[A president who is out of control confronts an agency that wants
to show Congress and the public that it is under control. All of which
underscores the new reality of Washington’s impeachment season:
nobody’s in control. ] [[link removed]]

IMPEACHMENT FEATURES TRUMP VS CIA WHISTLEBLOWER  
[[link removed]]

 

Jefferson Morley
October 4, 2019
Independent Media Institute

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_ A president who is out of control confronts an agency that wants to
show Congress and the public that it is under control. All of which
underscores the new reality of Washington’s impeachment season:
nobody’s in control. _

,

 

The long-impending constitutional crisis has arrived, courtesy of a
CIA whistleblower. If his or her complaint
[[link removed]] was
conceived as a covert political action operation, it could not have
been more effective. The nine-page letter
[[link removed]] did
what Robert Mueller’s 448-page opus did not: jump-start the
impeachment process. The day after Trump acknowledged he spoke with
the Ukrainian president about Joe Biden’s son Hunter, seven
freshman Democrats
[[link removed]],
six of them with national security experience, came out for
impeachment. Nancy Pelosi, an impeachment skeptic, relented and
allowed impeachment proceedings to begin. “The facts changed the
situation,” she said.

No, says the president and his defenders. It’s just “BULLSHIT,”
[[link removed]] tweeted
the rattled Trump. His conversation with the Ukrainian president was
“perfect,” he intones. To doubt its perfection is to join the
ongoing “deep state”
[[link removed]] conspiracy
to get him.

Trump’s defenders, while awash in bad faith and lies, are correct
about one thing: there is a subterranean conflict that pulses beneath
partisan clashes between congressional Democrats and the Republican
president. It is a clash of bureaucratic factions, fought with leaked
(or planted) narratives disseminated by allies in the media.

This is the traditional way of Washington politics, now whipped to a
froth by the convulsions of a dysfunctional and deregulated political
system. Not only do U.S. intelligence agencies see the American
presidency is vulnerable to manipulation (or capture) by pro-Trump
intelligence services
[[link removed]] in
Moscow, Riyadh, and Jerusalem, but the president himself is viewed as
a threat to the national security process.

The crisis runs even deeper than Watergate, which had the effect of
empowering Congress and reining in the intelligence agencies. As in
Watergate, the Trump crisis pits a president who says there are no
limits on his freedom of action against the institutional forces of
the CIA and FBI. These agencies were, and are, adept at defending
their interests in the Washington press corps. As in Watergate, the
interests of the agencies and the Democrats overlap—they both seek
to curb and remove a lawless president.

The CIA-White House power struggle is much more naked than during
Watergate. In the early 1970s, the agency abhorred the very idea of a
“media presence.” The imperious director Richard Helms
[[link removed]] occasionally
testified in Congress, but he gave no interviews. He cultivated senior
editors but betrayed few secrets. The CIA, respectable and feared, had
many Republican defenders on Capitol Hill. No more.

Today, the Agency is more public and politicized. The agency’s
suspicions of Trump crystallized as he marched to the Republican
presidential nomination in 2016. Trump’s arriviste style and proud
ignorance were provocative to the agency’s buttoned-down style. So
was his “isolationism” and hostility to the shibboleths of free
trade and national security. Damaging leaks of classified information
from national security sources began even before he took the oath of
office.

Since then, the political profile of the CIA has grown. Former
directors John Brennan and Michael Hayden have become cable TV
regulars, along with a diverse cast of former officers. In 2018, two
CIA formers were elected to Congress, and the agency launched its
Twitter and Instagram feeds (which, Edward Snowden observes, amount to
state-sanctioned propaganda repackaged as adorable social media
[[link removed]].)

Publicity is not necessarily an advantage for covert operators. Unlike
Nixon, Trump is willing to mobilize popular hostility to his
bureaucratic antagonists. Privately, Nixon raged and plotted against
the CIA and FBI, but publicly he championed those agencies. He
couldn’t and wouldn’t make them a political issue.

Trump is not so constrained. Four times in the last two weeks, the
president has taken to Twitter to liken the whistleblower to a spy
[[link removed]] who
should face “Big Consequences.”
[[link removed]] Wit
[[link removed]]h less
than a third
[[link removed]] of
Trump supporters holding a favorable opinion of the CIA and FBI, Trump
can shore up his support by demonizing his critics as tools of “a
Crooked and Demented Deep State.”
[[link removed]]

Nonetheless, Trump has taken a punch, apparently from the CIA, that
has him raging incoherently in public. The whistleblower’s complaint
about Trump’s dealings with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky
transformed Washington’s political reality by capturing Trump, the
recidivist, in action.

Last spring, Mueller’s cautious report detailed how Trump’s
entourage solicited help from the Russian state agents without ever
quite conspiring with them. Mueller documented how Trump obstructed
his investigation but left it to others to bring charges. “No
collusion,” Trump crowed.

But, barely a day after Mueller’s July 24 appearance before
Congress, Trump couldn’t help but do what he had just denied: He
sought to collude. The White House summary
[[link removed]] of
his conversation with Zelensky essentially confirmed the
whistleblower’s narrative that Trump had tried to solicit—if not
extort—a foreign government into helping his 2020 election campaign.
Thanks to the CIA officer’s report, the case for impeachment
suddenly had a simple narrative and a new urgency.

