The 'Deep State' Conspiracy Is How Fascists Discredit Democracy

The efforts to call into question the motivations of top officials at the FBI are creating a constitutional crisis.

GLENN CARLE
02.06.18 4:57 AM ET

The memorandum put together by Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), alleging partisan behavior by the FBI and the Department of Justice in a “Deep State” conspiracy against Donald Trump is, what we would call in the CIA, “disinformation.”

Tougher words could be used. But let’s put it simply at this: It is a deliberate diversion from the hard facts that the FBI and CIA have been amassing of Russian espionage activity with members of Donald Trump’s entourage. And it presents FBI and CIA officers with a progressively grave constitutional crisis. The Nunes memo makes it difficult for those officers to serve an executive who—evidence increasingly indicates—has betrayed his oath to the Constitution. It also makes it hard for them to serve a legislative oversight committee that is distorting its functions so as to protect that executive.

Inside the CIA, where I served for decades, and the FBI, the strongest reaction to the Nunes memo will be anger and alarm. Top officials in both those institutions operate in a manner fundamentally at odds with what is now being depicted.

In the CIA, I encountered colleagues with views that ranged from the far right to far left—every view except, perhaps, that of the communists. This broad diversity is also true for my colleagues in the FBI. Indeed, the “cultures” of both institutions are utterly apolitical. Officers take their oaths with sometimes life-sacrificing devotion: To “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”

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