{"id":196368,"date":"2019-10-16T06:53:05","date_gmt":"2019-10-16T06:53:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=196368"},"modified":"2019-10-19T05:47:11","modified_gmt":"2019-10-19T05:47:11","slug":"were-in-a-permanent-coup","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=196368","title":{"rendered":"We’re in a permanent coup"},"content":{"rendered":"

Matt Taibbi \u2013 taibbi.substack.com Oct 11, 2019<\/h1>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve lived through a few coups. They\u2019re insane, random, and terrifying, like watching sports, except your political future depends on the score.<\/span><\/p>\n

The kickoff begins when a key official decides to buck the executive. From that moment, government becomes a high-speed head-counting exercise. Who\u2019s got the power plant, the airport, the police in the capital? How many department chiefs are answering their phones? Who\u2019s writing tonight\u2019s newscast?<\/span><\/p>\n

When the KGB in 1991 tried to reassume control of the crumbling Soviet Union by placing Mikhail Gorbachev under arrest and attempting to seize Moscow, logistics ruled. Boris Yeltsin\u2019s crew drove to the Russian White House in ordinary cars<\/strong><\/span><\/a>, beating KGB coup plotters who were trying to reach the seat of Russian government in armored vehicles. A key moment came when one of Yeltsin\u2019s men, Alexander Rutskoi \u2013 who two years later would himself lead a coup against Yeltsin<\/strong><\/span><\/a> \u2013 prevailed upon a Major in a tank unit to defy KGB orders and turn on the \u201ccriminals.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

We have long been spared this madness in America. Our head-counting ceremony was Election Day. We did it once every four years.<\/span><\/p>\n

That\u2019s all over, in the Trump era.<\/span><\/p>\n

On Thursday, news broke that two businessmen said to have \u201cpeddled supposedly explosive information about corruption involving Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden\u201d were arrested at Dulles airport on \u201ccampaign finance violations<\/strong><\/span><\/a>.\u201d<\/strong><\/span> The two figures are alleged to be bagmen bearing \u201cdirt\u201d on Democrats, solicited by Trump and his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani.<\/span><\/p>\n

Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman will be asked to give depositions to impeachment investigators. They\u2019re reportedly going to refuse. Their lawyer John Dowd also says they will \u201crefuse to appear before House Committees investigating President Donald Trump.\u201d Fruman and Parnas meanwhile claim they had real derogatory information about Biden and other politicians, but \u201cthe U.S. government had shown little interest in receiving it through official channels.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

For Americans not familiar with the language of the Third World, that\u2019s two contrasting denials of political legitimacy.<\/span><\/p>\n

The men who are the proxies for Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani in this story are asserting that \u201cofficial channels\u201d have been corrupted. The forces backing impeachment, meanwhile, are telling us those same defendants are obstructing a lawful impeachment inquiry.<\/span><\/p>\n

This latest incident, set against the impeachment mania and the reportedly \u201cexpanding\u201d Russiagate investigation of U.S. Attorney John Durham, accelerates our timeline to chaos. We are speeding toward a situation when someone in one of these camps refuses to obey a major decree, arrest order, or court decision, at which point Americans will get to experience the joys of their political futures being decided by phone calls to generals and police chiefs.<\/span><\/p>\n

My discomfort in the last few years, first with Russiagate and now with Ukrainegate and impeachment, stems from the belief that the people pushing hardest for Trump\u2019s early removal are more dangerous than Trump. Many Americans don\u2019t see this because they\u2019re not used to waking up in a country where you\u2019re not sure who the president will be by nightfall. They don\u2019t understand that this predicament is worse than having a bad president.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Trump presidency is the first to reveal a full-blown schism between the intelligence community and the White House. Senior figures in the CIA, NSA, FBI and other agencies made an open break from their would-be boss before Trump\u2019s inauguration, commencing a public war of leaks that has not stopped.<\/span><\/p>\n

The first big shot was fired in early January, 2017, via a CNN.com headline, \u201cIntel chiefs presented Trump with claims of Russian efforts to compromise him<\/a><\/strong><\/span>.\u201d This tale, about the January 7th presentation of former British spy Christopher Steele\u2019s report to then-President-elect Trump, began as follows:<\/span><\/p>\n

Classified documents presented last week to President Obama and President-elect Trump included allegations that Russian operatives claim to have compromising personal and financial information about Mr. Trump, multiple US officials with direct knowledge of the briefings tell CNN.<\/span><\/p>\n

