97 The Real Deep State: a Sizable Percentage of FBI Agents “Felt Sympathetic” to the J6ers
Section title: The Real Deep State is Republican
You can look at this chapter as a kind of sequel to chapter The FBI is a Very Republican Place. To be sure I’ve gone back and forth in terms of chapter titles because another very apt title would simply be: The Real Deep State is Republican. This should be obvious or would be if facts mattered but based on the last 10 years of American politics there’s reason for considrable doubt that they do. It’s why I’ve spoke of the idea that one way to conceive of the 10 year Trumpification of America is of the epistemological collapse of the nation aka the Orwellianization of America-Trump obviously being O’Brien.
Section: 2+2=5
Perhaps quixotically I like to think of myself as Winston-LOL. Of course that’s a pretty cautionary tale as Winston ultimately succumbs to O’Brien and agrees: “2+2=5.”
“He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had tak- en him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother. THE END”
FN: Amazon.com: 1984 eBook : Orwell, George: Kindle Store Location 4829
End FN
There are so many versions of 2+2=5 in America today which tens of millions of people claim to believe-even those who majored in math! Like all the medical professionals-doctors, nurses, health care officials who now claim to believe that the Polio vaccine is more dangerous than the disease. To be sure America didn’t become Orwellian overnight-the rise of the anti vaxxers began in around 2000 leading us to becoming a country that the WHO had to remove us from the list of nations which had accomplished heard immunity.
Of course, yet another version of 2+2=5 that Trump developed during Covid is that the WHO is some eeeevil dastardly shady fascist institution bent on world domination-this kind of lie is particularly effective as it’s as so much of what Trump and his Republican party co-conspirators engage in blatant projection. Every accusation is an involuntary confession. After all, we’ve got your eeeevil dastardly shady fascist institution bent on world domination-it’s called the modern Republican party.
Another version of 2+2=5 was when Michael Flynn frothed that “If I did 10% of what Hillary Clinton did I’d be in jail” when the truth was literally the opposite as has since been proven many times.
FN: Michael Flynn last July: “If I did a tenth of what [Hillary Clinton] did, I would be in jail” | Vox
Section: Fleetwood Mac’s Sweet Little Lies Becomes Mainstream US Policy
In the 1990s Fleetwood Mac sang “Tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies.”
The Trump years must be a veritable utopia, they’re dream walking
Bing Crosby – Did You Ever See A Dream Walking 1933
There’s the sweet little lie-“2+2+5 it really does what are you talking about it’s always equaled 5 it NEVER equaled 4!” that the reason 60% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck is because of brown skinned immigrants or that Trump is kind of pro choice really-he just wanted to sent it back to the states. Despite being more responsible than anyone-along with Mitch McConnell-for the fact that in many parts of the country today a 13 year old rape victim has less rights than her rapist-many believe the sweet little lie that it had nothing to do with Trump. This explains millions of Americans who voted for pro choice measures AND Donald Trump-in Florida, Arizona, etc.
There’s the sweet little lie of “Russia, Russia, Russia” that Marcy Wheeler has been on the warpath about lately-rightly to be sure-that Hillary Clinton lied about Russia when the truth is actually that Russia lied about Hillary Clinton.
But no bigger lie today than that the Deep State is run by the Democrats despite the apparently trivial fact that the FBI elected Trump in 2016, completely soft pedaled the Russiagate investigation-Chapter The FBI is a Very Republican Place-another Trumpian lie is that the Russiagate investigation was especially aggressive to being egregiously so when of course the egregiously, aggressive investigation as this book lays out in considerable granular detail was Emailgate.
So with this fact pattern it should not be shocking-but it is for many as facts don’t matter and our nation is in the throes of epistemic collapse-that many over at Trumpland the FBI freaked out at the very idea that the sensitive many of them classified documents Trump stole on his way out after finally relinquishing power in January 2021.
We know about this thanks to the efforts of Jason Leopold’s FOIA requests.
As news of the Mar-a-Lago raid unfolded on the morning of Aug. 8, 2022, it unsurprisingly drew fierce reaction from Trump, his biggest backers, and many Republican members of Congress. But a cache of documents I recently obtained from the FBI shows just how much the historic event roiled some of the bureau’s rank and file, forcing FBI Director Christopher Wray to engage in damage control.”
Hmm-maybe that’s why I refer to the FBI as GOPland-because it acts like little more than a Super Pac with law enforcement powers of the Republican party?
