Who wants to block the confirmations of Tulsi Gabbard and Kash Patel, and what are they trying to hide?
This dossier has been released by The LaRouche Organization for immediate circulation.
Letter of Transmittal
To Members of The United States Senate,
In the coming days, you will be holding hearings to confirm incoming President Donald Trump’s choices for important posts within his administration.
Recently, former FBI and CIA Director William Webster, has written to you urging you to reject the nominations of Tulsi Gabbard for DNI, and Kash Patel for Director of the FBI. Clearly, since he is 100 years old, he must feel very strongly about preventing these appointments.
As President of The LaRouche Organization. and as a United States Citizen who has had immediate family members deployed in Iraq in the U.S. Army, I would ask you to think deeply about how you would explain to the family members of the nearly 5,000 U.S. soldiers who were killed in that war, why their loved one died. Why did your colleagues vote to send them into a war, which former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi admitted years later, was not only based on a lie, but it was a lie that the “Gang of Four,” as she called it, including herself on the House Intelligence Committee, knew was a lie at the time it occurred?
Many people in the U.S. intelligence community knew at the time that lies were being told to justify a war which not only would kill thousands of Americans, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, but which would change the political landscape in the Middle East for generations to come, displacing millions of people and creating a breeding ground for terrorist organizations, but they persisted in these lies, and doubled down to protect their false narrative by creating more wars, and doing greater harm to the safety and reputation of the United States.
Not only did they lie about Iraq’s possession of “weapons of mass destruction,” they lied about Libya, and specifically Benghazi. They lied about Syrian President Assad using chemical weapons, they lied about the Russians hacking the DNC server, and they were emboldened so much by the lack of any pushback from our august representatives (your colleagues), who should have been holding hearings and conducting investigations, that 51 of these people even signed a public letter saying that the very real Hunter Biden laptop was a Russian pre-election ploy.
So, I would challenge each one of you: Why on earth would you listen to any of these people, whose lies have literally killed thousands of Americans, and irreparably harmed or even ended the lives of millions of people around the world, when it comes to selecting a Director of National Intelligence or a Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation?
Both former Congresswoman, Lt Col. Tulsi Gabbard and former federal prosecutor Kash Patel have had the courage to stand against the tide of manipulated public opinion to question the false narratives which have proved very harmful to the well-being of our people and our Republic. This is what qualifies them both to serve in the posts for which President-elect Donald Trump has nominated them.
A speedy confirmation of Tulsi Gabbard for Director of National Intelligence, and Kash Patel as Director of the FBI would be the appropriate response to the wailing and gnashing of teeth coming from people who have a lot to hide. Iam confident that most Americans agree with me.
Sincerely,
Diane Sare
President, The LaRouche Organization
Yes, it is indeed true that the national security of the U.S. is under threat by various forms of meddling and malicious intrigues—but the problem does not originate in Russia, China, Iran, or any of the other nations on the neocon “bad guys” list. The threat emanates from long-term operatives embedded deep within the permanent bureaucracy of the U.S. government, and their mentors in the intelligence agencies, foundations and think-tanks of the British establishment. These corrupt individuals, and their sponsors, have operated with impunity for decades, because they dominate the very agencies which supposedly defend our national security. Now they fear exposure, because incoming President Trump has nominated two highly qualified “outsiders” to oversee and clean up those agencies. This is why a “Liars’ Bureau,” which lives principally in the bowels of the 17 (or more) American intelligence agencies, and their illegal, criminal and even murderous spin-offs, is now mobilized on the orders of London and Wall Street to stop the confirmation of Tulsi Gabbard and Kash Patel. As Senator Chuck Schumer warned Donald Trump, “You take on the intelligence community? They have six ways from Sunday to get back at you.”
Gabbard and Patel are not without their faults, and no one can say with certainty what they will do once they assume office. But we can with certainty tell you who fears their scrutiny, and why. In this report, we will identify five specific areas where dangerous corruption exists, and where the leadership of Gabbard and Patel is urgently required in order to root it out:
I. Manipulation of the News Media and 'Russiagate'
Operation Mockingbird Revisited
The last time a serious inquiry was launched into the activities of the CIA, FBI and related agencies was almost exactly fifty years ago on January 27, 1975, with the formation of the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, better known as the Church Committee, after its chairman, Democratic Senator Frank Church of Idaho. Can there be any doubt that the United States now needs a new Church Committee? The recent “RussiaGate” tissue of lies, perpetrated by a combination of forces that keyed off a “dodgy dossier” supplied by a former British Intelligence operative, Christopher Steele, was an assault on the American Presidency, the American people, and the world. “It was either the biggest espionage story in history..Putin putting a Manchurian candidate in the White House—or it was the biggest lie in history” was the way that journalist Matt Taibbi put it this past Dec. 5.