Four intelligence chiefs in the FBI\u2019s James Comey, the CIA\u2019s John Brennan, the NSA\u2019s Mike Rogers, and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, presented an incoming president with a politically disastrous piece of information, in this case a piece of a private opposition research report.<\/span><\/p>\n

Among other things because the news dropped at the same time Buzzfeed <\/em>decided to publish<\/a><\/strong><\/span> the entire \u201cbombshell\u201d Steele dossier, reporters spent that week obsessing not about the mode of the story\u2019s release, but about the \u201cclaims.\u201d In particular, audiences were rapt by allegations that Russians were trying to blackmail Trump with evidence of a golden shower party commissioned on a bed once slept upon by Barack Obama himself.<\/span><\/p>\n

Twitter exploded<\/strong><\/span><\/a>. No other news story mattered. For the next two years, the \u201cclaims\u201d of compromise and a \u201ccontinuing\u201d Trump-Russian \u201cexchange\u201d hung over the White House like a sword of Damocles.<\/span><\/p>\n

Few were interested in the motives for making this story public. As it turned out, there were two explanations, one that was made public, and one that only came out later. The public justification as outlined in the CNN piece, was to \u201cmake the President-elect aware that such allegations involving him [were] circulating among intelligence agencies.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

However, we know from Comey\u2019s January 7, 2017 memo<\/a> <\/strong><\/span>to deputy Andrew McCabe and FBI General Counsel James Baker there was another explanation. Comey wrote:<\/span><\/p>\n

I said I\u00a0wasn\u2019t saying this was true, only that I\u00a0wanted [Trump] to know both that it had been reported and that the reports\u00a0were in many hands.\u00a0I said media like CNN had them and were looking for a news hook. I said it was important that we\u00a0not\u00a0give them the excuse to write that the FBI has the material\u00a0or\u00a0[redacted] and that we were keeping it\u00a0very close-hold.<\/span><\/p>\n

Imagine if a similar situation had taken place in January of 2009, involving president-elect Barack Obama. Picture a meeting between Obama and the heads of the CIA, NSA, and FBI, along with the DIA, in which the newly-elected president is presented with a report complied by, say, Judicial Watch, accusing him of links to al-Qaeda. Imagine further that they tell Obama they are presenting him with this information to make him aware of a blackmail threat, and to reassure him they won\u2019t give news agencies a \u201chook\u201d to publish the news.<\/span><\/p>\n

Now imagine if that news came out on Fox days later. Imagine further that within a year, one of the four officials became a paid Fox contributor. Democrats would lose their minds<\/em> in this set of circumstances.<\/span><\/p>\n

The country mostly did not lose its mind, however, because the episode did not involve a traditionally presidential figure like Obama, nor was it understood to have been directed at the institution of \u201cthe White House\u201d in the abstract.<\/span><\/p>\n

Instead, it was a story about an infamously corrupt individual, Donald Trump, a pussy-grabbing scammer who bragged about using bankruptcy to escape debt and publicly praised Vladimir Putin. Audiences believed the allegations against this person and saw the intelligence\/counterintelligence community as acting patriotically, doing their best to keep us informed about a still-breaking investigation of a rogue president.<\/span><\/p>\n

But a parallel story was ignored. Leaks from the intelligence community most often pertain to foreign policy. The leak of the January, 2017 \u201cmeeting\u201d between the four chiefs and Trump \u2013 which without question damaged both the presidency and America\u2019s standing abroad \u2013 was an unprecedented act of insubordination.<\/span><\/p>\n

It was also a bold new foray into domestic politics by intelligence agencies that in recent decades began asserting all sorts of frightening new authority. They were kidnapping foreigners, assassinating by drone, conducting paramilitary operations without congressional notice, building an international archipelago of secret prisons, and engaging in mass warrantless surveillance of Americans. We found out in a court case just last week how extensive the illegal domestic surveillance has been, with the FBI engaging in tens of thousands of warrantless searches<\/a> <\/strong><\/span>involving American emails and phone numbers under the guise of combating foreign subversion.<\/span><\/p>\n

The agencies\u2019 new trick is inserting themselves into domestic politics using leaks and media pressure. The \u201cintel chiefs\u201d meeting was just the first in a series of similar stories, many following the pattern in which a document was created, passed from department from department, and leaked. A sample:<\/span><\/p>\n