Some in the government appeared to run interference on behalf of the president’s son. But others followed the law without fear or favor.
Jul 24, 2023 18:35:49 #
H****r B***n and the ‘Deep State’
Some in the government appeared to run interference on behalf of the president’s son. But others followed the law without fear or favor.
By Eli Lake
July 24, 2023
For Donald Trump’s most dedicated fans, the latest revelations from the FBI and IRS about H****r B***n suggest a darker force at work: the Deep State.
For this crowd, the deep state functions like an invisible force behind the curtain that controls our country on behalf of an oligarch class. As a concept, it’s been around for decades. Dot-connectors and beautiful minds will use the deep state as a conceptual crutch to explain great national traumas. Who shot JFK? The deep state. Who invented crack cocaine? The deep state. 9/11? You get the picture.
This kind of deep state is a paranoid fiction. But a more nuanced version of this concept—call it the national security state—does in fact exist. It is the secret part of our government and it includes entrenched bureaucrats at our intelligence agencies, the FBI, and the military. Because its actions and policies are often highly classified, it often acts with little real oversight or accountability.
Since Trump’s emergence on the national scene in 2016, elements of this deep state have used their power to advance the interests of his political opposition.
And the latest news from Congress on H****r B***n further fuels the perception that powerful parts of the government undermined Trump’s presidency.
Last Thursday, House Republicans dropped another bombshell. This one was about the infamous laptop that Biden abandoned at a computer repair shop in Delaware that became grist for a series of scoops before the 2020 e******n from the New York Post.
You’ll recall that those scoops weren’t as big a news story as was the fact that Facebook and Twitter banned users from sharing the story on the theory that it was the fruit of Kremlin f**ery intended to sway the p**********l e******n. It turns out that the FBI officials who warned social media companies that the laptop story might be part of a Russian scheme to mislead v**ers themselves knew that the laptop was real. And they knew so as early as December of 2019.
But instead of clarifying that the FBI had verified its contents, the bureau instead allowed a falsehood about its provenance to linger. Savor the irony. In an effort to counter Russian disinformation, the FBI actively allowed American disinformation to spread.
“Put simply, after the FBI conditioned social media companies to believe that the laptop was the product of a hack-and-dump operation, the Bureau stopped its information sharing, allowing social media companies to conclude that the New York Post story was Russian disinformation,” the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Jim Jordan, wrote to FBI director Chris Wray.
Jordan is a polarizing figure; he is one of Donald Trump’s biggest allies in Congress. In this case, however, he brings receipts. The letter quotes extensively from an interview the committee conducted with Laura Dehmlow, the current chief of the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force—the FBI body that interacted with social media platforms to warn against foreign disinformation.
She explains that in one conference call with Twitter executives, on the day the first New York Post laptop story ran, an executive asked if the FBI knew if the laptop was real. A junior G-man began to answer that it was, until he was cut off and a more senior person said there was “no further comment.”
After the call, according to Dehmlow, the task force huddled to determine the new policy on whether it would confirm that the laptop had been authenticated. The decision—which Dehmlow took pains to say she did not make—was that it would offer no comment going forward.
It goes without saying these are very bad facts for Joe Biden and his family. The H****r laptop is a veritable scandalabra. There are graphic photos of H****r posing with prostitutes and crack pipes. There are emails discussing various schemes by which H****r monetized his family’s good name. There are references to payouts reserved for the “big guy,” a suggestion that the current president benefited from his son’s buckraking.
But as bad as the latest news is for the Bidens, it’s far worse for the FBI, which relies on public trust for its survival and its power. It has decimated that trust by allowing itself to be wielded as a weapon of one political party.
Because it’s not just H****r B***n.
It’s also Russiagate—Trump’s alleged (and never proven) collusion with Russia—which was fueled by a Democrat-funded opposition research sheet known as the Steele Dossier. The FBI knew by early 2017 (at the latest) that the whole thing was junk. But like the Russian disinformation lie about the laptop, the bureau let the dossier falsehood linger while the Steele Dossier was hyped like Watergate by the legacy press and Democratic Party in 2017 and 2018.
