# Yes, Virginia, There is a Deep State - by Matt Taibbi - TK News by Matt Taibbi > ## Excerpt > A major untold story of the Trump era has been the political comeback of the CIA, NSA, and FBI, who thanks to an ingenious marketing campaign now enjoy widespread support among young liberals --- [](https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2fe9eba8-6d9b-469a-a1d0-e5cd8f41c2fa_2832x1846.png) On _The Young Turks_ the other night, during a segment called — this is not a joke — “RebelHQ,” commentator Ben Carollo extolled the virtues of the CIA. In one section, he described how intelligence officials responded to “Donald Trump trying to plan some ridiculous scheme to maintain himself as president”: > _It’s not a conspiracy theory to say that these government officials wanted to listen to congress and cared about Democratic norms and respected the constitutional structure of the way the United States is today._ When I first heard Carollo talking about the desire of intelligence officials to “listen to congress,” I thought he was being literal. Maybe, I thought, he meant that time in 2014, when [the CIA spied on the the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyyQiNE7j0k) into its torture program, wiring up Senate computers and reading staffers’ emails. Or perhaps he meant that time in 2015, when the Obama administration was using the NSA to listen to Israeli critics of his Iran deal, and ended up with “inadvertent” [access to phone calls back and forth with political opponents](https://www.politico.com/story/2015/12/spying-israel-congress-netanyahu-217207) in the U.S. congress, on both sides of the aisle. Or, maybe Carollo also meant that time when the CIA intercepted communications between the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community and congressional staff, about pending whistleblower complaints. As the ICIG put it in [one of its declassified notifications](https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Congressional%20Notification%20from%20(former)%20Inspector%20General%20of%20the%20Intelligence%20Community,%20I.Charles%20McCullough,%20dated%20March%2028,%202014.pdf), “CIA security compiled a report that includes excerpts of these whistleblower-related communications, and this report was eventually shared with CIA management.” This way, the CIA bosses could know ahead of time who was going to congress with complaints about abuses! Good times. Alas, Carollo didn’t mean _intelligence officials are listening to congress_ in that sense. His video essay entitled, “[Fact-checking Glenn Greenwald’s stunt on Fox News](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyyQiNE7j0k),” was designed to refute the apparently ridiculous notion that “there’s some sort of secret deep state working behind the scenes.” A central part of his argument is that unlike agencies like Homeland Security, formed under the Republican administration of George W. Bush and designed to be “far more shielded from congressional oversight,” the CIA reports to congress and basically does what it’s told. The agencies with the real power to color outside the lines, Carollo tells us, are DHS-sub-operations, “specifically ICE, and Customs and Border Control,” which “have far less congressional oversight and far less structure in place for there to be those checks and balances.” Because of that, Carollo says, “Donald Trump was more than capable of enacting an extremely racist border policy.” <iframe src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/vyyQiNE7j0k?rel=0&amp;autoplay=0&amp;showinfo=0&amp;enablejsapi=0" frameborder="0" loading="lazy" gesture="media" allow="autoplay; fullscreen" allowautoplay="true" allowfullscreen="true" width="728" height="409"></iframe> Even the Pentagon and the defense intelligence agencies are less of a concern, he said, because “when it comes to something like the military, there’s a long history of deep congressional oversight,” and “many checks and balances that are put into place.” Carollo looks like he’s about six, and I say that fully conceding jealousy over his full head of hair. It’s relevant only because he’s representative of a generation of young, left-leaning intellectuals who grew up in the Trump years believing the CIA, FBI, NSA, and other such agencies to be trusted, straight-and-narrow defenders of democratic “norms.” These credulous kids with piercings and chin-beards who think the secret services are on their side are the fruits of one of the great P.R. campaigns of our time. Six or seven years ago, “Deep State” was a term you would only see in left-leaning media. Bill Moyers explored the theme on his site from time to time, and when _The Nation_ [asked Edward Snowden about it](https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/snowden-exile-exclusive-interview/), he