Welcome to your weekly Drain Pipe, a guide to what’s driving the news in The Swamp.
By now we’ve become well acquainted with the Deep State. For a decade or more, it’s become clear that some of the most important power players in Washington are people you’ve never heard of. America has been riven by power hungry middle managers with Bruce Springsteen T-shirts and Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History bumper stickers.
On Friday, the Department of Justice indicted Nikki Floris, the head of former FBI Director Christopher Wray’s Foreign Influence Task Force, the Orwellian name for Wray’s internal team downplaying tips that may substantiate President Donald Trump’s concerns about election interference and neutering factual information about Hunter Biden’s laptop as Russian disinformation. (“I am basically running a shadow government inside the FBI right now,” Floris told her colleague, an FBI official who prepared the President’s Daily Brief for Trump.)
Floris assured Congress under oath she did not have any knowledge of the Laptop From Hell — a big fat fib, the New York Post’s Miranda Devine reports.
Meanwhile, ousted USAID employee Marcia Mundt, who once oversaw $1 billion in “democracy promotion” abroad — a euphemism for achieving the electoral outcomes America likes — was caught red-handed by Data Republican saying explicitly (and bitterly) that she was ready to apply these methods at home.
While Americans may hope the FBI and CIA are tracking down drug cartel kingpins and courting intelligence sources in Beijing, these washed-up national security officials are instead issuing warnings about election interference in a barely concealed bid to discredit Republicans and strengthen their control over the levers of democracy.
We’ve seen this playbook for ten years.
In December 2016, James Clapper strong-armed his counterpart at the National Security Agency into participating in the conspiracy to tie Trump to election interference by Russia, calling it a “team sport.”
A decade later, one gets the sense we’re at ever greater risk of total domination under what paleoconservative Paul Gottfried described as the “managerial state” — an illiberal, unaccountable, and fundamentally mediocre bureaucracy operating in the shadows.
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