The Church Committee hearings revealed a shocking array of covert activities directed, not at America’s adversaries, but at her own citizens. One of these covert activities was Operation Mockingbird, a CIA project that recruited high-profile journalists to serve as conduits for agency propaganda. In 1975, this was considered to be scandalous, but today, manipulation of the press by these agencies is completely out in the open without the public batting an eye. For example, former CIA Director John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who both lied under oath to the U.S. Congress about illegal activity by the CIA and NSA, now hold high-profile positions at MSNBC and CNN respectively. Asha Rangappa, a former FBI special agent specializing in counterintelligence investigations, is now a commentator at CNN. It is no longer necessary for the covert agencies to furtively recruit operatives from among the American press corps; They, increasingly, are the American press. The once-free press, exemplified by a few stalwarts such as Julian Assange, Glenn Greenwald, Seymour Hersh, Matt Taibbi and other real journalists, has been largely replaced by “agency people.”
Concerned that the citizenry might turn to social media as an alternative source for news and information, they have also taken steps to impose censorship there. Facebook brought in the vociferously neocon Atlantic Council and the mother of all Regime Change organizations, the National Endowment for Democracy, as consultants in 2018 to help decide which voices should be silenced. Not to be outdone, Twitter hired a part-time officer in the British Army’s psychological warfare unit as senior executive with editorial responsibility for the Middle East in 2019. The following year, Facebook upped the ante by hiring the former Director-General of Israel’s Justice Ministry, a specialist in censorship, as a member of its new “oversight board.” Journalist Matt Taibbi revealed that throughout 2020, the FBI was essentially supervising Twitter censorship policy, with particular emphasis on trying to legitimize evidence-free allegations of foreign interference in U.S. affairs, and on controlling the way that the American Presidential race was allowed to be discussed.
Both Patel and Gabbard have experienced harshly antagonistic relationships with the corporate media. In Patel’s case, he battled them over the “Russiagate” hoax, at one point threatening to “come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens” if they were found to have violated the law. It is a tribute to the power of propaganda that despite the unambiguous conclusions of the Mueller Report, many Americans today still believe that there was some sort of “collusion” between Trump and the government of Russia, and politicians such as Adam Schiff continue to blithely speak of it as if it were real.
A recent response by the FBI to a two year-old Freedom of Information Act request by journalist Aaron Maté raises new questions about the FBI’s role in the Russiagate affair. The response was almost entirely redacted, but it does disclose that Deputy Director of the FBI Andrew McCabe opened an investigation of Trump, after he took office in 2017, due to information "...that reasonably indicates that President Donald Trump may be or has been, wittingly or unwittingly, involved in activities for or on behalf of the Russian government which may constitute violations of federal criminal law or threats to the national security of the United States." We can only guess at what that information might be, because it has been redacted. As Matt Taibbi points out, “Either the FBI had evidence to start such an investigation, which would be damning to Trump, or it didn’t, which would be damning to the FBI. Which was it?” Will Kash Patel be the one to provide an answer?
Liz Cheney: Outsourcing Lying to Save Democracy?
- In an October 15, 2024 press release issued by the U.S. Congress Committee on House Administration, it was announced that its Subcommittee on Oversight Chairman, Barry Loudermilk (GA-11), “obtained never-before-seen correspondence between January 6 Select Committee Vice-Chair Liz Cheney, and Cassidy Hutchinson.” Hutchinson, a former White House aide who had served as assistant to Chief of Staff Mark Meadows during the first Trump administration, gave sensationalist testimony at the June 28, 2022, public hearings of the House Select Committee on the January 6 U.S. Capitol protests. Hutchinson's testimony was at the time widely publicized in the U.S. news media.
The new texts reveal that Liz Cheney communicated with Hutchinson through an intermediary, Farah Griffin, prior to testimony, while Hutchinson was still a subject of the Select Committee’s investigation and without Hutchinson's attorney's knowledge—this, despite Cheney knowing this was totally unethical. After this surreptitious "communication," Hutchinson dramatically changed her testimony; “In her May 17, 2022, transcribed interview Hutchinson testified to a series of uncorroborated and unverified stories that conveniently fit the Select Committee’s narrative that President Trump is dangerous and solely responsible for the events of January 6. Despite already testifying to the Select Committee twice, (Feb 23 and March 7) Hutchinson never previously mentioned this “new information.” After this third interview, Cheney began communicating directly with Hutchinson. Hutchinson then fired her attorney, Passantino and hired Cheney’s recommended attorneys, who agreed to represent Hutchinson—pro bono.
