April, 2013. The fifth year of the Obama Administration.
And on the nationally syndicated Tom Joyner radio show – Joyner an Obama-supporting liberal – the Attorney General of the United States is discussing his plans for the future. Having served through the Obama first term, the question posed is whether Holder is planning to depart the government at the beginning of the second term. Politico headlined the story this way:
Eric Holder: ‘I’m still the president’s wingman’
The story began:
“Attorney General Eric Holder brushed off a question Thursday about when he might leave the administration. Instead, the top lawman professed his allegiance to President Barack Obama.
‘I’m still enjoying what I’m doing, there’s still work to be done. I’m still the President’s wing-man, so I’m there with my boy. So we’ll see,’ Holder said in an interview on the Tom Joyner radio show.”
Holder would, in fact, leave two years later, to be replaced by fellow liberal Loretta Lynch.
Recall now when President Trump scolded Attorney General Jeff Sessions for the latter’s recusal from the Russia collusion business. Here is Sally Yates, the Obama Deputy Attorney General who was briefly Trump’s Acting Attorney General pending Session’s confirmation. Trump would fire Yates for insubordination over the issue of the so-called “travel ban.”
When Trump’s attack on Sessions was in the news, The Huffington Post reported the following of Yates:
“Former acting Attorney General Sally Yates said that Trump’s attack on Sessions’ recusal on Russia ‘reveals yet again his violation of the essential independence of DOJ, a bedrock principle of our democracy.’”
Catch the game? There is Yates’s one-time Obama-appointed boss, Eric Holder, saying quite publicly that he is Obama’s “wingman” at the Department of Justice. Yet there wasn’t a peep at the time from Yates that Holder’s statement ‘reveals yet again his violation of the essential independence of DOJ, a bedrock principle of our democracy.’”
Then there’s this story that emerged in the wake of the release of the House Intelligence Committee “Nunes Memo.” Congressman Devin Nunes, the Committee chairman, appeared on Fox with host Brett Baier. This following this tweet from former Obama Secretary of State John Kerry. Said Kerry:
“The Nunes memo is dangerous, ugly, and an assault on the integrity of the institutions of our country,” he tweeted. “I lived through Watergate/Nixon: America pays a very steep price when a political party tries to undermine the institutions that hold us together …”
And what did Nunes have to say to Baier? This:
“We are in the middle of what I call phase two of our investigation, which involves other departments, specifically the State Department and some of the involvement that they had in this.
That investigation is ongoing and we continue work towards finding answers and asking the right questions to try to get to the bottom of what exactly the State Department was up to in terms of this Russia investigation.”
Notice the pattern?
On the one hand, Yates and Kerry are trying to tell the American people that the institutions in which they worked – the Justice and State Departments respectively – are all about the non-partisan, unbiased execution of the law. Strictly non-political.
But in fact? In fact what we have is no less than Attorney General Holder himself personally contradicting Yates and confirming that his job is, yes indeed, not to be professional and non-partisan but rather to be the President’s decidedly political (and Left-wing) “wingman” in the running of the Department of Justice. And there is the former Secretary of State talking indignantly about “when a political party tries to undermine the institutions that hold us together…” – meaning in his case the State Department – while we learn from Chairman Nunes that in fact there is a congressional investigation into just “what exactly the State Department was up to in terms of this Russia investigation.”
And before Kerry was Secretary of State? When was Hillary Clinton running the Department? Here is this jewel about the conduct of then-Under Secretary of State Patrick Kennedy, a career diplomat no less. Kennedy joined the Foreign Service in 1973 and worked his way through the ranks of career diplomats before leaving office in January 2017. The subject: Benghazi and Clinton’s role in that episode which cost the lives of four Americans. Reported the Washington Examiner’s Susan Ferrechio:
“Newly released FBI documents depict Kennedy seeking to reverse the classification of one of Clinton’s emails related to the terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi. Kennedy promised to “archive the document in the basement of [the State Department] never to be seen again.”