Then there is the double standard the bureau applied to pursuing foreign influence investigations into Trump’s campaign and the campaign of Hillary Clinton. That was one of the primary conclusions of a report released in May from U.S. Special Counsel John Durham. For Trump, the FBI opened a full investigation on the thinnest of pretexts. For Clinton, the bureau delayed investigations into potential foreign influence and offered defensive briefings to her lawyers.
There is a clear pattern here. The question raised by the latest round of disclosures about H****r B***n is: did the Justice Department and the FBI protect him because of his last name?
Here it is useful to examine the other major event of last week: the serious allegations raised by two career IRS investigators who led the team probing H****r’s tax violations.
On Wednesday the two agents, Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler, testified in open session before the House Oversight Committee.
Ziegler and Shapley painted a picture of a long-standing probe that began in 2018 into H****r B***n’s income that was stymied and delayed at nearly every turn. The delays were significant—so significant that eventually the statute of limitations ran out.
Ziegler said that the probe did not follow normal procedures. Prosecutors, he said, “slow-walked the investigation, and put in place unnecessary approvals and road blocks from effectively and efficiently addressing the case. A lot of times, we were not able to follow the facts.” Ziegler and Shapley also said there were times when prosecutors informed H****r’s lawyers about investigative steps, such as a search warrant.
All of that would be bad enough. But the event that led Ziegler and Shapley to eventually blow the whistle was when, in October of last year, the U.S. attorney in charge of the case, David Weiss, privately told them that it was not his decision to charge H****r in districts outside of Delaware. That directly contradicted the pledge that Attorney General Merrick Garland made to Congress that there would be no restrictions placed on Weiss in his investigation of H****r.
Both Weiss and Garland have disputed the account of the whistleblowers. But Ziegler and Shapley are standing by their story and offered the names of other IRS officials who were at that October meeting with Weiss. And while it’s true that it’s normal for prosecutors and investigators to disagree on what charges to bring, it’s extremely rare that such a dispute would lead agents to file formal whistleblower complaints in Congress and the Department of the Treasury’s Inspector General.
Ziegler, a gay Democrat, spoke for many Americans when he said: “No one should be above the law regardless of your political affiliation.”
Do the disclosures about the FBI and the IRS prove that some kind of deep state acted as a shield for H****r’s derelictions and tax crimes? Not exactly.
It’s true that the FBI has lost much of its legitimacy with the Republican Party. But the key reason why the bureau has been exposed is because of other individuals who would surely count as part of a “deep state.” For example, the Justice Department’s inspector general, at the end of 2019, issued a devastating report that destroyed the defenses made for the FBI’s application to spy on a Trump campaign aide named Carter Page.
Ziegler and Shapley are investigators for the agency of the U.S. government that collects federal income taxes—the textbook definition of deep-state actors. And yet, they pursued H****r’s crimes without fear or favor even as others tried to stop them. Eventually, Ziegler and Shapley blew the whistle and Congress now has an opportunity to hold the prosecutors who went easy on the president’s son accountable.
Stories like Russiagate and the H****r B***n affair play into the paranoid underbelly of American politics. For those Americans that look for the hidden hand of a deep state, these scandals are proof that the system itself is r****d. And yet the events of the past week prove that, thanks to honorable people, the system is also working.
Some in the government appeared to run interference on behalf of the president’s son. But others followed the law without fear or favor.
By Eli Lake
July 24, 2023
For Donald Trump’s most dedicated fans, the latest revelations from the FBI and IRS about H****r B***n suggest a darker force at work: the Deep State.
For this crowd, the deep state functions like an invisible force behind the curtain that controls our country on behalf of an oligarch class. As a concept, it’s been around for decades. Dot-connectors and beautiful minds will use the deep state as a conceptual crutch to explain great national traumas. Who shot JFK? The deep state. Who invented crack cocaine? The deep state. 9/11? You get the picture.
This kind of deep state is a paranoid fiction. But a more nuanced version of this concept—call it the national security state—does in fact exist. It is the secret part of our government and it includes entrenched bureaucrats at our intelligence agencies, the FBI, and the military. Because its actions and policies are often highly classified, it often acts with little real oversight or accountability.
Since Trump’s emergence on the national scene in 2016, elements of this deep state have used their power to advance the interests of his political opposition.