Tulsi Gabbard vs. the Neocons
In Gabbard’s case, she has locked horns for years with the corporate press, challenging such cherished neocon shibboleths as the notion that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was “unprovoked.” She has expressed skepticism about the campaigns to engineer military confrontations with Iran, Syria, and China. The response from the war party has been childishly heavy-handed, with such neocon luminaries as Hillary Clinton and John Bolton suggesting that she is a “Russian asset.” It is difficult for “chickenhawks” with no military service record to convincingly smear Gabbard, a combat veteran who is currently a Lieutenant Colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve, as some sort of traitor. That, however, does not stop media organs such as Newsweek, AP and the London Economist and Guardian from repeating the insinuations. On June 19, 2022, Gabbard said in a speech before the Western Conservative Summit, “To protect our loved ones, to protect our children, to protect our world, we have to—we are talking about an existential threat—we have to stand up to these cowardly warmongering politicians who exist in both parties now.” Is she willing to stand up to the “war party” as President Trump’s Director of National Intelligence? The Liars’ Bureau prefers that she not have that opportunity.
The Ukrainian Biolabs
On March 13, 2022, Tulsi Gabbard posted the following on Twitter:
There are 25+ US-funded biolabs in Ukraine which if breached would release & spread deadly pathogens to US/world. We must take action now to prevent disaster. US/Russia/Ukraine/NATO/UN/EU must implement a ceasefire now around these labs until they’re secured & pathogens destroyed.
What followed was a spectacular display of neocon rage. Former Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., said Gabbard had embraced “actual Russian propaganda” and called it “traitorous.” Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, said Gabbard was “parroting fake Russian propaganda.”
Oddly enough, neocon queen bee Victoria Nuland had testified six days earlier, in response to a question from Sen. Marco Rubio in hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, that “Ukraine has biological research facilities which, in fact, we’re now quite concerned Russian troops, Russian forces may be seeking to gain control of, so we are working with the Ukrainians on how we can prevent any of those research materials from falling into the hands of Russian forces should they approach.” Somehow Nuland’s admission that the labs existed was considered to be neither “traitorous” nor “fake Russian propaganda,” perhaps because she managed to include some anti-Russian “spin.” Neither Gabbard nor Nuland claimed that the labs were for weapons research, although Gabbard’s opponents did not hesitate to insinuate that she had done so. Regarding Gabbard’s claim that the labs were “US-funded,” a story in the New York Post appeared the very next week on March 26, with the title: “Hunter Biden helped secure funds for US biolab contractor in Ukraine: e-mails.” The source for the article was now-famous Hunter Biden laptop (more on this below.)
Whether there was a military aspect to the biolabs remains an open question. Much research in biology, physics and chemistry will have both military and civilian applications. There was undeniably a significant buildup, sponsorship and privatization of bio-weapons research by the United States in the immediate aftermath of the September, 2001 anthrax terror attack in which 5 Americans were killed, which followed immediately upon the heels of the 9/11 attacks. The neocons vehemently rejected the idea that there could be any military applications, while the Russians—in particular, Lt. Gen. Igor Kirillov, who headed Russia’s radiological, biological and chemical protection forces—insisted that these were weapons labs. Predictably, the U.K. accused Kirillov of acting as a “significant mouthpiece for Kremlin disinformation.” Kirillov was assassinated on December 17 in a bombing attack for which the Ukrainian government took credit.
II. The neocon alliance with terrorists
The Lessons of Syria
In 1975, as the Church Committee hearings began, the malignant grouping within the U.S. national security establishment had already charted a foreign policy course that emulated the worst features of the British Empire.
Professor Bernard Lewis was a leading British intelligence operative and academic, who arrived in America in 1974 to take up joint positions at Princeton University and the Institute for Advanced Studies. He promoted the idea among U.S. government circles that the spread of Islamic fundamentalism could weaken their opponents in the Cold War, by creating a zone of instability along the southern flanks of Russia and China (this was a further elaboration of what 19th century Empire strategists called the “Great Game.”) This tactic was enthusiastically supported by National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, and other leading lights of the emerging neoconservative movement. Neocon think-tankers dubbed it the “Arc of Crisis” for public consumption. Insiders, however, still called it the “Bernard Lewis Plan.”
