Latest news with #deepState
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Why MAGA can't move on from the ‘Epstein files'
'Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein?' asked the president. 'I can't believe you're asking a question on Epstein at a time like this.' For some of the president's supporters, the fate of the 'Epstein files,' evidence that would surely tie the world's elites to reputation-ending sex crimes, was their first true disappointment. When a reporter tried to ask Attorney Gen. Pam Bondi some of their burning questions — specifically, whether Epstein had ever been an intelligence asset and why a minute of footage from outside his jail was missing — Trump surprised them, suggesting that this wasn't important anymore. It wasn't? Hadn't Bondi said that Epstein's 'client list' was 'sitting on my desk right now?' Hadn't JD Vance promised to 'release the Epstein list?' Hadn't Kash Patel demanded that the deep state 'let us know who the pedophiles are?' Yes, they had. The 'Epstein files' debacle won't impede the Trump agenda, but it revealed that the 'files' were never actually part of that agenda. It was the first leak in the dreadnought Trump built to win last year, when he managed to run on both his record as president and the theory that he, having been victimized by the intelligence establishment, would bring it down from the inside. Last summer, I called this the 'weird vote,' inverting the insult that Tim Walz liked to hurl at Republicans, to explain that a whole lot of people had 'weird' beliefs but only one party was courting them. Matthew Yglesias identified a 'crank realignment' that was overall bad for Democrats, and had 'eroded the epistemic quality of both coalitions.' Democrats are not immune to conspiracy theories, or hoping for some box of files to banish their enemies and win the election. But 10 years of campaigning against Donald Trump, and four years of watching him question the 2020 election, has given them very little tolerance for this stuff. Polls show a decently-sized minority of Democrats believing that something was amiss when Trump won every swing state. Party leaders refuse to indulge them. The Trump campaign had no problem indulging the faithful. Epstein aside, they've gotten more of what they hoped for than the supporters of any recent president. Other Republicans promised to bulldoze the Department of Education, to end affirmative action, and to get rid of rules limiting church involvement in elections. Trump simply did it. That's one of the reasons that he exerts such total control over his party and its base. It's also a reason why the Epstein debacle has been so painful to MAGA voters. Why keep those promises, but not this one? 'If God spared President Trump's life it wasn't so that America could make money and fix the budget,' wrote Alex Jones, a man who trusted no politician until Trump showed up and made him a believer. 'It was to burn down a system that relies on people like Jeffrey Epstein.' Democrats have had their first fun in weeks with this, creating a bot that will report, every day, that Trump hasn't released the 'Epstein files.' Its avatar is a picture of Trump and Epstein together, a memento of how impossible it was for them to convince the 'weird' voter that a man who knew Epstein, and who was president when Epstein killed himself, was not actually running a decade-long undercover operation that would end with the trial of Hillary Clinton. In Axios, Marc Caputo reports that FBI deputy director Dan Bongino took Friday off, after clashing with Bondi over the bungled Epstein releases. In Red Letter, Tara Palmeri, who covered the Epstein story for ABC News, wonders whether it's now 'buried for good.' In the Bulwark, Will Sommer surveys the 'MAGA meltdown' over Bondi's failure to deliver what she said she had.
Bloomberg
4 days ago
- Politics
- Bloomberg
The Deep Thinker Rising Through a Shallow Pentagon
In national security as in other policy areas, President Donald Trump has been gutting what he derides as the 'deep state,' and turning it into what some scholars now call a ' shallow state ' — a government in which careers depend less on expertise and more on sycophancy. But even a government of the shallow, by the shallow, for the shallow needs depth in certain functions. This means that the remaining people in the administration who know their brief, as long as they're also politically adroit, may play an outsized role in setting strategy.