said, “There’s definitely a deep state. Trust me, I’ve been there.” The “deep state” was on the liberal left’s front burner then because a spate of horrendously ugly revelations put it there. We learned via Snowden that the NSA was collecting the communications of people all around the world in secret (Carollo might want to mark down that congress wasn’t informed) in a program the U.S. Court of Appeals just last year [declared illegal](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-nsa-spying/u-s-court-mass-surveillance-program-exposed-by-snowden-was-illegal-idUSKBN25T3CK). We found out top intelligence officials like [CIA chief John Brennan](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/31/cia-director-john-brennan-lied-senate) [and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper](https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/01/19/james-clappers-perjury-dc-made-men-dont-get-charged-lying-congress-jonathan-turley-column/1045991001/) lied to congress, among other things about the warrantless surveillance program, and [got away without perjury charges](https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/01/19/james-clappers-perjury-dc-made-men-dont-get-charged-lying-congress-jonathan-turley-column/1045991001/) despite a furious outcry from legislators (another useful factoid for Carollo, on the oversight front). We learned about the CIA’s [systematic use of torture techniques](https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/documents/CRPT-113srpt288.pdf), ranging from anal feeding to threatening to rape and murder relatives to induced hypothermia, another fun set of pastimes the agency decided not to burden congress with knowledge of. Worst of all, we learned Barack Obama and his staff held regular “Terror Tuesdays” meetings to decide who they would and would not kill by secret drone assassination, a program which many Americans were surprised to learn was run not by the military but by the CIA. Obama — who would eventually be quoted joking that it “[turns out I’m really good at killing people](https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-power-of-presidents-to-take-human-life/2019/02/25/6048e5e0-36d8-11e9-8375-e3dcf6b68558_story.html)” and “I didn’t know that was gonna be a strong suit of mine” — widened the secret “kill list” to include Americans. The Justice Department managed this by writing a [secret legal memorandum](https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/olc/pages/attachments/2015/04/02/2010-07-16_-_olc_aaga_barron_-_al-aulaqi.pdf) asserting that even though the Fifth Amendment of the constitution guarantees “due process” for every American before so extreme a punishment as execution, that requirement, as the _New York Times_ described it, “could be satisfied by internal deliberations in the executive branch.” In other words, you get to have due process, just not due process in which you yourself participate. I once sat in a federal courtroom and listened to a Justice Department lawyer named Stephen McCoy Elliott tell a judge that when it came to the question of whether or not an American citizen could be targeted for “lethal” action, “the executive gets to make that determination, not a court.” Another tidbit on the oversight front: in that case, Elliott responded to one of judge Rosemary Collyer’s queries by saying he would “have to ask my client.” But nobody knew who the client was, not even the judge. I asked the Justice Department what agency or agencies Elliott was arguing on behalf of that day, and they refused comment. I tell this story to stress the degree to which programs like “targeted killing” exist almost completely outside of any notion of checks and balances. Pre-Trump, all of this spoke to the worst nightmares of American liberalism. Millions of Boomers and Gen-Exers alike had grown up worshipping at the altar of _Miranda_ and _Mapp v. Ohio_, believing the ideas of due process and transparency inviolable. After the Church Committee hearings on intelligence abuses in the seventies, blue-staters also tended to believe the CIA had been chastened at least somewhat when it came to the really nasty stuff, like assassination, domestic spying, etc. After 9/11, though, all this was brought back on a grand scale and, worse, given a brilliant legal makeover to keep congress, judges and the press locked out this time. Targets of the FBI’s “National Security Letters” could not by law be told they’d been searched. You couldn’t find out if you were on a watch or no-fly list. Those scooped up as enemy combatants (so named to eliminate Geneva Convention oversight) and renditioned to God Knows Where had no _habeas corpus_ rights, a fact a lot of Americans were fine with, so long as the prisoners were al-Qaeda