The use of Islamic radicals as mercenaries had been pioneered in the 1950s by the British, who attempted to use the Muslim Brotherhood against Egypt’s nationalist president, Gamal Abdel Nasser. Under Lewis’ tutelage, the U.S. funded, trained, and armed the Mujahideen in Afghanistan during the 1980s, using them to harass the Russian military which had occupied that nation. After they succeeded in driving the Russians out, the Mujahideen soon morphed into groups such as al-Qaeda and ISIS, and began to commit acts of terrorism in Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Syria, and other countries. Anglo-American intelligence disavowed their role in enabling this transformation, describing their former “fiercely independent Afghansi freedom fighters” as having become a “Frankenstein’s monster” of sorts.
Then, using the 9/11 attacks as a pretext, the U.S. and British began to systematically target the secular, multiconfessional governments in Southwest Asia for various types of destabilization and “regime change,” using radical Islamicist groups as proxies. The nation of Syria proved to be a challenge for them. Syria resisted these destabilization tactics even after the U.S. began, in 2012, to directly support Islamicist elements to the tune of roughly $1 billion per year, in what was later exposed as Operation Timber Sycamore. As the BBC approvingly wrote, "Those who supported his approach, the Arms for Rebels group, included then-CIA Director David Petraeus, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and most of the foreign-policy establishment in Washington, both Democrat and Republican."
But it was not until December 8, 2024 that the government of Bashar al-Assad was finally toppled and replaced by a grouping led by Ahmed al-Sharaa AKA Abu Mohammed al-Julani, a man whom the U.S. had previously designated as a terrorist, and had even offered a $10 million bounty for his capture. The replacement of a secular, nationalist government by a gang of “fiercely independent jihadists” should have been a humiliating embarrassment for the neocons, but the compliant American media obediently characterized it as a “victory for democracy.”
Tulsi Gabbard played an important role in calling attention to this decades-long “regime change” travesty. As a Congresswoman from Hawaii in 2016, she introduced the Stop Arming Terrorists Act into the House of Representatives, saying, “Under U.S. law it is illegal for any American to provide money or assistance to al-Qaeda, ISIS or other terrorist groups. If you or I gave money, weapons or support to al-Qaeda or ISIS, we would be thrown in jail. Yet the U.S. government has been violating this law for years, quietly supporting allies and partners of al-Qaeda, ISIL, Jabhat Fateh al Sham and other terrorist groups with money, weapons, and intelligence support, in their fight to overthrow the Syrian government.”
The following year, she traveled to Damascus, where she met with the Syrian President, causing howls of outrage from the neocon sect. During this visit, she gained first-hand knowledge of British operations in that country, which include the MI6-linked “White Helmets” organization and the British-based “Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.”
The White Helmets organization was founded by James Le Mersurier OBE, a former British military officer who later admitted to embezzling the organization’s funds and apparently died by his own hand. The organization identifies itself as a “volunteer civil defense organization” that provides aid to communities in Syria, but has been characterized as allies and “hidden soldiers” by the Islamist insurgents there. The White Helmets have been lionized by the neocons, and an Oscar-winning documentary film was even produced in order to sell them to the public. The US and UK governments have funded them to the tune of $70 million since 2014.
Neocons, who venerate the British Empire as the model they wish to emulate, are particularly anxious to hide the British role in Syria. One incident in 2013 which was exploited for propaganda purposes was an alleged chemical weapons attack in Ghouta, which was quickly blamed on the Assad government. There is some debate about whether such an attack actually took place, due to a suppressed report by the original Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) team that went to Syria, and did not find any evidence of a chemical weapons attack.
On September 13, 2023, investigative reporter Seymour Hersh published a leaked Defense Intelligence Agency internal assessment. It stated that the al-Nusrah Front, one of the numerous al-Qaeda offshoots operating in Syria, possessed the capability of carrying out the attack. This information had been deliberately withheld from President Obama, who went on to make public statements that only the Syrian government could be responsible. This echoed the pronouncements of the British Joint Intelligence Organisation, which had issued a statement that “there is no credible intelligence or other evidence to substantiate the claims or the possession of CW [chemical weapons] by the opposition.”
The Grayzone news source has offered meticulously documented evidence that the White Helmets deceived and manipulated the OPCW, in order to further the propaganda narrative that the Syrian government used chemical weapons against its own people. It was important to the British and their neocon associates that Assad be blamed, because they hoped to use the alleged attack as the pretext to persuade the U.S. to launch a military attack on Syria, as one part of the grand geopolitical agenda of the Bernard Lewis Plan.
