The moment acting Attorney General Sally Yates decided to defy President Trump concerning his executive order on immigration that the media erroneously dubbed the Muslim ban, you saw the vestiges of what we now call the Deep State. It’s the cadre of government workers who are working against the Trump administration in the shadows. They hate the president and will do anything to push back at all costs. It also doesn’t help that there were oodles of Obama holdovers when Trump was inaugurated in 2017.
Anyway, the point is that there is ample evidence that there is a deep state working against the Trump White House. Its members are not really known to the public, and The Wall Street Journal’s Kimberley Strassel details how this anti-democratic club is a cancer to the country in her new book “Resistance at All Costs: How Trump Haters are Breaking America.”
Strassel notes that former CIA Director John Brennan and fired FBI Director James Comey are some of the folks used as examples of deep state antics. Their conduct was less than honorable; Comey’s was worthy of termination, which Trump promptly did in May 2017. The Department of Justice’s inspector general report makes that quite clear. Yet, she notes these are political appointments that are subject to scrutiny and can be removed.
The proper Deep State is made up of those who work in secret, are not known to the public, and are virtually impossible to fire. We’re in the swampy bureaucracy on this one, and they’ve caught a nasty algae bloom in the form of Trump Derangement Syndrome, causing them to infest and rot the very institutions that they work for and have sworn to uphold in their oaths as civil servants. They work for us. Their duty is to serve the country, not act like Dumbledore’s Army working to sabotage policies the American people wanted with the 2016 election results. I know, please forgive the Harry Potter reference, but it seems it’s the only book the Left has read in the last 10-15 years.
Strassel notes that the Fort Sumter moment for this band of undemocratic clowns was when Yates defied Trump. She did it, so should we is how the anti-Trump deep state resistance read this and alas, this is where we are in this town (via WSJ):
Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates became acting attorney general on Mr. Trump’s inauguration and Loretta Lynch’s resignation. A week later, the president signed an executive order restricting travel from seven Middle Eastern and African countries. Ms. Yates instructed Justice Department lawyers not to defend the order in court on the grounds that she was not convinced it was “consistent” with the department’s “responsibilities” or even “lawful.” She decreed: “For as long as I am Acting Attorney General, the Department of Justice will not present arguments in defense of the Executive Order.”
Mr. Trump fired her that day, but he shouldn’t have had to. Her obligation was to defend the executive order, or to resign if she felt she couldn’t. Nobody elected Sally Yates.
The Yates memo was the first official act of the internal resistance—not only a precedent but a rallying cry. Subordinates fawningly praised her in emails obtained by Judicial Watch. “You are my new hero,” wrote one federal prosecutor. Another department colleague emailed: “Thank you AG Yates. I’ve been in civil/appellate for 30 years and have never seen an administration with such contempt for democratic values and the rule of law.” Andrew Weissmann—a career department lawyer, then head of the Criminal Fraud Division and later on the staff of special counsel Robert Mueller—wrote: “I am so proud. And in awe. Thank you so much.” Ms. Yates set an example to rebels throughout the government: If she can defy the president, why can’t I?
That mentality fed the stream of leaks that has flowed ever since. The office of Sen. Ron Johnson, chairman of the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, made a study of Mr. Trump’s first 18 weeks in office. It found the administration had “faced 125 leaked stories—one leak a day—containing information that is potentially damaging to national security under the standards laid out in a 2009 Executive Order signed by President Barack Obama. ” Nearly 80% focused on the Russia probe, and many revealed “closely-held information such as intelligence community intercepts, FBI interviews and intelligence, grand jury subpoenas, and even the workings of a secret surveillance court.” Unauthorized disclosure of classified information is a felony.
Employees also started using social media to “resist.” A National Parks Service employee had already used an official Twitter account to troll Mr. Trump, passing along a post that showed side-by-side comparison of the crowd at Mr. Trump’s inauguration and the larger one at Mr. Obama’s. Around the time of the Yates firing, someone in the Pentagon set up the Twitter account @Rogue_DOD, on which was posted a damaging opinion piece about Trump and internal documents about climate change. A former employee at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention set up @viralCDC, with the description: “The unofficial ‘Resistance’ page of the CDC.” Its pinned tweet read: “If they choose to make facts controversial, the purveyors of facts must step into the controversy. #ScienceMarch #resist.”
These details come from a Jan. 31, 2017, Washington Post story, which reported that “180 federal employees have signed up for a workshop next weekend, where experts will offer advice on workers’ rights and how they can express civil disobedience.”
At the State Department, resisters organized a “cable” protesting Mr. Trump’s travel ban. It worked its way through dozens of U.S. embassies and ultimately had at least 1,000 signatures. The cable was part of a “dissent channel” that Foggy Bottom maintains to allow officials to disagree with policy, and it is meant to be confidential. The resisters made the letter public, bragging about the numbers of signers and anonymously slamming Mr. Trump.
So, you can see that Yates ignited a spark that set off this brushfire. The leaks, the dishonesty, the backstabbing, and the overall unhinged disposition of the professional Left in D.C. has caused damage to the country. Why should anyone trust these clowns? What’s the point of participating in the election process when its institutions are being corrupted by a self-righteous caucus of government workers who think they can quarterback policy they feel is right because of their paycheck? That’s the point Strassel aptly makes.
Strassel also exposes the idiotic nature of the Left’s argument against Trump. They think he’s illegitimate due to the Russian collusion myth, but moreover, the nauseating claim that it was Hillary’s time. Obviously, it wasn’t, which is why she’s a two-time presidential loser. Too bad—they don’t get to make that call. Their job, as Strassel noted, is to serve the government. Pass the memos and paper along and shut the hell up. If they can’t handle that, then resign. But alas, they won’t. They’re taking the ‘we need to burn the village to save it’ approach, which again exposes how insane and stupid this progressive warrior class has become.