As news of the Mar-a-Lago raid unfolded on the morning of Aug. 8, 2022, it unsurprisingly drew fierce reaction from Trump, his biggest backers, and many Republican members of Congress. But a cache of documents I recently obtained from the FBI shows just how much the historic event roiled some of the bureau’s rank and file, forcing FBI Director Christopher Wray to engage in damage control.”
Trump Documents Raid at Mar-a-Lago Sparked Protest From FBI Employees – Bloomberg
Damage control! How dare you act like Donald Trump isn’t above the law! This reaction reminds you of nothing so much as freakout of many in the FBI after July 5 when Comey very belatedly declined to prosecute Clinton. Apparently Comey and McCabe similarly had to have meetings, etc at “damage control.” Note though that when the target was a Democratic Presidential candidate the outrage was that she SHOULD have been prosecuted. With Trump it was that he wasn’t been treated with kid gloves.
“Did this really just happen? Am I dreaming? The FBI served a Search Warrant on a former president?” wrote an incredulous bureau employee in an email that was sent to the FBI’s acting ombudsman, Chauncenette Morey, shortly after the Mar-a-Lago search. “If he took documents, give him a call and ask for them back. Like … Seriously? My own agency …. A bunch of democrat political hacks up top…I’ve lost just about all faith in our leadership.”
Well this “credulous bureau employee” sure doesn’t sound partisan! And apparently he didn’t realize that they’d been asking Trump to give the sensitive documents back for over a year? Guess that’s a trivial detail.
Jason Leopold:
A handful of records came from the FBI’s little known Office of the Ombudsman, the division within the bureau where employees can confidentially raise concerns. That partially explains why the FBI cited a privacy exemption under the FOIA to justify redacting the email sender’s name. Still, the documents showed that Morey forwarded the email to Paul Abbate, the FBI’s deputy director.
“Just wanted you to be aware of the concerns/comments our office has received regarding the search of former President Trump,” Morey wrote.
Another FBI employee was even harsher, characterizing the bureau as a “Banana Republic” and an “embarrassment,” and demanding answers to a series of questions.”
To call the FBI leadership FINALLY taking back the stolen sensitive documents after over a year “Banana Republic” is in itself Orwellian. Seeing as they don’t see J6-a true “Banana Republic” moment as not such a big deal.
Rumors have long swirled that FBI agents at various field offices had been sympathetic to Trump even as the bureau launched investigations into his campaign and his business dealings. The claims were always attributed to anonymous sources. An email I obtained last year after a separate FOIA lawsuit related to the Jan. 6 Capital riots backs up those assertions.
“There’s no good way to say it,” read the email to deputy director Abbate. “So I’ll just be direct: from my first-hand and second-hand information from conversations since January 6th there is, at best, a sizable percentage of the employee population that felt sympathetic to the group that stormed the Capitol and said it was no different than the BLM protests of last summer,” the person wrote a week after the riots.
The FBI agent went on to summarize his view of the climate at FBI offices based on his conversations with his colleagues. Agents, especially those who work counterterrorism cases, he said, sympathized with the insurrectionists’ “frustration” and chalked it up to “everyone having been quarantined at home for months” due to COVID, losing their jobs and “fake news,” for example.
“A senior analyst from my first unit who retired less than 2 years ago has a Facebook page full of #StoptheSteal content. These are not one-off events – they are representative of a larger group within” the FBI, the agent wrote.
The dirty little secret of course is that these are anything but one off events-many police departments had QAnon sympathizers in the department across the country. Law enforcement tends to lean Right-and in many cases not moderately so.
The FBI agent went on to summarize his view of the climate at FBI offices based on his conversations with his colleagues. Agents, especially those who work counterterrorism cases, he said, sympathized with the insurrectionists’ “frustration” and chalked it up to “everyone having been quarantined at home for months” due to COVID, losing their jobs and “fake news,” for example.
“A senior analyst from my first unit who retired less than 2 years ago has a Facebook page full of #StoptheSteal content. These are not one-off events – they are representative of a larger group within” the FBI, the agent wrote.
But when hasn’t it been politized? Remember the Clinton years?
FN: See Chapter The FBI is Very Republican Place
There’s never been a single Democratic FBI Director in 117 years-yet note that the agent quoted above was quick to dismiss the raid of Trump’s home as the fruit of “a bunch of Democrat political hacks on top.” This was the irony of Trump’s “17 Angry Democrats”-you’d be lucky to find 17 Democrats in the entire agency.
“People are threatening us more than usual due to the actions of the few,” one of the employees wrote to Morey, the FBI ombudsman.