In an interview with Tucker Carlson, Tulsi Gabbard had this to say:
Where is the evidence? Where is the evidence that would provide the basis for the US to launch a military strike against Syria? That evidence was never presented, and it's very clear now that as time has gone on that there was a cover-up, and why was there a cover-up? It became very clear that this OPCW report, the final report, was tailored before it was finally released, in order to provide cover for that un-Constitutional military strike that the United States launched against Syria in April of 2018. And really what's at stake here is the credibility of this international organization, the OPCW, that people are supposed to be able to trust to be a neutral entity, to provide objective facts based on what their investigators have found on the ground. And it's very clear that this did not happen in this instance. And the impact of this is not only credibility of this investigation into this alleged chemical weapons attack in Douma, in Syria, but it will undermine the credibility of all past reports and investigations from the OPCW as well as any future reports and investigations they conduct. It calls into question their very integrity.
Gabbard’s resistance to such a coordinated international media operation demonstrates her qualifications as an appointee to the position of DNI, inasmuch as it demonstrates her ability to discern war-mongering “psychological operations” from real, human intelligence.
III. Election Meddling and the Hunter Biden Laptop
We now know that it was neocon princeling Anthony Blinken who instructed CIA Deputy Director Mike Morell to organize the now-notorious “Public Statement on the Hunter Biden Emails,” signed by 51 intelligence professionals, following the discovery of a laptop owned by Hunter Biden with incriminating evidence of corruption of the Biden family. These individuals, including former Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper and past CIA Directors Michael Hayden, Leon Panetta, and John Brennan, all proclaimed that the release of these revelations “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” This narrative continued to be circulated until the New York Times ruefully conceded in March of 2022 that the laptop story was legitimate. Some of these 51 signators may be able to plead incompetence, the majority are simply bald-faced liars; none, however, can plead innocence.
Liars’ Poker: 'Double or Nothing'
Right on cue, a similar letter came out in December of 2024, signed by “almost 100 former intelligence and national security officials,” opposing the confirmation of Tulsi Gabbard. One of the reasons cited for their opposition is that she is said to have “publicly cast doubt on U.S. intelligence reports and overwhelming public reporting that Assad carried out chemical weapons attacks on Syrian civilians, giving credence to the debunked conspiracy[sic] that the attack was staged by agents of the United Kingdom.” It is interesting to note here that it is considered intolerable to cast doubt on “overwhelming public reporting” by the same press courtesans who told us that there were Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq. Also noteworthy is that the majority of those who signed this letter are retired ambassadors or other State Department functionaries, which suggests that Secretary of State Blinken may be reprising his role as organizer of the “laptop letter caper.”
In response, a spokeswoman for Gabbard said, “These unfounded attacks are from the same geniuses who have blood on their hands from decades of faulty ‘intelligence,’ including the non-existent weapons of mass destruction. These intel officials continue to use classification as a partisan weapon to smear and imply things about their political enemy without putting the facts out.”
The British Perspective
If one wants to know why the British establishment—members of whose intelligence agencies, such as “former” British intelligence agent Christopher Steele, and his controller, former head of British Intelligence (1999-2004) Sir Richard Dearlove, played such a central role in Russiagate—would now be so heavily involved, as a foreign power, in attempting to block the appointments of Patel and Gabbard, it is often helpful to go to the unofficial organ of the British establishment, the London Economist. The Economist has published two major articles on Tulsi Gabbard in the past two months, signaling its concern over the threat she poses to the sort of “special relationship” that is typified by the swapping of Orwellian surveillance data between the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) and the U.K.’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ)(more on this below). Their November 24th article affects a flippant, snarky tone, with the title “Donald Trump and Tulsi Gabbard are coming for the spooks” and the subtitle “The spy who purged me.” But their underlying anxiety comes out in such ominous warnings as, “Within the Five Eyes intelligence pact, made up of America, Australia, Britain, Canada and New Zealand, signals-intelligence gathering is so tightly integrated that it would be impossible to unravel without causing massive disruption to America itself.”
The December 13th article describes Gabbard as a “Democratic apostate and apologist for Vladimir Putin,” and approvingly quotes the ever-disingenuous Sen. Adam Schiff, who warns that if American allies “don’t trust the head of our intelligence agencies, they’ll stop sharing information with us.” Along with the tacky commentary on personal appearance which is always reserved for female political figures, the Economist can’t contain its indignation over her criticisms of “regime change wars” and “neocon war hawks.”
