The people pushing hardest for Trump’s early removal are more dangerous than Trump

Fascinating. Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone magazine is very much a part of the Mandarin Class clerisy. He hates Donald Trump.

But . . .

From We're in a permanent coup by Matt Taibbi. A fascinating mix of two firm beliefs.

Donal Trump is almost evil and certainly incompetent

and

We have a Deep State coup going on which threatens our system of government.

Both the article and the commenters (apparently also firmly of the Left) are a clanging cry of cognitive disonance.

From the article:

My discomfort in the last few years, first with Russiagate and now with Ukrainegate and impeachment, stems from the belief that the people pushing hardest for Trump’s early removal are more dangerous than Trump. Many Americans don’t see this because they’re not used to waking up in a country where you’re not sure who the president will be by nightfall. They don’t understand that this predicament is worse than having a bad president.

The Trump presidency is the first to reveal a full-blown schism between the intelligence community and the White House. Senior figures in the CIA, NSA, FBI and other agencies made an open break from their would-be boss before Trump’s inauguration, commencing a public war of leaks that has not stopped.

The first big shot was fired in early January, 2017, via a CNN.com headline, “Intel chiefs presented Trump with claims of Russian efforts to compromise him.” This tale, about the January 7th presentation of former British spy Christopher Steele’s report to then-President-elect Trump, began as follows:

Classified documents presented last week to President Obama and President-elect Trump included allegations that Russian operatives claim to have compromising personal and financial information about Mr. Trump, multiple US officials with direct knowledge of the briefings tell CNN.

Four intelligence chiefs in the FBI’s James Comey, the CIA’s John Brennan, the NSA’s Mike Rogers, and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, presented an incoming president with a politically disastrous piece of information, in this case a piece of a private opposition research report.

Among other things because the news dropped at the same time Buzzfeed decided to publish the entire “bombshell” Steele dossier, reporters spent that week obsessing not about the mode of the story’s release, but about the “claims.” In particular, audiences were rapt by allegations that Russians were trying to blackmail Trump with evidence of a golden shower party commissioned on a bed once slept upon by Barack Obama himself.

Twitter exploded. No other news story mattered. For the next two years, the “claims” of compromise and a “continuing” Trump-Russian “exchange” hung over the White House like a sword of Damocles.

Few were interested in the motives for making this story public. As it turned out, there were two explanations, one that was made public, and one that only came out later. The public justification as outlined in the CNN piece, was to “make the President-elect aware that such allegations involving him [were] circulating among intelligence agencies.”

However, we know from Comey’s January 7, 2017 memo to deputy Andrew McCabe and FBI General Counsel James Baker there was another explanation. Comey wrote:

I said I wasn’t saying this was true, only that I wanted [Trump] to know both that it had been reported and that the reports were in many hands. I said media like CNN had them and were looking for a news hook. I said it was important that we not give them the excuse to write that the FBI has the material or [redacted] and that we were keeping it very close-hold.

Imagine if a similar situation had taken place in January of 2009, involving president-elect Barack Obama. Picture a meeting between Obama and the heads of the CIA, NSA, and FBI, along with the DIA, in which the newly-elected president is presented with a report complied by, say, Judicial Watch, accusing him of links to al-Qaeda. Imagine further that they tell Obama they are presenting him with this information to make him aware of a blackmail threat, and to reassure him they won’t give news agencies a “hook” to publish the news.

I agree. It seems increasingly obvious that our intelligence community, supplemented by the IRS, have become politicized and are no longer serving the great public but are pursuing their own personal partisan/personal agendas. For our great experiment in constrained government to continue to succeed, it depends on a bedrock of trust. Once government agencies demonstrate that they are not serving the public but their own interests instead, we are in perilous waters.

Taibbi then goes on to document the increasingly compelling evidence that various governmental agencies have been actively working and coordinating with the loser of the last election to subvert the power and effectiveness of the winner.

This is the dangerous territory Taibbi sees us in and I agree. As he says:

My discomfort in the last few years, first with Russiagate and now with Ukrainegate and impeachment, stems from the belief that the people pushing hardest for Trump’s early removal are more dangerous than Trump.