The documents mention one threat that received widespread media attention: a Navy veteran armed with an AR-15 who said on social media days after the Mar-a-Lago search that federal agents should be killed “on sight.” He died in a shootout with a state trooper in Ohio after he tried to breach the FBI’s Cincinnati field office.
What’s interesting here is that this employee was suggesting that these threats are a legitimate reaction to those in the Bureau who were ‘mean to President Trump.’
Section Internal Revolt
But this is very reminiscent of the talk you had from Guiliani in late 2016-“there’s a revolution going on inside the FBI” because Comey-very belatedly-didn’t indict Clinton.
CODA: Of course Comey in dragging it out so unforgivably long created the expectation that she was going to be indicted or at least should be.
“The documents make clear that the FBI’s Wray was trying to stave off an internal revolt. One email referred to the statement Wray released after the search of Mar-a-Lago. But that, too, angered another FBI employee who emailed Morey and laid into FBI leadership.”
Many in the FBI also didn’t see any great need to even investigate the J6ers-not surprising as a significant amount were sympathetic
“I literally had to explain to an agent from a ‘blue state’ office the difference between opportunists burning and looting during protests that stemmed legitimate grievance to police brutality vs. an insurgent mob whose purpose was to prevent the execution of democratic processes at the behest of a sitting president,” the person wrote to Abbate. “One is a smattering of criminals, the other is an organized group of domestic terrorists.”
The person also wrote that an official in one FBI office in a “red state” said that more than 70% of that office’s counterterrorism squad and about three-quarters of its agent population disagreed with the violence, “but could understand where the frustration was coming from.”
Frustration that Biden legitimately beat Trump by 7 million votes?
Of course, speaking of the FBI there’s the inconvenient fact that the FBI was warned yet failed to respond to J6. Which kind of reminds you of the dynamic of 9/11.
You can argue we’re pretty lucky we had the January 6 SC at all-Pelosi’s-apparent-preferred option had been a 9/11 styled commission but #MoscowMitch filibustered it. Thank God-the proposed commission would have had the same number of Democrats and Republicans with both parties having subpoena power.
This was a case where the congenital instinct for obstruction of McConnell and Friends worked to the benefit of the public interest-it was a major mistake by McConnell. That commission would have been worse than toothless.
At the outset one problem was the conventional wisdom that the 9/11 Commission was a great success when in fact it had been a monumental failure.
FN: This is not just my view and the view of many Americans but many of the leading 9/11 families themselves.
There are a lot of unanswered questions-the truth is the Commission was set up to fail by Bush-Cheney. Classic example of fox guarding the chicken coop-the Bush-Cheney stooge Zelikow was leading the Commission and you had Dick Cheney calling in to upbraid (Democrat) Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschele that the Commission was a “very dangerous and time-consuming diversion…”
See pg 49
There is certainly good reason to suspect the Commission was potentially very dangerous to Dick Cheney which is why he took the lead in tamping down on it-Cheney guarding the henhouse…
Because with all the very good unanswered questions, the most interesting one by far may be the allegation that Cheney gave a stand down order regarding Flight 93. Of course the conventional wisdom is that Cheney actually ordered a shoot down as this is what Cheney claimed so the Savvy instinct is to simply take his word for it-as to question it would be to question American exceptionalism itself. It’s like how Chris Cuomo dismissed the idea that Bill Barr could have lied out of hand-simply unpossible.
CF. Chapter Cuomo
But even simply presuming that as the conventional (un)wisdom does-despite the (trivial?) fact that in fact the plane wasn’t shot down-begs the pretty embarrassing question of on who’s authority? Once again the conventional answer is that W gave Cheney the authority though once again we’re stuck having to take his word-and W who later claimed he had given it in contradiction of his earlier statement. What’s clear is that there was no legal basis for the Vice President to be involved in this decision-the Veep has no place in the chain of command for such a decision.
Indeed, while the January 6 Select Committee overall did a very good job the one area it clearly dropped the ball was the monumental failure of the law enforcement agencies.
“The House Select Committee’s report on the Jan. 6, 2021, attack asks readers to suspend their belief in reality. Fault is found only with former President Donald Trump’s actions — no blame is given to the inactions of federal security officials.”
“But Jan. 6 was not simply the story of a failed politician and his supporters’ willingness to commit violence to keep him in power. It is also the story of the greatest security failure in Washington, D.C., since policeman John Frederick Parker abandoned his post near Abraham Lincoln on April 14, 1865.”
But the J6C does a full on 9/11 Commission.