The Daily Telegraph published a more overtly hysterical article with the title, “British defence figures ‘alarmed’ by Trump’s choice of ‘pro-Moscow’ Tulsi Gabbard.” They worry about “potential reductions in intelligence sharing across the Five Eyes alliance.” The article quotes former MI6 chief Sir Richard Dearlove, who complained that Gabbard has “no experience of intelligence and security.” No mention is made that Dearlove was involved in certifying the fake story that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, used by the Bush administration to launch the war against Iraq in 2003; and the Russiagate story, which included British “confirmation” that Putin was involved in rigging the 2016 election, backed by the fake dossier produced by former MI6 agent Christopher Steele, and vouched for by Dearlove. Unnamed British Government sources were trotted out to say that if Gabbard were to take up the position that America would remain the UK’s “closest ally”, there would be no issues with the relationship between the two nations.
In a separate article titled “Who is Kash Patel”, the Telegraph introduces Patel (an attorney and former federal prosecutor at the U.S. Department of Justice who has served as senior counsel on counterterrorism for the House Select Committee on Intelligence in 2017, as well as senior director of the Counterterrorism Directorate at the U.S. National Security Council and Chief of Staff to the acting U.S. secretary of defense Christopher C. Miller,) as a “children’s author.”
IV. Corruption in the Department of Justice
The Truth About the 'Weaponization of the Justice System'
At various times in recent decades, both Republicans and Democrats have accused their opponents of attempting to use control over the Department of Justice and law enforcement agencies for political advantage. But one of the things we learned from Sen. Frank Church’s Committee in 1975 is that this problem began much earlier, and included operations such as COINTELPRO, an FBI program started in the mid-1950s which involved the illegal surveillance, infiltration and disruption of a wide assortment of political organizations and movements that were regarded as undesirable. As with other covert (and illegal) activities that were exposed in the Church Committee hearings, the FBI issued a mea culpa and assured the public that COINTELPRO had been discontinued. However, the facts demonstrate that this was not the case.
The most spectacular and meticulously documented abuse of DOJ and FBI power was the decades-long campaign against the movement of economist and statesman Lyndon LaRouche. About that corrupt campaign, former Attorney General Ramsey Clark wrote, “I believe it involves a broader range of deliberate and systematic misconduct and abuse of power over a longer period of time in an effort to destroy a political movement and leader, than any other federal prosecution in my time or to my knowledge.” It involved defamatory stories planted in the media, attempted infiltration, bogus prosecutions, the jailing of movement leaders, the suppression of publications, and other, more covert forms of harassment, all of which took place after the FBI had claimed it had discontinued COINTELPRO.
These activities persist today; for example, Lieutenant Colonel Tulsi Gabbard, who has a high security clearance, was placed last year on a Transportation Security Administration watchlist called “Quiet Skies.” This prompts additional security screening before flights, a particularly insulting form of harassment.
Kash Patel has declared that he will have a “take no prisoners” attitude when confirmed to head the FBI. He writes in his book, Government Gangsters:
One of the most cunning and powerful arms of the Deep State is the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the primary investigatory agency within the executive branch, which operates under the authority of the DoJ. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) may have a greater air of mystery around it (and it’s certainly the subject of many more spy thrillers), but in many ways a hyperpoliticized FBI is a much greater threat to American freedom and self-government. That’s because while the CIA has the power and authority to collect intelligence and operate in clandestine manners overseas, the FBI focuses inside of the United States. We have legal and procedural safeguards in place in order to prevent abuses, but as the nation has learned, those safeguards are not even close to being enough. The FBI is now the prime functionary of the Deep State. The politicized leadership at the very top has turned it into a tool of surveillance and suppression of American citizens.
The Debacle of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act
In recent years, a particular arena of political gamesmanship within the legal system has been the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC).
Ironically, the FISA and FISC were created during the Carter administration as a response to the COINTELPRO and related abuses uncovered by the Church Committee. They were supposed to limit “non-criminal electronic surveillances within the United States” to those that were conducted “for the purpose of collecting foreign intelligence and/or foreign counterintelligence,” and established a system of courts to review and control applications by federal agencies for search warrants.
However, they left a gaping loophole in order to make it possible to spy on someone who could not be plausibly connected to nefarious foreign interests, by allowing something called “acquisition,” which is undefined in the statute. To fill this gap, the NSA has defined it as “interception by the National Security Agency through electronic means of a communication.” Thus, information acquired by Britain’s GCHQ, or one of the other UKUSA parties, and then passed to U.S. agencies, is not covered under the act. The U.S. and U.K. can simply spy on each other’s citizenry and swap the data.
Using a “national security” rationale, the proceedings of the FISC courts are kept secret. Applications for search warrants are almost never denied. The system is essentially toothless and has not lived up to the expectations of the Church Committee. Tulsi Gabbard said, “The [FISA] court has proven to be a dependable rubber stamp for government requests.”