Interestingly, Taibbi is even more explicit in the comments section.

Matt Taibbi Oct 11

Thanks - see Chuck McClenon’s reply below. I can’t stress enough that the Russiagate insanity, and specifically the Steele leak, began before Trump took office. If it was not framing exactly it was certainly manipulation of wrong intelligence, on par with using Chalabi’s tales to start war. There are only three explanations for the January 7, 2017 “intel chiefs” meeting. One, they sincerely believed Trump was a cultivated foreign agent as Steele reported. I don’t buy that this is possible. They had half a year at least to investigate these extremely serious claims. If they were true, leaking to CNN and letting Trump take office is an extremely weak response. Moreover no evidence to substantiate the idea ever surfaced. Two: Steele was on some level genuinely reporting rumors he heard, and the agencies merely waved this dicey intel on to the public via leaks (and gave it gravitas with leaks of their meeting) because it was explosive and expedient, advancing political goals they had. This to me is the most likely explanation. A sub-possibility is Steele was duped by Russian disinformation and the agencies either knew this and waved it through, or weren’t sure and waved it through anyway. Three: the agencies had a direct hand in creating the Steele nonsense. I think this unlikely. It’s what Trump and Giuliani believe, and it’s not completely unsupported, given Steele’s relationship with the FBI and Fusion’s dubious history, but I have a hard time believing such a Dr. Evil narrative absent hard hard evidence. Still, option #2, i.e. cynically using/leaking wrong intel to cripple an incoming president, would be an awesome corruption/meddling story, beyond anything Trump has done.

chuck mcclenon Oct 11

Right. And this is where I'm also caught, trying to figure between options #2 and #3 -- it's hard to believe #3 in which there is some intentional Dr. Evil master-minding the coup, even if the incestuous relationships among Steele, the McCabes, foreign intelligence partners, etc. Certainly the opportunities were there for some very deliberate collusion, but have all of these players already been totally in the bank for Hillary from the beginning? It seems more likely that there were more tentacles, operating more or less independently -- Steele and Fusion GPS doing their thing, bought and paid for fairly directly by the Clinton campaign, and the IC community/FBI believing this because it was useful to them. But it becomes a fuzzy line between when the IC community is wanting to believe it and wanting more of it. Are they conspirators, or dupes? Which would be worse? As evidence in support of #3, we have McCabe keeping in touch with Steele even after Steele is officially fired, and it appears that the rest of the agency is aware of this. What we lack is the specific individual Dr. Evil who is pulling the strings. But isn't a multi-header Dr. Evil both more plausible and more evil? But, as you say, even option #2 is far more corrupt and awesome than anything Donald Trump is capable of.

I agree with Taibbi that we are suffering a crisis of institutional credibility and not one of polarization. Select individuals within particular agencies are working to subvert the will of the people. And are thereby subverting the entirety of our system of governance. The fact that such actions also constitute a defense of appropriated power and Mandarin Class protectionism is a material, though separate, issue.

I disagree with Taibbi regarding whether it is patently obvious that Trump is an evil dunce. I think that there is an enormous amount of evidence to the contrary. Trump definitely thinks differently than the Mandarin Class, takes different risks than they are comfortable with, and disdains and insults the Mandarin Class. None of that justifies an attempt to overturn the choice of the sovereign people. It is not even clear that those differences are a threat to anyone except the Gilded Clerisy and their utopian fantasy where they are the Philosopher King controlling everyone else.

It is also interesting that the most severe indictment of the Deep State malfeasance hinges on whether "the agencies had a direct hand in creating the Steele nonsense." If that is the only barrier for Taibbi to believing the worst about the Deep State actions, then I think we are very close to a solidly left representative of the Mandarin Clerisy being convinced that the Deep State is undermining our democracy.

I think they are and I would split a hair. I think they have been trying to reverse the results of the election but I do not think it has been a controlled and coordinated effort. Not a conspiracy per se but a native instinct for self-preservation of privilege and sinecures. So bad actions for bad reason's, just not a structured conspiracy.