Draining the US national security swamp

Political bias across the US government bears the fingerprints of the deep state. Trump must act.

Dr. Peter Vincent Pry, WASH TIMES

One year into President Trump’s tenure, anti-Trump political bias in the FBI and Department of Justice is now so obvious that objective observers should fear for the future of our constitutional republic from the “deep state.”

Frighteningly, the deep state has been exposed as a real thing, with names and faces. Senior officials in FBI and DOJ are conspiring with the national liberal media and allies in Congress to delegitimize, criminalize and ultimately unseat a legitimately elected president.

Yet there is an even graver threat to the American people and the very existence of the United States.

Deep Staters dominating bureaucracies within the Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, Department of State, and intelligence community, are undermining national security policies Mr. Trump was elected to implement.

The deep state thinks it knows better than Mr. Trump and the voters. They would “stay the course” on failed policies that are now reaching the point of crisis with North Korea, Russia, China, and Iran.

Mr. Trump’s national security administration so far comprises only a thin veneer of senior officials in DOD, DHS, DOS, and the intelligence community. Beneath relatively few Trump appointees are thousands of officials and the permanent bureaucracy inherited from the Obama and Clinton administrations.

One great mistake of President George W. Bush was failure to purge his administration of Clinton appointees, many of whom wormed into the permanent bureaucracy. Since President Clinton’s administration, the federal bureaucracy, including national security departments and agencies, has moved steadily leftward, pausing under the second President Bush, but rapidly accelerating hard-left during President Obama’s 8 years.

Today’s deep state, hostile to Mr. Trump, Republicans and conservative policies generally, has been in the making a quarter-century, or more. The left that so hated “the establishment” in the 1960s has today become “the establishment” in the government, media, and universities.

Today, “anti-establishment” enemies of the deep state are Reaganites, conservatives, and independent thinkers who have for years been exiled from government for “political incorrectness.”

Our hope is that Mr. Trump, as the people’s “politically incorrect” and “anti-establishment” champion, would resume the Reagan Revolution to restore ideological balance and common sense to at least the national security establishment.

Alas, Mr. Trump’s administration is still largely manned by deep state Obama-Clinton apparatchiks hostile to his “America First” worldview and “Peace Through Strength” agenda.

The national security deep state is not only hostile to Mr. Trump — they are dangerously incompetent:

• The Intelligence Community (which also wrongly claims Russia rigged elections favoring Mr. Trump) grossly underestimated North Korea’s ICBM capabilities and proximity to the H-Bomb. Yet former Reagan administration officials and independent experts have warned for years the intelligence community is underestimating North Korea’s nuclear missile threat.

• Washington’s foreign policy establishment continues to seek denuclearization of North Korea through China, even though evidence is overwhelming that China and Russia helped build the North Korean nuclear threat to advance their geostrategic interests.

• Even many Republicans mistakenly accept as gospel the narrative of the Department of State and intelligence community “professionals” that Mr. Obama’s nuclear deal stopped Iran from getting the bomb. Yet there is compelling evidence, ignored by the deep state, that Iran has already clandestinely developed nuclear weapons, as North Korea did in 1994.

We have first-hand experience working inside government for the Congressional EMP Commission during Mr. Trump’s first year.

Dangerously, the national security deep state is undermining protection of the nation’s electric grid and other life-sustaining critical infrastructures from electromagnetic pulse (EMP), contrary to the president’s election promise in the Republican National Committee Platform and his recent National Security Strategy:

• The Obama administration’s classified Joint Atomic Energy Intelligence Committee report on EMP continues to inform White House and dominate DHS policy, even though the EMP Commission found the JAEIC report to be the worst and most erroneous study of EMP ever produced.

• Sen. Ron Johnson’s excellent Critical Infrastructure Protection Act required DHS to report to Congress in December 2017 on a strategic plan to protect the nation from EMP. Yet this requirement was ignored for nearly a year. A DHS EMP Task Force formed only a few months ago. It excludes those analysts most expert on EMP, refused briefings from the EMP Commission, and is proposing to use for the baseline EMP threat the discredited JAEIC report.

• The Obama administration’s “do nothing” policy on EMP continues at the Department of Energy where the Office of Electric Reliability plans to spend millions endlessly studying EMP in collaboration with the national labs and the electric power industry. Yet these studies are unnecessary. DOD has all the data needed to protect the national grid now, but has ignored the EMP Commission’s recommendation to share EMP data.

• Obama-holdovers in DOD slow-rolled and sabotaged the EMP Commission, hoodwinking Congress into terminating the EMP Commission in September 2017. That same month North Korea successfully tested an H-Bomb they describe as capable of “super-powerful EMP attack” and released a report accurately describing a Super-EMP nuclear weapon.

Mr. President, drain the national security swamp.

Dr. William Graham was chairman of the congressional EMP Commission, White House science advisor to President Reagan and director of NASA. Dr. Peter Vincent Pry was EMP Commission chief of staff and served in the House Armed Services Committee and the CIA. Reposted from the Washington Times at the request of the writers.

The writer is Executive Director of the Task Force on National and Homeland Security and Director of the U.S. Nuclear Strategy Forum, both congressional advisory boards, and served in the Congressional EMP Commission, the Congressional Strategic Posture Commission, the House Armed Services Committee, and the CIA. He is author of Apocalypse Unknown: The Struggle To Protect America From An Electromagnetic Pulse Catastrophe available through CreateSpace.com or Amazon.com.