Fox News
21-05-2025
- Politics
- Fox News
DAVID MARCUS: The invisible hand that governed America during Biden years
When history gazes back upon the presidency of Joseph Robinette Biden, one question will stand out: Who was really running the country? Because it certainly wasn't the so-called commander in chief. But perhaps, it wasn't really a question of who. Maybe we were governed by something much closer to an invisible hand of wokeness. Maybe we were governed by a twisted worldview, not a conspiracy or solitary figure. It is reasonable, and almost comforting, to believe that Barack Obama or some other Democrat luminary was sitting at the center of the political universe like Vishnu, myriad arms pulling levers and flicking switches. But the reality might be far more troubling. The reality might be that progressive politics have created a self-perpetuating deep state bureaucracy that, left unchecked, couldn't care less who sits behind the Resolute Desk. There are a handful of behind-the-scenes power brokers, hiding from public view of late, who clearly had a lot of sway in the Biden White House: Chief of Staff Jeff Zeints, longtime ally Mike Donilon, Senior Adviser Anita Dunn, and the ever-present Susan Rice. But in all likelihood, they were not running some textbook conspiracy theory to rule in Biden's name. In fact, the entire Biden administration looks more like a broken play in football; It really was just trying to stay on its feet. It is telling that the front-facing cabinet members of Biden's, unlike his hotshot behind-the-scenes team, were feckless, awful and never fired for anything. Watching our current Secretary of State Marco Rubio cross swords with Democrats in his Senate testimony this week couldn't help but remind us of someone like hapless Biden Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, sitting in those same rooms, like a scolded child unable to mount a defense for his open borders. Or how about Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who seemed to have a special Zippo lighter designed to let him fire up conflagrations from Ukraine to the Middle East? Or Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin -- when he was available, of course -- whose Afghanistan withdrawal made the Keystone Cops look like the A Team? For four years this "aw shucks" brigade of midwits was allowed to drive our nation off a cliff precisely because nobody was actually in charge. When the border was a mess and Mayorkas embarrassed himself on the Hill, what would be the process for firing him? The boss is oblivious. Who would actually care enough to go after him? None of the insiders I mentioned above. It wasn't their legacy, wasn't their problem. So no accountability. No. We were governed by a set of progressive assumptions, much like the invisible hand of the market that Adam Smith wrote about. In progressive politics the questions simply answer themselves. It is a system. Why would Mayorkas let the southern border become a turnstile for foreign gang members? Because first and foremost, we must think of the innocent migrants, even if the cruel open borders policy is getting many of them trafficked. Why couldn't the Biden administration back off of the hill of men playing in women's sports when everyone without pronouns on their business card knows it's absurd? Because progressive ideology dictates that the oppressed must be right. Why was the Biden administration unable to forcefully call out antisemitism on our college campuses? Because Jews are now white-adjacent and privileged. We were governed by a set of left-wing assumptions. Think about what almost happened. Even if Democrats had somehow gotten Methusela Biden over the finish line, with his new cancer diagnosis, we now know we would have wound up with Kamala "I'm not taking questions at this time" Harris as president. Could there be a better example of the fact that, to Democrats, it doesn't matter in the slightest who is actually in charge? We do not have two functioning political parties today. We have the GOP and a Democrat Party that is like the Borg from Star Trek, it speaks with a single voice that is somehow always dead wrong. There is a reason that we have a president. Leadership matters, and in the last 120 or so days, from securing the border to securing trade deals, President Donald Trump has exemplified just how crucial his job really is. In retrospect, we look back on four years of Biden's presidency and ask ourselves, what the hell just happened? What happened was a reign of woke policy agendas that flooded our border, inflated our prices, wrought war across the globe and infiltrated Catholic churches looking for fantastical right-wing extremism. We may never know exactly what happened, but one thing we do know. It can never be allowed to happen again.