Meanwhile over in yet another part of the federal government, the Environmental Protection Agency, the pattern appears yet again. Climate Depot, an environmentalist website sponsored by a group called the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), headlined this:
Career EPA employees to fight Trump: ‘We will resist in whatever way, shape or form that we can’
Trump had been in office a mere eleven days when the Washington Post was headlining:
Resistance from within: Federal workers push back against Trump
The article begins this way:
“The signs of popular dissent from President Trump’s opening volley of actions have been plain to see on the nation’s streets, at airports in the aftermath of his refugee and visa ban, and in the blizzard of outrage on social media. But there’s another level of resistance to the new president that is less visible and potentially more troublesome to the administration: a growing wave of opposition from the federal workers charged with implementing any new president’s agenda.
Less than two weeks into Trump’s administration, federal workers are in regular consultation with recently departed Obama-era political appointees about what they can do to push back against the new president’s initiatives. Some federal employees have set up social media accounts to anonymously leak word of changes that Trump appointees are trying to make.
…The signs of resistance in federal offices range from low-level grumbling and angry opposition posted online to anonymous promises of outright insubordination as new policies develop.”
One could go on. And on and on. In that same Post article former GOP House Speaker Newt Gingrich summed up the problem:
“Former House speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), a Trump adviser and longtime critic of the bureaucracy, said the pushback against the new administration reveals how firmly entrenched liberals are and how threatened they feel by the new regime. He cited an analysis by the Hill newspaper that showed that 95 percent of campaign donations from employees at 14 federal agencies went to Hillary Clinton last fall.
‘This is essentially the opposition in waiting,’ Gingrich said. ‘He may have to clean out the Justice Department because there are so many left-wingers there. State is even worse.’
Gingrich said Trump might push for civil service revisions to make it easier to fire federal workers. He predicted that the public would back the president over federal employees.”
What does all of this have to do with the Nunes Intelligence Committee memo?
Everything.
The hard, very blunt fact of the matter is that Eric Holder’s self-description of his role as Attorney General of the United States as the “wingman” for a Leftwing president is, in fact, the mindset of a great many of those who work and run the entire federal bureaucracy. They are in fact the “Deep State.” They see themselves as the opposition to any conservative or Republican president. And they will do whatever it takes to thwart if not covertly sabotage the duly elected president.
Which in turn makes the entire Nunes investigation into the FBI and the Justice Department totally relevant to a serious problem with the operation of the entire federal government. The now-famous texts between FBI counterintelligence expert Peter Strzok and his mistress, FBI lawyer Lisa Page said, among other things of candidate and then-President Trump, that Trump was an “idiot”, a “d*uche” and, oh yes, “God(,) Trump is a loathsome human.” There was more – oh so much more. But rest assured, they were not alone in these sentiments.
The real problem here isn’t simply the manipulation of the FBI and the Justice Department to thwart or unseat a duly elected President of the United States in the fashion of a banana republic-style insider/silent coup. And make no mistake, that is one huge problem.
No, the real problem here is that hundreds if not thousands of employees of the federal bureaucracy of the United States government see themselves – in whatever department or agency they may serve – as some version of Eric Holder’s self-description of his role as the Obama Attorney General. These federal bureaucrats see themselves as the wingman of the American Left. Their role in government is not to be unbiased or straight-shooting career professionals. Far from it. They see their role as ensuring that Leftist dogma on whatever progressive agenda item is relevant to their job is strictly followed. And as with the FBI’s Peter Strzok there is no limit to which they will not go to achieve that end. They are the Deep state personified.
All of which says there must be one serious addition to the Trump agenda. Which Newt Gingrich has summed up well. As the Post noted, “Trump might push for civil service revisions to make it easier to fire federal workers.”
The dangerous “Deep State” FBI-Department of Justice conduct and what Nunes is saying about the State Department makes it clear. American government at the federal level has a very, very serious problem. Now is the time to start fixing it. To overhaul the Deep State completely to ensure as best as can be done that this never happens again.
President Trump is exactly the president who could do it.
The views and opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect the official position of Sean Hannity or Hannity.com
Jeffrey Lord is a frequent contributor to Hannity.com. You can follow him on Twitter @realJeffreyLord