President Trump is battling an entrenched “Permanent State” — unelected bureaucratic workers entrenched throughout the echelons of government who are unaccountable to the American people and even the president, Sebastian Gorka, Trump’s former deputy assistant, said Friday at a panel that conservative government watchdog group Judicial Watch hosted.
Referred to derisively as the “Deep State,” Gorka said a more accurate name for the officials who have filled government bureaucracies in Washington is the “Permanent State” because they are neither hidden nor covert.
“It was in our faces. It was arrogant. It was right there in the surface of our policy discussions at the highest level of the White House. … It’s overt,” he said during the panel, which was called Exposing the Deep State.
He added, “It’s been there for a long time. This thing has been brewing for decades, truly decades.”
Gorka, who left the White House about three weeks ago, described attending frequent meetings at the National Security Council, where participants from all the agencies — State Department, Defense Department, Justice Department, the intelligence community — would never once mention the president’s name or his agenda, as if it did not exist or matter.
Even worse, the Permanent State is fighting back against Trump’s agenda in the form of leaks, he suggested, citing a recent Senate report that showed there were 125 national security leaks during the first 126 days of the administration, with at least 60 of them having to do with serious national security matters.
“I’ve seen the worst of the worst — the first seven months of how the bureaucracy responded to the administration of Donald J. Trump,” he said.
Gorka, former national security editor at Breitbart News and a professor, described the hostility he drew when he asked for three of his former students, who were already government officials in the intelligence community, to be transferred over to him at the White House — a common practice known as detailing.
Not only did their agencies deny the request, but they punished those individuals by taking them off their jobs and put into menial tasks “outside the National Security remit.”
This was “through no fault of their own,” Gorka noted. “Why? Because the ‘seventh floor’ of that agency — to quote a senior individual — ‘looks at the White House as the enemy,’” he said, referring to the agencies’ top officials. “Now, let’s just let that sink in for a moment.”
At the same time, he said he saw “sherpas” — people assigned to guide incoming Cabinet secretaries into their new agencies, who had nothing to do with the presidential campaign and were even “Never Trumpers,” — take powerful positions in the administration.
James Peterson, a senior attorney for Judicial Watch who also spoke on the panel, said it is still as difficult to get the government to hand over documents as it was during the Obama administration.
“The same people are still there. They’re not just at each of the agencies that are in control,” he said. “The same people that are still in control.”
“Even though there’s a new president, new policies and a new perspective on things, nothing changes,” he said, adding that federal workers are openly using encrypted cell phone technology to communicate with one another to avoid accountability, which he called an “open violation of the law.”
Christopher Farrell, Judicial Watch’s director of investigations and research and professor at George Mason University, noted that an overwhelming majority of people in the Washington, DC-area voted for Hillary Clinton.
“Ninety-four of Washington, DC, voted for Hillary Clinton. If you go to Prince George’s County, it’s something like 89 percent. If you go to Arlington, it’s something like 87 percent,” Farrell said.
“When that population gets up in the morning and sort of goes to work and staffs and mans the departments and agencies of the government … that is the headquarters. That is the leadership of all the departments and agencies,” he said.
“And so, that is what the new administration faces,” he said.
Diana West, a Yale-educated conservative columnist and author who also spoke on the panel, said the “national security super state” is particularly unaccountable.
“That has long, long run amok and is worse than ever, flouting our Fourth Amendment protections daily without oversight and with immense and frightening powers,” she said.
She said the CIA, FBI, and NSA inserted themselves into the presidential campaign “in order to destroy his candidacy and presidency.”
“It is Trump who is imperiled,” she said.
@ Lorenzo: WHY PUTIN PERFERED HILLARY FROM:The CIA’s dirty tricks American democracy By Cliff Kincaid
The real issue is what policies these two candidates would have pursued. We already know that Obama and Hillary staged a Russian reset that was a spectacular failure, and that Putin used this new development in relations between the U.S. and Russia to launch military aggression in Ukraine and Syria. So the former KGB chief running Russia knew he could get the better of Hillary if she became president.
Writing at Forbes, Paul Roderick Gregory looks at the evidence of how Trump poses a far greater threat to Putin, not in threatening military action against the Russian regime, but in seeking American energy independence. He says, “If Putin’s core objective is indeed to protect his petrostate, he would not root for Trump. The US fracking revolution has transformed the world energy market from $100 to $50 oil, has broken Russia’s dominance of the European natural gas market, and has plunged the economy into a prolonged ‘period of stagnation,’ as the Soviets used to call it. Under Trump, Putin can expect a second energy revolution, which will threaten Putin’s hold on power, which looks strong but is weaker than we think.” This is why there have been reports that the Russians are secretly subsidizing anti-fracking groups in the West.
Gregory says that if you look at the energy picture from Putin’s perspective, he would have preferred the Obama/Clinton policies that “blocked pipelines, imposed strict regulations on unconventional oil and gas, froze leases on federal lands, and used other anti-carbon actions” that had the ultimate effect of propping up the value of the oil resources of his shaky regime.
@ Lorenzo:
Utter nonsense. There was no collusion.Lorenzo Said:
A total lie.
Very discouraging. I have long suspected that American democracy was only a facade for rule by an unelected permanent state, largely controlled by individuals in the shadows who are technically not government officials at all.But the Trump presidency proves it. On the first occasion in our history since 1860 when the electorate chose a President who was not considered one of us by the de facto permanent government, they have made a determined effort, using every means at their disposal, including the news media who are clearly in their pocket, to reverse the election and overthrow an elected President. A “democracy” where an elected head of state is met with violent “resistance” and open threats to his life, as well as incessant verbal abuse, the countermanding of his decisions by unelected judges, systematic efforts by state and local governments to prevent him from enforcing the law of the land, etc., from his very first day in office–that is no democracy at all.
The permanent state that Gorka and his ilk warn us about is the U.S. intelligence establishment. These man and women who give their lives to keep us safe are a danger to President Trump who more and more appears to be involved with the Russians in fixing the 2016 election. Every single intelligence service, and not only in America, with the single exception of Russia agree that the Russians conspired to interfere in the 2016 elections. In this regard Gorka could be seen as a Russian stooge.