Arab News
15-05-2025
- Politics
- Arab News
Ex-FBI agent and Pentagon contractor sues over secret recording showing him criticizing Trump
WASHINGTON: A former FBI agent and Pentagon contractor has sued the founder of a conservative nonprofit known for its hidden camera stings over secretly recorded videos showing the contractor criticizing President Donald Trump to a woman he thought he had taken on a date. Jamie Mannina says in his lawsuit that he was misled by a woman he met on a dating website who held herself out as a politically liberal nurse but who was actually working with the conservative activist James O'Keefe in a sting operation designed to induce Mannina into making 'inflammatory and damaging' remarks that could be recorded, 'manipulated' and posted online. Clips from their January conversations were spliced together to make it appear that Mannina was 'essentially attempting to launch an unlawful coup against President Trump,' and articles released online with the videos defamed Mannina by painting him as part of a 'deep state' effort with senior military officials to undermine Trump's presidency, according to the lawsuit filed Wednesday in federal court in Washington. Mannina does not deny in the lawsuit making the comments but says his words were taken out of context, edited and pieced together in a manner designed to paint him in a false light, including in a written description on YouTube that accompanied the publication of one of the recordings. O'Keefe founded Project Veritas in 2010 but was removed from the organization in 2023 amid allegations that he mistreated workers and misspent funds. He has continued to employ similar hidden camera stings as part of a new organization he established, O'Keefe Media Group, which also is named in the lawsuit along with the woman who pretended to be on dates with Mannina. Her identity is not known, the lawsuit says. O'Keefe told The Associated Press on Wednesday that Mannina 'voluntarily' offered up the comments in the recording and that it was important for the public to hear Mannina's remarks. O'Keefe pointed out that the District of Columbia requires the consent of only one party, not both, for a conversation to be recorded. He called the lawsuit an 'attack on the First Amendment' and said he was prepared to fight it all the way to an appeals court if necessary. 'He said what he said. We did not take him out of context. The words that we reported came out of his mouth,' O'Keefe said, adding, 'We stand by our reporting.' The lawsuit includes claims of defamation, false light, fraudulent misrepresentation and violations of the federal Wiretap Act. Though the lawsuit acknowledges that D.C.'s consent law for recording conversations, it asserts that the law nonetheless prohibits 'the interception and recording of a communication if it was for the purposes of committing a tortious act.' The complaint arises from a pair of dates that Mannina had in January with the woman and a series of videos that O'Keefe released in the following days. During their first date, the lawsuit alleges, the woman expressed her distaste for Trump and repeatedly pressed Mannina on his political views and about his work with the government. Mannina told her that included working as a 'spy catcher' several years earlier when he was an FBI counterintelligence agent. A recording that O'Keefe released shows Mannina being asked at one point by the woman, whose name was not disclosed in the lawsuit, about his 'overall assessment of Trump.' 'He's a sociopathic narcissist who's only interested in advancing his name, his wealth and his fame,' Mannina can be heard saying. Asked in the recording whether there was anything he could do to 'protect the American people,' Mannina replied that he was in conversation with some retired generals to explore what could be done. The lawsuit says Mannina and the woman met for a second date over lunch, and as they left the restaurant, a man with a microphone approached Mannina and said: 'Jamie, you're a spy hunter, you say. Well, I'm a spy hunter, too, but I'm evidentially a better spy hunter than you.' The man was O'Keefe, the lawsuit says. Mannina was swiftly fired from Booz Allen, where he worked as a contractor, after O'Keefe contacted the press office and presented at least parts of the video of the two dates. The lawsuit was filed by Mark Zaid, a prominent Washington lawyer who routinely represents government officials and whistleblowers. Zaid himself sued Trump last week after the president revoked his security clearance. 'Lying or misleading someone on a dating app, which no doubt happens all the time, is not what this lawsuit seeks to address,' Zaid said in a statement to the AP. 'The creation of a fake profile for the specific purposes of targeting individuals for deliberately nefarious and harmful purposes is what crosses the line.' The lawsuit says the O'Keefe Media Group painted Mannina in a false light by misconstruing his words and his title, including in an article published on its website that said, 'BREAKING VIDEO: Top Pentagon Adviser Reveals On Hidden Camera Conversation 'with a Couple of Retired Generals to Explore What We Can Do' to 'Protect People from Trump.'' According to the lawsuit, the characterization of Mannina as a 'top Pentagon adviser,' when he was actually 'one of a countless number of defense contractors,' was intended to support 'fabricated claims that Mr. Mannina was essentially attempting to launch an unlawful coup against President Trump.' The lawsuit does not directly say why Mannina was targeted, but it does note that in 2017, when he was working at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, he published three articles in the Huffington Post and The Hill newspaper that were critical of Trump.
