If there is one department that’s under siege throughout this whole Trump impeachment fiasco, it’s the State Department. Its employees, especially the top staff, are being bombarded by their counterparts abroad about the nature of this Democratic attempt to undo the results of the 2016 election. Supposedly, the executive branch has treated these people very badly, and that has led to scores of officials defying the Trump administration to testify before House Democrats who had up until recently been producing this impeachment circus on the Hill in total secrecy. Luckily, Politico is there to flesh out the details, name those who are enemies of this administration, and all the while saying that their anonymous sources told them there is no anti-Trump deep state in existence. If there is or was, it failed, quoting a former official who left the department only to rail against it in an op-ed for The Washington Post. As Politico noted, with this Trump-Ukraine impeachment clown show now in full effect, made official by the House vote yesterday—the State Department is having its ‘revenge’:
They’ve been derided as a “deep state,” slurred as “Obama holdovers,” threatened with draconian budget cuts and told President Donald Trump doesn’t even need them.
[…]
In recent days, current and former foreign service officers have defied Trump administration orders and trudged to Capitol Hill to testify before House committees conducting an impeachment investigation against the president. Colleagues inside the State Department and their allies in the broader foreign policy community are quietly hailing them as heroes, with special praise for those testifying despite still being on the government payroll.
[…]
Masha” is a reference to Marie Yovanovitch, the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine who gave a deposition to lawmakers on Oct. 11 under subpoena from the investigating House committees and despite State Department objections. In her opening statement, she decried Trump’s machinations on Ukraine while calling for more support for the foreign service.
Yovanovitch was recalled from Ukraine in May, a few months before her tenure was up, after Trump allies spread rumors that she was biased against the president. In a July 25 phone call with Ukraine’s leader that’s at the heart of the impeachment inquiry, Trump called her “bad news” and said she was “going to go through some things.”
Yovanovitch told lawmakers that, in her 30-plus years as a diplomat, she always stuck to the required ethos of nonpartisanship. She said she was “incredulous” at being recalled over “false claims.” She warned that the State Department is being “attacked and hollowed out from within” and stressed that the repercussions go beyond Foggy Bottom.
[…]
Yovanovitch was followed on Capitol Hill by two other prominent career foreign service officers: George Kent, the deputy assistant secretary whose portfolio includes Ukraine, and Michael McKinley, who just days ago resigned as a senior adviser to Pompeo. Three other State Department officials — Bill Taylor, now the top U.S. diplomat in Kyiv; Philip Reeker, the acting assistant secretary for European and Eurasian affairs; and Suriya Jayanti, a foreign service officer based in Kyiv — have been summoned to testify; others could follow.
[…]
Like Yovanovitch, Kent testified in defiance of instructions from the White House and Pompeo. Both remain on the State Department payroll.
Hill staffers have indicated that they subpoenaed the diplomats to give them some cover so they could cooperate. McKinley, having resigned from State, testified voluntarily.
[…]
Department employees say that in Foggy Bottom and beyond, civil- and foreign-service officers are doing their jobs and there are no work stoppages or visible expressions of protest.
[...]
In August, two foreign service officers announced their departures in tough-worded op-eds describing their deep disappointment with Trump.
One dismissed the belief, widespread among Trump aides, that a deep state exists within the federal bureaucracy that is determined to thwart Trump’s agenda. “If the resistance does exist, it should be clear by this point that it has failed,” wrote the outgoing diplomat, Chuck Park.
Oh, please—so, some of these folks adhere to a policy of nonpartisanship when it comes to the foreign service, but will testify before a secretive and nakedly partisan hearing that has an end goal of impeaching and removing Donald Trump from office because he made a phone call to Ukraine in July. Yeah, sorry—anyone who cooperates with the Democrats’ impeachment game deserves scrutiny and the revocation of their good servant credentials. They’re now participants to what could be described as a coup. And of course, these people will never admit to a deep state, though there’s ample evidence that one exists. Former Acting Attorney General Sally Yates provided the Fort Sumter moment when she refused to enforce an executive order on immigration from the Trump White House. One person admitted to it in an op-ed for The New York Times got a book deal from it, the work is called “A Warning.” The actions of James Comey, John Brennan, and other Obama intelligence and Department of Justice officials are also other examples, specifically using an unverified and politically biased opposition research dossier compiled by an ex-MI6 spy to secure FISA warrants against those who were affiliated with the 2016 Trump campaign. That person was Carter Page, the supposed Kremlin operative, who proved to be very much otherwise and had his life destroyed. Who leaked the conversation between then-National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and former Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak? We still don’t know, but it seems that the DOJ higher-ups might have colluded to entrap Flynn, hence the perjury charge that was lobbed at him. The texts between disgraced former FBI Agent Peter Strzok and his mistress Lisa Page point to top officials conspiring ways to hamstring the Trump administration; Strzok straight-up says they’ll “stop” it. James Comey gave personal memos of his meetings with Trump to a friend with the intention of leaking them to the press in order to get a special counsel investigation into Russian collusion. The president has many enemies in D.C. This is not news, but the breadth and width in which we have government officials acting in open defiance of an administration, to the detriment of the institution’s integrity, is something that is unprecedented. These clowns, who bellow at how Trump is destroying institutions, have taken the strategy of burning them down in order to save them. The FBI is just now on the rebound, but not after it suffered a devastating blow to its reputation. And sorry, just because two people who left State said there is no anti-Trump resistance within the halls of government doesn’t make it so.
And while we’re at it, this is who was the Trump-Ukraine whistleblower. Bronson wrote about it. Really? We can look at this person and his contacts and say there’s nothing at all fishy or hyper-political and partisan about this man who is reportedly the whistleblower. Paul Sperry at Real Clear Investigations did the deep dive:
More than two months after the official filed his complaint, pretty much all that’s known publicly about him is that he is a CIA analyst who at one point was detailed to the White House and is now back working at the CIA.
But the name of a government official fitting that description — Eric Ciaramella — has been raised privately in impeachment depositions, according to officials with direct knowledge of the proceedings, as well as in at least one open hearing held by a House committee not involved in the impeachment inquiry. Fearing their anonymous witness could be exposed, Democrats this week blocked Republicans from asking more questions about him and intend to redact his name from all deposition transcripts.
[…]
Federal documents reveal that the 33-year-old Ciaramella, a registered Democrat held over from the Obama White House, previously worked with former Vice President Joe Biden and former CIA Director John Brennan, a vocal critic of Trump who helped initiate the Russia “collusion” investigation of the Trump campaign during the 2016 election.
Further, Ciaramella (pronounced char-a-MEL-ah) left his National Security Council posting in the White House’s West Wing in mid-2017 amid concerns about negative leaks to the media. He has since returned to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
“He was accused of working against Trump and leaking against Trump,” said a former NSC official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters.
Also, Ciaramella huddled for “guidance” with the staff of House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, including former colleagues also held over from the Obama era whom Schiff’s office had recently recruited from the NSC. Schiff is the lead prosecutor in the impeachment inquiry.
And Ciaramella worked with a Democratic National Committee operative who dug up dirt on the Trump campaign during the 2016 election, inviting her into the White House for meetings, former White House colleagues said. The operative, Alexandra Chalupa, a Ukrainian-American who supported Hillary Clinton, led an effort to link the Republican campaign to the Russian government. “He knows her. He had her in the White House,” said one former co-worker, who requested anonymity to discuss the sensitive matter.
The president has enemies everywhere. Act accordingly folks.
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