The role of the CIA is unnerving. President Harry Truman initially
opposed the creation of the CIA in 1945 because he feared creating an
“American Gestapo,” a secret police force. The agency’s
involvement in American politics today is hardly unprecedented. In the
early 1990s, four senior agency officers were indicted for leading
roles in the Iran-contra conspiracy to bypass a congressional ban on
CIA activities in Central America. But, in that case, the agency and
the presidency were aligned. President George H.W. Bush, a former
director, pardoned the indicted men on the advice of Attorney General
Bill Barr. The agency suffered little for its intervention in domestic
politics.

Now the CIA and the White House are at war. In comparison with an
unstable president, a rogue attorney general, and a coterie of
conspiracy theorists, the agency’s credibility is higher than usual.
But the Ukrainian revelations, coming from an employee of a
law-breaking, not law-making, organization, has to be treated with
care.

First of all, meddling in (and profiting from) Ukrainian politics
[[link removed]] is
the norm in the U.S. political class, as Yasha Levine notes. Paul
Manafort, Trump’s one-time campaign manager, reaped coin
[[link removed]] in
Kiev. So did Tad Devine
[[link removed]],
a strategist for Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign. So
did Hunter Biden
[[link removed]].
That doesn’t excuse Trump’s mafioso-like demand for “a favor”
from the Ukraine president, but it does explain why he might have
thought it was business as usual.

“I do not trust the CIA when it comes to whistleblowers,” says
John Kiriakou, a former operations officer turned whistleblower who
went to jail for 30 months for confirming details of the CIA’s
torture regime to a reporter. “The CIA is protecting itself. They
don’t care about you, they don’t care about me. They don’t care
about the presidency. They care about themselves.”

The complaint, Kiriakou speculated in a phone interview, was written
by “a committee of spies.” He speculated that the whistleblower
was advised by CIA superiors, including lawyers, before submitting the
complaint to the inspector general in the Office of the Director of
National Intelligence. The New York Times has reported that the
whistleblower only shared the complaint anonymously
[[link removed]] with
CIA lawyers. That said, Kiriakou added, “I want to believe the guy.
I think his identity should be protected and more people should come
forward.”

I asked Larry Pfeiffer, former chief of staff to ex-CIA director
Michael Hayden, if he thought the whistleblower’s complaint had been
vetted by the agency.

“I’m not going to speculate about something like that,” he
replied. “The whistleblower statute was written to protect the
identity of the whistleblower, so I would assume he or she wouldn’t
want others to know. My reading of the complaint is that it sounds
like the whistleblower coordinated with others working on Ukraine
issues across the inter-agency [process.] I think they were all
concerned that the stated policy of the U.S. government was not being
adhered to.”

Under fire from the president, the agency suddenly needs the
intelligence oversight process. The post-Watergate reforms—the
creation of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, and the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act courts—brought the agency
under more supervision, which it consistently resisted. Five years
ago, the CIA was stonewalling
[[link removed]] the
Senate Intelligence Committee’s torture investigation.

Now the agency embraces oversight to ward off a hostile president.

“Congressional oversight of executive branch activities is a vitally
important constitutional tool in maintaining our democracy,” wrote
former acting CIA director Michael Morell and coauthor David Kris, a
former assistant attorney general for national security, in a
Washington Post column
[[link removed]] last
month. “It is particularly important for intelligence activities
because the intelligence community consists of secret organizations
operating in a democracy.”

It’s easy to mock Morell’s commitment to democracy given the
agency’s record of anti-democratic dirty tricks. The fact that
Morell is a Post columnist (and CBS News contributor) illuminates the
alignment of the liberal media and the clandestine service. But
Morell’s take on the current crisis is hard to fault.

Thanks to a “radical change in our politics … many partisan actors
today seek advantage by rejecting bedrock institutions and norms while
a significant portion of the electorate responds with nihilistic
glee,” wrote Morell and Kris. “As applied to the oversight of
intelligence, this convergence is very dangerous, because those
institutions and norms are a major part of what keeps the intelligence
community properly in check.”

In other words, the beleaguered CIA is looking for allies on Capitol
Hill, especially among liberals and Democrats who want stronger
oversight.

“From what we know so far, this looks very much like the story of
Mark Felt and Watergate,” says historian Bruce Schulman of Boston
University. Felt was the senior FBI official who served as
confidential source for the Washington Post’s Watergate reporters as
they investigated President Nixon’s abuses of power in the early
1970s.

“There’s a career employee, a lifer, who doesn’t like the way
the White House wants to use his or her agency,” Schulman went on.
“He or she wants to push back. What’s different is that in the
post-Watergate environment, they don’t have to leak to the Post.
There are new institutions and processes through which that can
happen.”

A president who is out of control confronts an agency that wants to
show Congress and the public that it is under control. All of which
underscores the new reality of Washington’s impeachment season:
nobody’s in control.

_This article was produced by The Deep State
[[link removed]], a project of
the Independent Media Institute._

_JEFFERSON MORLEY is a writing fellow and the editor and chief
correspondent of the Deep State
[[link removed]],
a project of the Independent Media Institute. He has been a reporter
and editor in Washington, D.C., since 1980. He spent 15 years as an
editor and reporter at the Washington Post. He was a staff writer at
Arms Control Today and Washington editor of Salon. He is the editor
and co-founder of JFK Facts, a blog about the assassination of JFK.
His latest book is The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster, James
Jesus Angleton
[[link removed]]._

 

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