What The Deep State War On Trump Really Means

Not long ago—June 14, to be expect—I wrote about the implications behind the Deep State’s use of the Espionage Act in a desperate attempt to oust Donald Trump from public life. At that time I maintained (in some detail) that the implication of this prosecution is to dismantle for good and all the Unitary Executive—which is the basis of the Executive Branch of government as delineated in Article II of the US Constitution—and replace it with rule by a permanent, unelected bureaucracy that is controlled and directed by Big Money interests.

You can reread the key parts here—More On The Dangers Of The Espionage Act but this is the overall theme:

… the dangers to our republic presented by the Espionage Act go beyond its stifling of speech and dissent among the citizenry. The use of the Act to prosecute a former president strikes at the very heart of our Constitution and the separation of powers—such as remains of that framework.

I was pleased to watch a Youtube yesterday in which Alexander Mercouris and Robert Barnes thrash out this same theme. Because this is at the very heart of our constitutional crisis I decided that it might benefit readers if I provided a written transcript cum summary of the key part of their discussion—I’ve cleaned it up a bit to make it more readable by inserting antecedents, etc. It’s basically the same as what I wrote, in concept, but it’s useful to get several different perspectives on this issue to flesh it out, to winkle out the nuances and implications.

Mercouris begins the discussion by stating that he has been doing some research on the American concept of a Unitary Executive. He summarizes his research in basically the same terms that I presented (sparked by Frank DeVito’s article) last week. He then turns the discussion over to Barnes. Barnes proceeds to present the basic thesis in a somewhat rambling narrative that devotes quite a bit of time to the appallingly nefarious role of Bluto Barr over the years as a Deep State consigliere. For more recent readers, I should explain that, up until the 2020 election, I was a cheerleader for Barr, based largely on his well known memo that suggested that Hillary—not Trump—was the true criminal. Well, what Barr wrote was more nuanced than that, but that was what any reader would naturally take away from the 19 page legal memo. 2020 opened my eyes to Barr’s duplicity.

Now, readers may disagree with some of the factual assertions that Barnes makes. One example: I believe his timeline for the Russia Hoax, especially when it actually was conceived, is probably a bit confused. But that’s not what this is really about. Concentrate on the legal/constitutional issues. Here we go:

Out of control Biden White House w/Robert Barnes

Barnes: Trump is the only candidate that scares the Deep State. The Deep State--Military Industrial Complex (MIC), National Security Establishment--mostly fears Trump, and that's the meaning of the indictment. The indictment is election interference. It's an attempt to derail Trump's comeback effort in 2024, to keep the war machine rolling--whether in Ukraine or anywhere else--to keep the National Surveillance State in power, and to use America as a tool for their own globalist agenda. Trump has been the big threat to that. He wasn't supposed to win in 2016. They never really took him seriously, even after he had the nomination, they thought it was a lock that he'd lose. They launched the spy campaign against him as soon as he gained any meaningful traction (when he won NH, in 2/2016). That escalated into the Russia Hoax, then the Ukraine fake impeachment, then Covid policy, then the 2020 election issues. And they haven't stopped. There are anomalies about J6 they still haven't explained--fake bombs being planted.

Trump is seen as such a threat that the moment he said he'd run again they escalated the NY lawfare against him, then the federal lawfare. The question was always whether they'd cross that Rubicon. The NY case was seen as so laughably absurd that it didn't seem like a Rubicon crossing--even someone like Bluto Barr, who has been a Deep State activist his whole career ...

Here, Barnes shifts gears to focus on Barr’s bio.

His dad was the Dalton School headmaster, very elite school, the current SecState went there. The last thing Barr's dad did before stepping down to write science fiction books that glorified underage sexual assault was to recommend Jeffrey Epstein to be a math teacher at the Dalton School. Barr was the only son of a wealthy family on the Upper West Side. He's one of those nerds who played the tuba. Goes on to get his political pedigree through the Bush family, worked for Poppy Bush at the CIA hiding all the evidence from the Church Committee about CIA misconduct and malfeasance. Bush brought Barr into the Justice Department when Bush became VP. Barr and Mueller then buried everything about Bush's connections to Manuel Noriega--all the drug running, money laundering, arms running, all kinds of illicit activity. We used Noriega as our guy going back to the 70s.

That's who Barr is. He suckered his way into the Trump administration by promising to end the Mueller investigation. [Suckered me.] That involved multiple levels of irony because Barr and Mueller go way back, but Mueller was at the end of his rope--they had no proof, but Mueller’s investigation had served its purpose to cover up the criminality of the Deep State in the initial spying on Trump. Barr used that as a perfect controlled opposition move. It was under Barr that Jeffrey Epstein died--Eternal Truth #1, Jeffrey Epstein did not kill himself. It was also under Barr that all the election issues happened, and he claimed there was no problem. And now we know that it was Barr who buried all the Biden corruption evidence since 2017. It's not a coincidence that the centerpiece of the Biden family corruption--although it extends elsewhere geographically--was Ukraine.