And the latest news from Congress on H****r B***n further fuels the perception that powerful parts of the government undermined Trump’s presidency.
Last Thursday, House Republicans dropped another bombshell. This one was about the infamous laptop that Biden abandoned at a computer repair shop in Delaware that became grist for a series of scoops before the 2020 e******n from the New York Post.
You’ll recall that those scoops weren’t as big a news story as was the fact that Facebook and Twitter banned users from sharing the story on the theory that it was the fruit of Kremlin f**ery intended to sway the p**********l e******n. It turns out that the FBI officials who warned social media companies that the laptop story might be part of a Russian scheme to mislead v**ers themselves knew that the laptop was real. And they knew so as early as December of 2019.
But instead of clarifying that the FBI had verified its contents, the bureau instead allowed a falsehood about its provenance to linger. Savor the irony. In an effort to counter Russian disinformation, the FBI actively allowed American disinformation to spread.
“Put simply, after the FBI conditioned social media companies to believe that the laptop was the product of a hack-and-dump operation, the Bureau stopped its information sharing, allowing social media companies to conclude that the New York Post story was Russian disinformation,” the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Jim Jordan, wrote to FBI director Chris Wray.
Jordan is a polarizing figure; he is one of Donald Trump’s biggest allies in Congress. In this case, however, he brings receipts. The letter quotes extensively from an interview the committee conducted with Laura Dehmlow, the current chief of the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force—the FBI body that interacted with social media platforms to warn against foreign disinformation.
She explains that in one conference call with Twitter executives, on the day the first New York Post laptop story ran, an executive asked if the FBI knew if the laptop was real. A junior G-man began to answer that it was, until he was cut off and a more senior person said there was “no further comment.”
After the call, according to Dehmlow, the task force huddled to determine the new policy on whether it would confirm that the laptop had been authenticated. The decision—which Dehmlow took pains to say she did not make—was that it would offer no comment going forward.
It goes without saying these are very bad facts for Joe Biden and his family. The H****r laptop is a veritable scandalabra. There are graphic photos of H****r posing with prostitutes and crack pipes. There are emails discussing various schemes by which H****r monetized his family’s good name. There are references to payouts reserved for the “big guy,” a suggestion that the current president benefited from his son’s buckraking.
But as bad as the latest news is for the Bidens, it’s far worse for the FBI, which relies on public trust for its survival and its power. It has decimated that trust by allowing itself to be wielded as a weapon of one political party.
Because it’s not just H****r B***n.
It’s also Russiagate—Trump’s alleged (and never proven) collusion with Russia—which was fueled by a Democrat-funded opposition research sheet known as the Steele Dossier. The FBI knew by early 2017 (at the latest) that the whole thing was junk. But like the Russian disinformation lie about the laptop, the bureau let the dossier falsehood linger while the Steele Dossier was hyped like Watergate by the legacy press and Democratic Party in 2017 and 2018.
Then there is the double standard the bureau applied to pursuing foreign influence investigations into Trump’s campaign and the campaign of Hillary Clinton. That was one of the primary conclusions of a report released in May from U.S. Special Counsel John Durham. For Trump, the FBI opened a full investigation on the thinnest of pretexts. For Clinton, the bureau delayed investigations into potential foreign influence and offered defensive briefings to her lawyers.
There is a clear pattern here. The question raised by the latest round of disclosures about H****r B***n is: did the Justice Department and the FBI protect him because of his last name?
Here it is useful to examine the other major event of last week: the serious allegations raised by two career IRS investigators who led the team probing H****r’s tax violations.
On Wednesday the two agents, Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler, testified in open session before the House Oversight Committee.
Ziegler and Shapley painted a picture of a long-standing probe that began in 2018 into H****r B***n’s income that was stymied and delayed at nearly every turn. The delays were significant—so significant that eventually the statute of limitations ran out.
Ziegler said that the probe did not follow normal procedures. Prosecutors, he said, “slow-walked the investigation, and put in place unnecessary approvals and road blocks from effectively and efficiently addressing the case. A lot of times, we were not able to follow the facts.” Ziegler and Shapley also said there were times when prosecutors informed H****r’s lawyers about investigative steps, such as a search warrant.