“In his forward to the report, Chair Bennie Thompson exonerated the intelligence and security agencies for their failures with this sweeping claim: “But the shortfall of communications, intelligence and law enforcement around Jan. 6 was much less about what they did or did not know. … Whatever weaknesses existed in the policies, procedures, or institutions, they were not to blame for what happened on that day.” And with that, a mere 11 pages into an 845-page report, the committee looks away from those who should have prevented Jan. 6.”
I say J6C ‘9/11 commisoned’ it as this was literally the narrative of Bush-Cheney-as well as the FBI at the time; so Bush-Cheney-Mueller: nobody could have seen it coming. Despite all the warnings prior-very similar to J6-we’re to believe nobody could have seen it coming. Apparently short of literally predicting the event nothing is specific enough to be actionable. Makes you wonder why we have intelligence at all with this level of ineptitude.
“Prior to Jan. 6, it was unimaginable” that a violent mob would attack the Capitol at the behest of the president, the report states. This premise is the critical flaw in the committee’s logic. The events of Jan. 6 represented the most telegraphed and predictable attack on the homeland in history.
The intelligence community knew the goal of the rioters. As a senior intelligence official in the D.C. government, my staff and I “red teamed” the scenario exactly as it unfolded a week before Jan. 6. The plausibility of the threat spurred us to raise the red flags. We convened an emergency conference call of the 79 state and local “fusion” intelligence centers in the country — an act without historical precedent.
Indeed, neither the DHS or FBI seemed very concerned about the possibility of an insurrection in the weeks prior to January 6.
Two things were clear to Donell Harvin, the homeland security and intelligence chief for Washington, D.C., in the weeks before Jan. 6, 2021.
One was that a large number of people, including extremists with histories of violence, had vowed on social media to take weapons to his city to protest the ceremonial congressional certification of Joe Biden’s electoral victory.
And the other was that federal agencies — the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security — didn’t seem very concerned about it.
The federal security planning during that time focused on the coming inauguration, Harvin said. “And if they mentioned Jan. 6 in one of these meetings,” he added, “that would be a footnote.”
The blue team, working behind the scenes, has a different focus: to provide what may be the only detailed appraisal of why the government failed to anticipate and stop the coordinated violence that sent federal lawmakers scrambling to safety in their own building.
That includes the unanswered question of why the FBI — the domestic intelligence agency whose primary mission since 9/11 has been to prevent a terrorist attack in the U.S. — didn’t do more to act on threats made publicly or passed along to the bureau by social media companies.
“We’re looking precisely at that very question,” a senior January 6 committee aide said.
The committee is working “to understand why there was not” a joint FBI-DHS intelligence bulletin about the many threats, the aide said, “even though, obviously, there’s been tremendous coverage about the warnings in plain sight.” Such bulletins are routinely published before large public events.
My theory is-drumroll please: The FBI is Trumpland. The elected Trump by weaponizing Emailgate while softselling Russiagate. Many agents post 1/6 are sympathetic to the insurrectionsits-even those who say the violence was wrong. If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, talks like a duck the FBI is Trumpland.
Trumpland 2.0
Meanwhile the Secret Service just happened to mass delete all the January 6 texts on January 7. Oops!
Secret Service agents deleted text messages sent and received around the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol even after an inspector general requested them as part of an investigation into the insurrection, the government watchdog has found.
The Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General, in a letter obtained by The Associated Press, said the messages between Jan. 5 and Jan. 6, 2021, were erased “as part of a device-replacement program.” The erasure came after the watchdog office requested records of electronic communications between the agents as part of its probe into events surrounding the Jan. 6 attack, the letter said.
Government watchdog says Secret Service agents deleted Jan. 6 text messages | PBS News
Somehow the Trump supporters James Murray and Tony Ornato’s Secret Service deleted all the texts of January 5 and 6 not realizing it was important. Who can figure out why that happened. Guess it’s like the Warren Report once said “a mystery wrapped inside an enigma.”
But it wasn’t only the Secret Service.
Additionally, Homeland Security personnel were told they couldn’t provide records to the inspector general and any such records would first have to be reviewed by DHS attorneys.
“This review led to a weeks-long delays in OIG obtaining records and created confusion over whether all records had been produced,” states the letter, which was dated Wednesday and sent to leaders of the House and Senate Homeland Security committees.”
But of course Orwellian nation that we’ve become there’s another Trumpian narrative that the FBI and other security agencies were TOO VIGILANT on January 6. You suspect many people at the FBI, Secret Service, and DHS believe this.
We got your Deep State right here.