As you look at those combined issues, Trump was the main obstacle all along and he remains the main obstacle. Barr, by "predicting" a federal indictment of Trump, was actually calling for the federal indictment that crossed the Rubicon [i.e., involving Deep State lawfare in electoral politics]. Jack Smith is close to the International Criminal Court--those aren't your great human rights advocates. Smith is a political hitman. If he's assigned a case, he brings an indictment, regardless of the evidence. He was involved in the John Edwards prosecution [outrageously flawed legal theory], similarly when he went after the VA governor on a bogus RICO theory--lost both cases, the VA case unanimously at the SCOTUS. Smith isn't known as a legal heavyweight--he's known as a Deep State affiliated hitman who will bring an indictment if he's assigned a case.

Implication not stated, which I discussed in the linked article above: Smith’s prosecutorial theory of the case against Trump is just as flawed—but, worse, is also a clear and present danger to our entire constitutional framework.

The Deep State believes that Trump is the greatest threat, and they believe that weaponizing the DoJ is the way to prevent Trump from getting back to the White House in 2024.

The other aspect to this is that they're trying to establish a legal precedent, which is that we now have a National Security State, a Deep State, that has legal power over our secrets. This has been the long objection of Julian Assange--that the corruption of our governments around the world, that the most horrific things that our governments do, depend on one thing above all else: Secrets. Exposing those secrets became Assange's life mission, but from a political, philosophical standpoint this was the main danger, that if you want to take out Deep States around the world, then take out secrets. Remove the Deep State's capacity to keep secrets.

So what is the Deep State doing in the Trump indictment? They're saying that the elected president of the United States cannot share Deep State secrets with anyone without their permission or, if he does--if he shares it with the people, if he shares it with the public, if he shares it with an investigative journalist--then he goes to prison. That's the precedent they wanna set here. That's how insane the precedent is from a constitutional perspective, because there is no constitutional basis for the Deep State [apart from the president as the Unitary Executive]. Its only existence is pursuant to the president creating it for the president's purposes. The "executive power" in Article II of the US Constitution is exclusively vested in the President of the United States. Congress can't change that, the courts can't change that. Classified secrets are created for the benefit of the president. So the idea that the president can be forced to keep a secret is kinda insane. The whole point is that the secrets are solely the president’s concern. The president is the elected embodiment of the people. So saying that the Deep State, the Administrative State, the National Security State, that some agency can have power over the president, that flips the constitutional order and creates a legal, administrative, bureaucratic state that can use the power of secrets to elevate themselves over the Branches of the government that are elected by the people--the elected representatives of the people. And in the process they completely destroy the constitutional framework.

That's the scarier part of the Trump case. People can think whatever they want about Donald Trump. This case is Democracy v. the Deep State, not the US v. Donald Trump. The issue is, does Constitutional Democracy survive or does the Deep State have legal precedent that they can even lock up the president for sharing a Deep State secret with the American people.

Mercouris: So what this is all about, in effect, is saying that the president is under the control of the officials. He doesn't control the officials--they control him. It reminds me of Alexander Vindman coming to the House for the first impeachment and complaining angrily that what President Donald Trump had done was contrary to the policies of the Interagency which is, in effect, the Deep State. So we see that they're taking another huge step forward. They're saying that from this point on the president doesn't control things--WE do! He must do what WE say, and if he doesn't we'll arrest him, charge him, and put him in prison. The first words of the Constitution--"We the People"--that doesn't apply any more. It's not the people who run the executive through their elected president any longer, it's the officials--the people that the president supposedly appoints. But if they can arrest him, can he really appoint them any longer? Can he sack them? Can he do anything with them?

Mercouris then goes on to place all the above in the context of The Iron Law of Oligarchy: Democracy is impossible, it cannot exist, because eventually an oligarchy must take control. Mercouris believes that the operation of the Iron Law in American history is novel, that it was not previously operative. Apparently he never heard of Dwight Eisenhower and the Military Industrial Complex. Nevertheless, it’s useful to ponder the Wikipedia summary of the Iron Law:

The iron law of oligarchy is a political theory first developed by the German-born Italian sociologist Robert Michels in his 1911 book Political Parties.[1] It asserts that rule by an elite, or oligarchy, is inevitable as an "iron law" within any democratic organization as part of the "tactical and technical necessities" of the organization.[1]

Michels' theory states that all socialist [social?] organizations, regardless of how democratic they are when started, eventually develop into oligarchies. Michels observed that since no sufficiently large and complex organization can function purely as a direct democracy, power within an organization will always get delegated to individuals within that group, elected or otherwise. As he put it in Political Parties, "It is organization which gives dominion of the elected over the electors. [...] Who says organization, says oligarchy."[2]

Using anecdotes from political parties and trade unions struggling to operate democratically to build his argument in 1911, Michels addressed the application of this law to representative democracy. He went on to state that "Historical evolution mocks all the prophylactic measures that have been adopted for the prevention of oligarchy."

So there we are. Or here we are. This is the big issue that confronts We the People with ever clearer urgency.