The Military-Intelligence Complex

[tonyz]

What would one call what has happened to Trump since the day he took office Obstruction? A coup? A conspiracy?

...a reasonable observer might at least call it disturbing, to say the least.

One thoughtful, well read and analytical observer has clearly laid out - in the piece below - the strange and unprecedented dynamics facing our sitting president.

The Military-Intelligence Complex

amgreatness.com/2019/11/03/the-military-intelligence-complex/
November 4, 2019
Victor Davis Hanson

Much has been written about the so-called Resistance of disgruntled Clinton, Obama, and progressive activists who have pledged to stop Donald Trump’s agenda. The choice of the noun “Resistance,” of course, conjures up not mere “opposition,” but is meant to evoke the French “resistance” of World War II—in the melodramatic sense of current loyal progressive patriots doing their best to thwart by almost any means necessary the Nazi-like Trump.

We know from a variety of disinterested watchdog institutions and foundations that the media has offered 90 percent negative coverage of the Trump Administration. CNN in its anti-Trump zeal has ruined its brand by serial fabrications and firings of its marquee biased reporters.

An entire array of CNN journalists and analysts either has resigned, been fired, retired, forced to offer retractions, or been disgraced either for peddling ad hominem crude attacks on Trump, displaying unprofessional behavior, concocting or repeating false stories, engaging in obscene commentary, or being refuted, including but not limited at times to Reza Aslan, Carl Bernstein, Donna Brazile, James Clapper, Marshall Cohen, Candy Crowley, Kathy Griffin, Julie Joffe, Michael Hayden, Suzanne Malveaux, Manu Raju, Jim Sciutto, Julian Zelizer, and teams such as Thomas Frank, Eric Lichtblau, and Lex Harris, and Gloria Borger, Jake Tapper, and Brian Rokus.

About every month or so, a Hollywood or entertainment personage offers a new assassination scenario of shooting, torching, stabbing, beating, blowing up, caging, or lynching the elected president.

Likewise, the country witnesses about every six weeks a new “turning point,” “bombshell,” “walls are closing in” effort to subvert the Trump presidency. And the list of such futile and fabricated attempts to abort Trump is indeed now quite monotonous: the efforts to sue three states on false charges of tampered voting machines, the attempt to subvert the voting of the Electoral College, the invocation of the ossified Logan Act, the melodramas concerning the emoluments clause and 25th Amendment, the Mueller’s Dream Team and all-star 22-month failed effort to find collusion and obstruction, the personal psychodramas of Stormy Daniels, Michael Cohen, Michael Avenatti, and the Trump tax returns, the desperate efforts to tar Trump as a “white supremacist,” followed by cries of “Recession! Recession!,” and now, of course, “Ukraine! Ukraine!”

Perhaps these efforts were best summed up by an anonymous New York Times op-ed writer who on September 5, 2018, outlined how officials within the Trump Administration took it upon themselves in the midst of the Mueller investigation to obstruct and impede the workings of the seemingly oblivious cuckold Trump: “The dilemma—which he [Trump] does not fully grasp — is that many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations . . . I would know. I am one of them.”

The Normalization of the Coup?
Yet far more disturbing have been the furor of lame-duck and retired intelligence and military officers.

In unprecedented fashion, some have not just disagreed with the commander in chief, but have declared that he is unfit for office and by implication thus should be obstructed and perhaps even removed. Efforts such as these were recently praised by former acting CIA Director John McLaughlin, who announced to a gathering of former intelligence bureaucrats, “Thank God for the deep state.”

Donald Trump had been in office less than a month when the Wall Street Journal reported that U.S. intelligence agencies had decided on their own to withhold information from the recently inaugurated president of the United States: “In some of these cases of withheld information, officials have decided not to show Mr. Trump the sources and methods that the intelligence agencies use to collect information, the current and former officials said.”

What would one call that? Obstruction? A coup? A conspiracy?

Most of the major intelligence heads in the Obama Administration—James Comey, John Brennan, and James Clapper—either leaked classified information aimed at harming candidate and then President Trump, later declared him a veritable traitor and Russian asset, or earlier took measures to monitor his campaign or administration’s communications.

In the coming months, the investigations of Michael Horowitz, the inspector general at the Justice Department, and the department’s own criminal investigations by U.S. Attorney John Durham, may well detail one of the most extensive efforts in our history by the American intelligence agencies and their enablers in the executive branch to subvert a campaign, disrupt a presidential transition, and to abort a presidency.

Just 10 days after Trump was inaugurated, Washington insider lawyer Rosa Brooks—a former adviser in the Obama Administration to Assistant Secretary of State Harold Koh and a former special counsel to the president at George Soros’s Open Society Institute—in Foreign Policy offered formal advice about removing Trump in an article titled, “3 Ways to Get Rid of President Trump Before 2020.”

Brooks needed just over a week to conclude that the elected president had to go by means other than an election. After rejecting the first option of the usual constitutional remedy of waiting until the 2020 election (“But after such a catastrophic first week, four years seems like a long time to wait.”), Brooks offered her three fallback strategies to depose Trump:

1) Immediate impeachment. “If impeachment seems like a fine solution to you, the good news is that Congress doesn’t need evidence of actual treason or murder to move forward with an impeachment,” she wrote. “Practically anything can be considered a ‘high crime or misdemeanor.’”). Brooks did not elaborate on what “anything” might be.

2) Declaring Trump mentally unfit under the 25th Amendment. “In these dark days, some around the globe are finding solace in the 25th Amendment to the Constitution,” she wrote. Brooks did not mention that what non-U.S. citizens abroad may feel about removing Trump as mentally unfit is of no constitutional importance. Yet she was also prescient—given the later McCabe-Rosenstein comical aborted palace coup of ridding the country of a supposedly “sick” Trump.

3) A military coup, which Brooks wrote, “is one that until recently I would have said was unthinkable in the United States of America.” If not a “coup,” then “at least a refusal by military leaders to obey certain orders.” Notice the cheap praeteritio: claim that such an idea should have been previously “unthinkable” as a means to demonstrate just how thinkable it now should be.

In the months and years that followed, Brooks again proved either vatic or had foreknowledge of the sort of “resistance” that would follow.

So it is now the decision of many ex-intelligence heads and flag officers to change the rules of the game. They will live to rue the ensuing harm to the reputations both of the intelligence services and the military at large.

In early March 2017, Evelyn Farkas, an outgoing Obama-appointed deputy assistant secretary of defense, detailed in a weird revelation on MSNBC how departing Obama Administration officials scrambled to leak and undermine the six-week-old Trump Administration. “I was urging my former colleagues and, frankly speaking, the people on the Hill . . .‘Get as much information as you can. Get as much intelligence as you can before President Obama leaves the administration . . . The Trump folks, if they found out how we knew what we knew about the Trump staff’s dealing with Russians, [they] would try to compromise those sources and methods, meaning we would no longer have access to that intelligence . . . That’s why you have the leaking.”

In other words, a Pentagon official was illegally leaking documents, apparently classified, in order both to defame the president as a Russian asset and to thwart any investigation of such internal and likely illegal resistance.

The New Retired Military
At various times, an entire pantheon of retired generals and intelligence directors has gone to Twitter or progressive cable channels like CNN and MSNBC to declare the president of the United States either a Russian asset and thus a traitor, or unfit for office, or in some other way to call for his removal before the election of 2020—for some, seemingly in violation of the code of military conduct that forbids even retired officers from defaming the commander-in-chief. None cited any felonious conduct on Trump’s part; all were infuriated either by presidential comportment and tone or policies with which they disagreed.