Trump-Russia leaks prove the national security deep state is real and powerful

It’s bad enough that the Obama administration used the tools of America’s intelligence apparatus to launch a politically motivated spying operation on then-candidate Trump. It’s worse that the sabotage operations continued well into the transition period and the Trump presidency.

Monday evening, we learned that during the presidential transition period, high-ranking former FBI officials, along with leaders in the Justice Department, appear to have coordinated with the media to leak salacious and unverified information that served to delegitimize the Trump presidency.

These emails show top FBI officials James Comey, Andrew McCabe, and others sharing messages about their plans to brief the president on the infamous Trump-Russia dossier, a political opposition research document funded by the Clinton campaign and the DNC.

The emails do not prove definitively that CNN was briefed on the dossier by Comey or McCabe. However, we do know the FBI previously determined that McCabe was the source of a leak to the Wall Street Journal. McCabe, who lied under oath to the FBI repeatedly about the incident, leaked information about an ongoing investigation in direct violation of FBI policy. We also know that former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper prompted Comey to brief the incoming president on the dossier. According to the House Intelligence Committee, Clapper leaked details of the dossier briefing to CNN and lied to Congress about it. He is now a CNN contributor.

McCabe also disclosed CNN’s awareness of the dossier in an email to Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, who would later become acting attorney general in the first days of the Trump administration.

The effort to dismantle the president’s agenda did not stop when he stepped into the Oval Office.

Yates openly defied the president’s national security executive order, which put a temporary moratorium on individuals traveling into the United States from terror-linked countries. Yates was summarily dismissed after she instructed the Department of Justice not to defend his executive order.

In the early days of the Trump presidency, the national security deep state leaked damaging information about the president at an average rate of one story per day. A Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committee report released by Senator Ron Johnson found that in the first four months of the Trump presidency, there were at least 125 national security-related leaks to the media. The report found that many of the leaks were related to the so-called Russian meddling investigation.

Given the makeup of the federal bureaucracy and its continuing expansion, these efforts to undermine the president’s “America-first” national security efforts weren’t exactly unexpected.

Government bureaucrats have overwhelmingly left-leaning sympathies. In 2016, The Hill found that 95 percent of federal government employee campaign contributions went to Hillary Clinton’s campaign for president.

Today, the DOJ and the FBI continue to pull out all the stops to shield their activities from congressional oversight. Justice officials have been attempting to conceal their overtly political activities through unnecessary redactions that have nothing to do with protecting national security and everything to do with covering for the corrupt Justice Department and FBI leadership.

The president has done what he can do drain the national security swamps in the National Security Council, the State Department, and in other major avenues for security policy. We are finally starting to see reform in institutions that were, in the early days of the Trump presidency, entirely dismissive of the president’s proposals and priorities. He has appointed like-minded allies such as national security adviser John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who will undoubtedly help him fight back against rogue deep state operators. It is also certain that newly confirmed CIA Director Gina Haspel and current Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats will face challenges from within their respective institutions.

However, Attorney General Jeff Sessions has essentially checked out from his responsibilities. He has left the keys of the Department of Justice to Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein, who has made it his mission to protect special counsel Robert Mueller’s supposed investigation into Russian activities during the 2016 election. Rosenstein has consistently defied Congressional inquiries into his efforts to shield the Justice Department from accountability.

Rosenstein has freed Mueller to infinitely extend his prosecutorial overreach. Instead of getting to the bottom of Russian meddling, Mueller has made it his mission to target Trump campaign and Trump administration officials on charges that have nothing to do with the alleged purpose of the Russia probe. The Mueller investigation has become nothing more than an extension of the national security deep state’s war on the Trump presidency.

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