved relations and greater cooperation. In
general, Clinton defended and intended to extend the
decadeslong international military order on which
the CIA and Pentagon’s preeminence depends, while
Trump — through a still-uncertain mix of instability
and extremist conviction — posed a threat to it.
Whatever
one’s views are on those debates, it is the
democratic framework — the presidential election,
the confirmation process, congressional leaders,
judicial proceedings, citizen activism and protest,
civil disobedience — that should determine how they
are resolved. All of those policy disputes were
debated out in the open; the public heard them; and
Trump won. Nobody should crave the rule of Deep
State overlords.
Yet craving
Deep State rule is exactly what prominent Democratic
operatives and media figures are doing. Any doubt
about that is now dispelled. Just last week, Chuck
Schumer issued a warning to Trump, telling Rachel
Maddow that Trump was being “really dumb” by
challenging the unelected intelligence community
because of all the ways they possess to destroy
those who dare to stand up to them:
And last night, many Democrats
openly embraced and celebrated what was, so plainly,
an attempt by the Deep State to sabotage an elected
official who had defied it: ironically, its own form
of blackmail.
Back in October,
a political operative and former employee of the
British intelligence agency MI6 was being paid by
Democrats to dig up dirt on Trump (before that, he
was paid by anti-Trump Republicans). He tried to
convince countless media outlets to publish a long
memo he had written filled with explosive
accusations about Trump’s treason, business
corruption and sexual escapades, with the
overarching theme that Trump was in servitude to
Moscow because they were blackmailing and bribing
him.
Despite how
many had it, no media outlets published it. That was
because these were anonymous claims unaccompanied by
any evidence at all, and even in this more
permissive new media environment, nobody was willing
to be journalistically associated with it. As the
New York Times’ Executive Editor Dean Baquet
put it last night, he would not publish these
“totally unsubstantiated” allegations because “we,
like others, investigated the allegations and
haven’t corroborated them, and we felt we’re not in
the business of publishing things we can’t stand
by.”
The closest
this operative got to success was convincing Mother
Jones’s David Corn to publish
an October 31 article reporting that “a former
senior intelligence officer for a Western country”
claims that “he provided the [FBI] with memos, based
on his recent interactions with Russian sources,
contending the Russian government has for years
tried to co-opt and assist Trump.”
But because
this was just an anonymous claim unaccompanied by
any evidence or any specifics (which Corn withheld),
it made very little impact. All of that changed
yesterday. Why?
What
changed was the intelligence community’s
resolution to cause this all to become public and to
be viewed as credible. In December, John McCain
provided a copy of this report to the FBI and
demanded they take it seriously.
At some
point last week, the chiefs of the intelligence
agencies decided to declare that this ex-British
intelligence operative was “credible” enough that
his allegations warranted briefing both Trump and
Obama about them, thus stamping some sort of vague,
indirect, and deniable official approval on these
accusations. Someone — by all appearances, numerous
officials — then went to CNN to tell them they had
done this, causing CNN to go on-air and, in the
gravest of tones, announce the “Breaking News” that
“the nation’s top intelligence officials” briefed
Obama and Trump that Russia had compiled information
that “compromised President-elect Trump.”
CNN
refused to specify what these allegations were
on the ground that they could not “verify” them.
But with this document in the hands of multiple
media outlets, it was only a matter of time — a
small amount of time — before someone would step
up and publish the whole thing. Buzzfeed quickly
obliged,
airing all of the unvetted, anonymous claims
about Trump.
Its
editor-in-chief Ben Smith
published a memo explaining that decision,
saying that—- although there “is serious reason
to doubt the allegations” — Buzzfeed in general
“errs on the side of publication” and “Americans
can make up their own minds about the
allegations.” Publishing this document
predictably produced massive traffic (and thus
profit) for the site, with millions of people
viewing the article and presumably reading the
“dossier.”
One can
certainly object to Buzzfeed’s decision and, as
the New York Times notes this morning, many
journalists are doing so. It’s almost impossible
to imagine a scenario where it’s justifiable for
a news outlet to publish a totally anonymous,
unverified, unvetted document filled with
scurrilous and inflammatory allegations about
which its own editor-in-chief says there “is
serious reason to doubt the allegations,” on the
ground that they want to leave it to the public
to decide whether to believe it.
But
even if one believes there is no such case where
that is justified, yesterday’s circumstances
presented the most compelling scenario possible
for doing this. Once CNN strongly hinted at
these allegations, it left it to the public
imagination to conjure up the dirt Russia
allegedly had to blackmail and control Trump. By
publishing these accusations, BuzzFeed ended
that speculation. More importantly, it allowed
everyone to see how dubious this document is,
one the CIA and CNN had elevated into some sort
of grave national security threat.
Almost immediately after
it was published, the farcical nature of the
“dossier” manifested. Not only was its author
anonymous, but he was paid by Democrats (and,
before that, by Trump’s GOP adversaries) to dig
up dirt on Trump. Worse, he himself cited no
evidence of any kind, but instead relied on a
string of other anonymous people in Russia he
claims told him these things. Worse still, the
document was filled with amateur errors.
While
many of the claims are inherently unverified,
some can be confirmed. One such claim — that
Trump lawyer Michael Cohen secretly traveled
to Prague in August to meet with Russian
officials — was strongly denied by Cohen, who
insisted he had never been to Prague in his life
(Prague is the same place that foreign
intelligence officials
claimed, in 2001, was the site of a
nonexistent meeting between Iraqi officials and
9/11 hijackers, which contributed to
70% of Americans believing, as late as the
fall of 2003, that Saddam personally planned the
9/11 attack). This morning,
the Wall Street Journal reported that “the
FBI has found no evidence that [Cohen] traveled
to the Czech Republic.”
None of
this stopped Democratic operatives and prominent
media figures from treating these totally
unverified and unvetted allegations as grave
revelations. From Vox’s Zach Beauchamp:
BuzzFeed’s Borzou Daraghai posted
a long series of tweets discussing the profound
consequences of these revelations, only
occasionally remembering to insert the rather
important journalistic caveat “if true” in
his meditations:
Meanwhile, liberal commentator
Rebecca Solnit declared this to be a “smoking
gun” that proves Trump’s “treason,” while Daily
Kos’ Markos Moulitsas sounded the same theme:
Glenn
Greenwald is one of three co-founding editors of The
Intercept. He is a journalist, constitutional lawyer,
and author of four New
York Times best-selling books on politics and
law. His most recent book, No Place to Hide,
is about the U.S. surveillance state and his experiences
reporting on the Snowden documents around the world.
The views
expressed in this article are the author's own and do
not necessarily reflect Information Clearing House
editorial policy. |