During the heyday of Russiagate, the court issued warrants on false premises for the FBI’s surveillance against the Trump campaign, dubbed Operation Crossfire Hurricane (made all the more ridiculous for having taken its code name from the lyrics of a song by the Rolling Stones.) Then, having been caught with its hand in the cookie jar, the court appointed former Assistant Attorney General for National Security David Kris, a vociferous Russiagate partisan, as adviser on reforming its warrant processes, prompting Rep. Devin Nunez to say, “It’s a ridiculous choice. The FBI lied to the FISC, and to help make sure that doesn’t happen again, the FISC chose an FBI apologist who denied and defended those lies. The FISC is setting its own credibility on fire.”
V. The War on Whistleblowers
The G.W. Bush administration, following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, simply bypassed the FISC courts altogether, setting up the secret Stellarwind surveillance program, one part of which involved the extensive collection of Americans’ phone call logs. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit later found that the program may have violated FISA.
Former intelligence official William Binney and two colleagues, Kirk Wiebe and Ed Loomis, made the decision to quit the NSA and become whistleblowers when they discovered the spy agency had begun using the “Thin Thread” software Binney had created to scoop up information on Americans without a court order. They attempted to become protected whistleblowers according to established procedure, and instead found themselves facing reprisals from the NSA and the DOJ; Binney came out of his shower one morning to find himself face to face with a gun-toting FBI agent, part of a team of 12 who were sent to search his home and confiscate his computer and documents. Similar treatment occurred with others. Such mistreatment at the hands of the federal government, along with the lies told to the American people by high-ranking officials like James Clapper, influenced the decision of Edward Snowden not to “work within the system.”
In 2013, while working as a government contractor, Snowden leaked highly classified information from the NSA. His disclosures revealed numerous global surveillance programs run by the NSA, the GCHQ, and the British-dominated "Five Eyes" intelligence alliance, with the cooperation of telecommunication companies. Fearing the reprisals that earlier whistleblowers had faced—the Obama administration was prosecuting whistleblowers at a historically unprecedented rate—he took elaborate measures for his personal security, leaving the U.S. before disclosing his leaked material and carefully choosing the recipients. However, rather than making his disclosures anonymously, he made them publicly under his real name. “I have no intention of hiding who I am because I know I have done nothing wrong,” he wrote. Snowden took evasive action to avoid being “renditioned” and ultimately accepted asylum from the government of Russia. The U.S. government indicted him for espionage.
Julian Assange, the Australian journalist who founded Wikileaks in 2006, created a mechanism with which whistleblowers could anonymously leak material that exposed serious violations of human rights and civil liberties by various governments. After verifying their authenticity, Wikileaks then released document caches.
On April 5, 2010, Wikileaks released 39 minutes of classified gunsight footage which WikiLeaks titled “Collateral Murder.” It showed the crew of the American gunship in Iraq firing on a group of people and killing several of them, including two Reuters journalists, and then laughing at some of the casualties, all of whom were civilians. Needless to say, this did not endear Assange to the neocons, who, as usual, were anxious to promote their latest war of choice as a noble, altruistic crusade for Democracy and Human Rights.
The neocon faction began looking for some way to retaliate, which led to a series of elaborate legal maneuvers involving the governments of Sweden, the U.K., and the U.S. In 2012, Assange took asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he lived for seven years until the asylum was withdrawn. Then Assange was incarcerated in Britain’s high-security Belmarsh prison for another five years before finally being released. He was indicted in the U.S. for “conspiracy to commit computer intrusion“ and later for violating the Espionage Act of 1917, but never stood trial.
The cases of Edward Snowden and Julian Assange became a highly polarizing issues, with neocons squaring off against civil libertarians. The neocons argued that, in the interests of national security, operatives of the secret agencies must have an implicit license to carry out highly illegal activities without scrutiny. Snowden and Assange had caused them acute embarrassment by revealing the sleazy depths of criminality in which they were engaging, such as the illegal surveillance (including of foreign heads of state such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel), war crimes, meddling in U.S. electoral politics, and even the nurturing of terrorist organizations. The neocons demanded extreme retribution in order to deter any future whistleblowing; Mike Pompeo, at the time that he headed the CIA, instructed the agency to develop plans to kidnap and murder Assange.
Meanwhile, a broad array of human rights and journalists’ organizations from around the world have called for the exoneration of both Snowden and Assange, as has Tulsi Gabbard. In a 2019 interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, Gabbard had this to say about Assange:
I think what’s happening here is, unfortunately, it is some form of retaliation coming from the government saying, ‘Hey, this is what happens when you release information that we don’t want you to release.’ And I think that’s why this is such a dangerous and slippery slope, not only for journalists, not only for those in the media, but also for every American that our government can and has the power to kind of lay down the hammer to say, ‘Be careful, be quiet and fall in line, otherwise we have the means to come after you.’