suspects and random Afghan cabbies. However, the clear implication of the Snowden revelations was the next step in the “War on Terror” was turning all of these new powers inward, starting perhaps with a new, turbo-charged version of giant [domestic surveillance operation](https://www.nytimes.com/1974/12/22/archives/huge-cia-operation-reported-in-u-s-against-antiwar-forces-other.html) the CIA was exposed for running back in 1974. By 2015 old-time liberals like Walter Mondale, Gary Hart, and Daniel Ellsberg were [calling](https://www.eff.org/files/2015/12/14/a_new_church_committee_final.pdf) for a “[new Church Committee](https://www.detroitnews.com/story/opinion/2015/02/23/treacy-america-needs-church-committee/23749485/)” to investigate the increasingly obvious overreach of the intelligence services. Then Trump arrived. Almost immediately, it was obvious his historical destiny was to be the best thing that ever happened to the secret services. In the same way hydroxychloroquine became snake oil the instant Trump said he was taking it, the “Deep State” became a myth the moment Trump and his minions [started talking about it](https://www.mprnews.org/story/2017/03/14/trump-white-house-sees-deep-state-behind-opposition-leaks). Deep state warriors like Brennan, Clapper, and former CIA chief Michael Hayden, held in near-universal disdain before as some of the world’s most loathsome people, people so morally ugly it showed on their hideous faces, became immediately respectable by rebranding themselves as Trump critics. The early Trump years, in fact, made heroes of every tumescent peeping-Tom creep and spook in the federal register, now cast in the press as democracy’s infantry, saving the world through intercepts, informants, and leaks. In a flash, programs that terrified American liberals previously, like FISA, became weapons of Holy War, in the ongoing campaign to Oust Trump via a succession of investigations and impeachment bids. When it came out that a known FBI informant spied on presidential candidate Trump, pundits not only cheered, they [refused outright to call it spying](https://www.vox.com/2018/5/25/17380212/spygate-trump-russia-spy-stefan-halper-fbi-explained). The openly illegal leaking of secret intercepts from intelligence sources to the country’s leading newspapers, with the aim of impacting domestic politics, was lauded. When David Ignatius of the _Washington Post_ ran a story detailing onetime Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn’s conversations with Sergei Kislyak, leading to his resignation, it happened because “[a patriot did leak this to the](https://money.cnn.com/2017/02/14/media/michael-flynn-investigative-journalism/index.html) _[Washington Post](https://money.cnn.com/2017/02/14/media/michael-flynn-investigative-journalism/index.html)_,” as MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough put it. This was an enormous story of the Trump years, about the collective decision of intelligence officials — both active and former operatives, if such distinctions exist — to involve themselves in domestic politics in ways not seen since the Hoover days. No one covered it, but it was obvious. The news cycle was dominated by intelligence leaks for all four years of Trump’s presidency, from before inauguration with the Ignatius story, through the leak-to-recusal comedy involving Jeff Sessions, through secret meetings in the Seychelles, through the “intelligence whistleblower” saga, through Bountygate and beyond. Before 2016, the FBI, CIA, and NSA already had most major news agencies eating out of their hands, mainly by feeding certain journalists scoops. In the Trump years that model was dismissed as too slow and cumbersome, and, as mentioned here before, intelligence officials accelerated things by physically mass-replacing both print and TV journalists with ex-spooks. Now, just like any other tinpot third-world country, we get our news directly from secret agents. I made a list once: [Also Michael Morell, John McLaughlin, John Sipher, Thomas Bossert, Clint Watts, James Baker, Mike Baker, Daniel Hoffman, Susan Rice, Ben Rhodes, David Preiss, Evelyn Farkas, Tony Blinken, Mike Rogers, "Alex Finley," Malcolm Nance... Matt Taibbi @mtaibbi John Brennan, James Clapper, Chuck Rosenberg, Michael Hayden, Frank Figliuzzi, Fran Townsend, Stephen Hall, Samantha Vinograd, Andrew McCabe, Josh Campbell, Asha Rangappa, Phil Mudd, James Gagliano, Jeremy Bash, Susan Hennessey, Ned Price, Rick Francona... I can keep going. https://t.co/g7nWvsXmFf ](https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1205835695471955973)[](https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1205835695471955973) If you don’t think modern America is funny, you must not have a sense of humor: _Tonight on MSNBC: [debunking ‘deep state’ talking points](https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/watch/mitchell-debunking-deep-state-talking-points-harder-when-ag-barr-spreading-conspiracy-theories-74915909563), the [new book that debunks Trump’s deep state conspiracy](https://www.msnbc.com/the-last-word/watch/new-book-debunks-trump-s-deep-state-conspiracy-70825029939), and Trump’s [bizarre new deep state conspiracy theory](https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/bizarre-new-conspiracy-theory-trump-sees-deep-state-fda-n1237862). For more, let’s go to our in-house national security analysts John Brennan, Clint Watts, Frank Figliuzzi, and Jeremy Bash…_ An even funnier symbol of the media reversal on intelligence involves the onetime Pentagon Papers publisher, the _Washington Post_, which of course is now owned by one of the CIA’s [biggest contractors](https://www.huffpost.com/entry/why-amazons-collaboration_b_4824854). The _Post_ recently held an “Are you an insane conspiracy theorist?”-type quiz that flatly graded you incorrect if you thought a “deep state” that “operates in secrecy and without oversight” existed: [](https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd0672963-b575-47d4-8011-5f34d10cb49e_1296x1178.png) This of course contradicts the paper’s own reporting over the years on countless issues, from the intelligence community’s “[black budget](https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/national/black-budget/)” to its [evasion of congressional oversight on torture](https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/cia-misled-on-interrogation-program-senate-report-says/2014/03/31/eb75a82a-b8dd-11e3-96ae-f2c36d2b1245_story.html) to abuse of the [FBI’s National Security Letter program](https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/22/AR2007032201882.html), but who cares? Trump obviates any need for logical consistency. During the Trump years you could wake up on any given day and see the former head of the CIA’s drone program or the architect of the NSA surveillance program — literally those people — reading the news on commercial television about anything from the pee tape to the Ukrainegate impeachment (started by anonymous intel officials) to the [letter signed by 50 of the country’s leading spooks](https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/19/hunter-biden-story-russian-disinfo-430276) denouncing (falsely, we [now know](https://www.amazon.com/Bidens-Familys-Tragedy-Scandal-Triumph/dp/1538738007)) the Hunter Biden laptop tale as having the “classic earmarks of a Russian disinformation operation.” The overtness of the intelligence community’s interference in domestic politics, combined with its astonishing record of unpunished, systematic lying to everyone — congress, judges, the United Nations, the International Court in the Hague, and especially the American public via the media — is driving people to real insanity. As podcaster Darrell Cooper put it earlier this year, in an [essay](https://outsidevoices.substack.com/p/author-of-the-mega-viral-thread-on) attempting to explain the thought process underlying “Stop the Steal”: > _Many Trump supporters don’t know for certain whether ballots were faked in November 2020, but they know with apodictic certainty that the press, the FBI, and even the courts would lie to them if they were._ Media fawning over agencies like the CIA mightily exacerbates this phenomenon, and I shouldn’t single out Carollo or _The Young Turks_, because this is the norm in most mainstream press organizations; Carollo is just the tadpole version of someone like the _Post’s_ [Glenn “I’m not sure if banks really count as ‘Wall Street’ Kessler](https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/05/06/whats-evidence-spying-trumps-campaign-heres-your-guide/). Young or not, the average commentator now is both committed to forgetting the sordid history of agencies like the CIA, and perfectly equipped mentally to keep that commitment. The cultural memories of the coming wave of media professionals extend back a few years at most. Most have read thousands more tweets than book pages. Their opinions come mainly from the dung-pile of popular news and are in sync with most Democrats, whom polls consistently [show](http://file///Users/owner/Downloads/02-14-18-agencies-release.pdf) to have strong majority favorable views of the CIA and the FBI, a dramatic turnaround from the pre-Trump years. In fact, now that the War on Terror has ostensibly been reconfigured to target gun owners, white supremacists, and “insurrectionists,” they can scarcely remember why they ever felt negatively about the NSA or the folks at Langley, which of course makes them perfect for their jobs. In a dystopia, a good memory is just an inconvenience.