All of that would be bad enough. But the event that led Ziegler and Shapley to eventually blow the whistle was when, in October of last year, the U.S. attorney in charge of the case, David Weiss, privately told them that it was not his decision to charge H****r in districts outside of Delaware. That directly contradicted the pledge that Attorney General Merrick Garland made to Congress that there would be no restrictions placed on Weiss in his investigation of H****r.
Both Weiss and Garland have disputed the account of the whistleblowers. But Ziegler and Shapley are standing by their story and offered the names of other IRS officials who were at that October meeting with Weiss. And while it’s true that it’s normal for prosecutors and investigators to disagree on what charges to bring, it’s extremely rare that such a dispute would lead agents to file formal whistleblower complaints in Congress and the Department of the Treasury’s Inspector General.
Ziegler, a gay Democrat, spoke for many Americans when he said: “No one should be above the law regardless of your political affiliation.”
Do the disclosures about the FBI and the IRS prove that some kind of deep state acted as a shield for H****r’s derelictions and tax crimes? Not exactly.
It’s true that the FBI has lost much of its legitimacy with the Republican Party. But the key reason why the bureau has been exposed is because of other individuals who would surely count as part of a “deep state.” For example, the Justice Department’s inspector general, at the end of 2019, issued a devastating report that destroyed the defenses made for the FBI’s application to spy on a Trump campaign aide named Carter Page.
Ziegler and Shapley are investigators for the agency of the U.S. government that collects federal income taxes—the textbook definition of deep-state actors. And yet, they pursued H****r’s crimes without fear or favor even as others tried to stop them. Eventually, Ziegler and Shapley blew the whistle and Congress now has an opportunity to hold the prosecutors who went easy on the president’s son accountable.
Stories like Russiagate and the H****r B***n affair play into the paranoid underbelly of American politics. For those Americans that look for the hidden hand of a deep state, these scandals are proof that the system itself is r****d. And yet the events of the past week prove that, thanks to honorable people, the system is also working.
Jul 24, 2023 18:44:37 #
gorgehiker
Loc: Lexington, Ky
Christopher Wray is a lifelong Republican. Is he a member of the deep state? How about William Barr? How about Federal district Judge Maryellen Noreika, an appointee of former President Donald Trump, who will preside over the case that Justice Department brought against President Joe Biden's son, H****r B***n? It seems that there are quite a few dedicated Republicans who are entrenched in your deep state.
Jul 24, 2023 19:07:16 #
gorgehiker wrote:
Christopher Wray is a lifelong Republican. Is he a member of the deep state? How about William Barr? How about Federal district Judge Maryellen Noreika, an appointee of former President Donald Trump, who will preside over the case that Justice Department brought against President Joe Biden's son, H****r B***n? It seems that there are quite a few dedicated Republicans who are entrenched in your deep state.
Wray yes, Barr no, who knows about the judge.
Jul 24, 2023 19:35:28 #
gorgehiker
Loc: Lexington, Ky
Blurryeyed wrote:
Wray yes, Barr no, who knows about the judge.
Wow. The deep state is really deep. It includes a number of Trump appointees. Why did Trump appoint members of the deep state?
Jul 24, 2023 19:55:43 #
gorgehiker wrote:
Wow. The deep state is really deep. It includes a number of Trump appointees. Why did Trump appoint members of the deep state?
What's your point that if Trump appointed them that they can't be any incentives for them to work against him? Do you actually understand how the Administrative state works?
Jul 25, 2023 03:02:53 #
gorgehiker
Loc: Lexington, Ky
Blurryeyed wrote:
What's your point that if Trump appointed them that they can't be any incentives for them to work against him? Do you actually understand how the Administrative state works?
OK. Now I understand. The deep state is actually a bunch of Republicans appointed by Trump. Does that make Trump a member of the deep state?
Jul 25, 2023 07:29:40 #
gorgehiker wrote:
OK. Now I understand. The deep state is actually a bunch of Republicans appointed by Trump. Does that make Trump a member of the deep state?