On September 30, 2020, Gabbard, along with Rep. Matt Gaetz, introduced House Resolution 1162, reproduced here:
RESOLUTION
Expressing the sense of the House of Representatives that the Federal Government should drop all charges against Edward Snowden.
Whereas, during a Senate hearing on March 12, 2013, James Clapper, then-Director of National Intelligence, was questioned by Senator Ron Wyden, and was asked whether the National Security Agency “collect[ed] any type of data at all on millions, or hundreds of millions of Americans”, to which Clapper replied “No, sir”, and added “not wittingly”, a response he later admitted was “clearly erroneous”;
Whereas, in June 2013, Edward Snowden disclosed to a selective group of journalists National Security Agency documents exposing that bulk collection of Americans’ telephone records from telecommunications providers by the intelligence community was occurring;
Whereas, on June 21, 2013, the Department of Justice unsealed charges against Edward Snowden for violating sections 793(d) and 798(a)(3) of the Espionage Act and theft of government property under section 641 of title 18, United States Code;
Whereas, on January 23, 2014, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board’s report on the National Security Agency’s telephone records program found “no instance in which the program directly contributed to the discovery of a previously unknown terrorist plot or the disruption of a terrorist attack” and that the program significantly threatened and violated the constitutional rights of the American people;
Whereas, on May 7, 2015, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled that section 215 of the Patriot Act did not authorize the bulk collection of telephone records and therefore such collection was unlawful;
Whereas, on September 2, 2020, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled the National Security Agency’s telephone records bulk collection program illegal and possibly unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment;
Whereas the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit found the telephone records bulk collection program did not play a pivotal role in any terrorism investigations;
Whereas those involved in the collection of Americans’ telephone records have yet to be held accountable for their illegal actions, further increasing the danger of continued government overreach and abuse of civil liberties; and
Whereas the United States Government must protect whistleblowers who expose illegal and unconstitutional acts of abuse within our government: Now, therefore, be it
Resolved, That it is the sense of the House of Representatives that—
(1) the National Security Agency’s bulk collection telephone records program was illegal and unconstitutional;
(2) Edward Snowden’s disclosure of this program to journalists was in the public interest; and
(3) the Federal Government should drop all charges against Edward Snowden.
Those Senators who will vote on whether to confirm President Trump’s appointees should ask themselves, which is more damaging to U.S. national security: the exposure of criminal activities—or the criminal activities themselves? The shrillness and ferocity of the attacks on Gabbard and Patel, coming from those who have something to hide, should tell us that there is a lot more dirt that has not yet seen the light of day. Speaking of both Snowden and Assange, Tulsi Gabbard called upon President Trump in 2020 to “please consider pardoning those who, at great personal sacrifice, exposed the deception and criminality of those in the deep state.”
VI. Conclusion: Is there a “Deep State”?
Unsurprisingly, the notion of a “Deep State” apparatus has been derided as a “conspiracy theory”—by the adherents of the Deep State. In fact, common sense dictates that in an enormous institution like the U.S. government, whose key administrators are frequently replaced in elections, there must be what the British like to call “continuity of government”: a permanent team of bureaucrats who offer their expertise to each newly elected administration, while retaining their own ideological prejudices, their own unchanging agendas, and their long-term allegiances to people and institutions both within and without the government per se (such as the infamous “Military-Industrial Complex). These people are the actual day-to-day managers of government, and it takes an exceptionally tough leader to compel them to change course.
The hue and cry over the nominations of Gabbard and Patel suggests that these individuals —and the Administration that they hope to represent— may have the opportunity, means, and motivation to finally clean out the painfully obvious, longstanding corruption in the government agencies they will run. It is urgent that they be confirmed.
Once that happens, the people of the United States must then demand and secure the immediate formation of a new “Church Committee,” a Congressional committee to investigate the unauthorized, lying and criminal operations of the nation's intelligence agencies, 50 years after Sen. Frank Church valiantly sought to do so. We must expose the Liars Bureau, and prosecute its members to the fullest extent of the law. We must fight to bring to light all the crimes committed against the American Presidency, and American republic, by its enemies, foreign and domestic—especially those operating under the guise of the British-American “special relationship.” This is an essential precondition for the United States to regain its once-honorable and trusted role in the world community, and the confidence of the American people in “equal justice under the law” for all its citizens.
Daniel Platt, Harley Schlanger, Dennis Speed, Robert Castle and Adrian Pearl contributed to the writing of this report.