The so called "deep state" are career bureaucrats that will indeed work against a president should their goals not align. Wray, certainly is more concerned about the way that the country views the FBI than he is in being forthright and honest in oversight hearings. Clearly he has obscured many of the FBI's abuses during his tenure in his current position.
Jul 25, 2023 08:28:19 #
thom w
Loc: San Jose, CA
Blurryeyed wrote:
The so called "deep state" are career bureaucrats that will indeed work against a president should their goals not align. Wray, certainly is more concerned about the way that the country views the FBI than he is in being forthright and honest in oversight hearings. Clearly he has obscured many of the FBI's abuses during his tenure in his current position.
Aren't you a term limits supporter? In what universe would term limits not increase the power of unelected bureaucrats?
Jul 25, 2023 09:46:25 #
gorgehiker wrote:
OK. Now I understand. The deep state is actually a bunch of Republicans appointed by Trump. Does that make Trump a member of the deep state?
Most positions that would be considered "deep state" jobs are part of the executive branch, employees of federal agencies. The heads of these organizations are often replaced by every president but the upper echelons of those organizations remain year after year. Any president that threatens the status quo will be thwarted by these people and without a doubt, career federal employees tend toward democrat affiliation, a fact that is easily seen in the demographics of the DC metropolitan area, where most of these people live.
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/religious-landscape-study/
Jul 25, 2023 10:19:52 #
gorgehiker wrote:
Wow. The deep state is really deep. It includes a number of Trump appointees. Why did Trump appoint members of the deep state?
Perhaps the real question SHOULD be, Why did some Trump appointees become members of the deep state. You seem to forget these are political positions. President Trump promised to drain the swamp. Many in that very swamp are Republicans who have also been corrupt for decades, Mitch McConnell is an example as is Lindsay Graham, Mitt Romney etc. Those politicians H**E President Trump and will do anything to be rid of him because his presence as POTUS threatens the corruption in their everyday political lives.
Come on now Gorge Girl, you don't really believe the only lying corrupt politicians are on the Left do you? Yup, some on the Right too.
Dennis
Jul 25, 2023 10:22:32 #
gorgehiker wrote:
OK. Now I understand. The deep state is actually a bunch of Republicans appointed by Trump. Does that make Trump a member of the deep state?
You purposely are not paying attention. As I pointed out it was President Trump who wanted to clean the swamp. But he didn't realize there were crooked corrupt Republicans who were deep state members of the same swamp. Why can't you get that point? Are you sooooo Left Wing you actually think ONLY Trump might be corrupt and everyone else is doing their best for a strong America? Are you that dense? Hard to believe, huh?
Why is it that Conservatives can admit lying and corruption on the Conservative side of politics but Left Wingers like you simply protect the lie and double down on protecting your own corrupt politicians? The Clintons, Schumer, Harry Reid, Obama, Biden's entire family, and many others are corrupt politicians. Yet you fail to acknowledge any of this. Is it so hard to open your eyes?
Dennis
Jul 25, 2023 15:00:37 #
thom w wrote:
Aren't you a term limits supporter? In what universe would term limits not increase the power of unelected bureaucrats?
I don't follow your thinking, I don't think that term limits would have much effect on the bureaucrats, they would IMO have great impact on the entrenched DC establishment.
Jul 25, 2023 15:02:36 #
dennis2146 wrote:
Perhaps the real question SHOULD be, Why did some ... (show quote)
Well when reaching into a live well to select a bait if the only guppies in the live well are spotted, chances are you will select a spotted guppy.
Jul 25, 2023 17:55:33 #
gorgehiker
Loc: Lexington, Ky
dennis2146 wrote:
Perhaps the real question SHOULD be, Why did some ... (show quote)
OK, Dennis, anybody who disagrees with you is a member of the deep state regardless of party affiliation. Got it.
Jul 25, 2023 23:01:16 #
gorgehiker wrote:
OK, Dennis, anybody who disagrees with you is a member of the deep state regardless of party affiliation. Got it.
THAT is not what I said, is it? You are not even close. Maybe you should read my post once more or get your head out of a dark place so you can see better. You are starting to take on the mantra of the lying corrupt Left Wingers here. You can support the Liberal without making yourself play the role of a FOOL, you know.
Dennis
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