The title of this column reflects the
first thought I had on the news of Steve Bannon's resignation last Friday as
President Trump's strategic advisor.
Although I do not know Mr. Bannon personally, the impression I
have gotten from reading biographies of him, as well as my knowledge of his
enunciated beliefs, his patriotism, and the pivotal role he played in
galvanizing Donald Trump's presidential campaign, caused me to believe that he
was the one individual with the intellectual firepower, intestinal fortitude,
and strategic vision to check the unchecked growth of our government.
Now, with his resignation, I fear that that the barely-begun
battle to retake control of the government and pare it back to something
resembling sanity, is lost.
Could Britain have survived the Nazi onslaught if Churchill had
resigned? Could America have held together had Lincoln quit?
Granted, Bannon was not the head of state. But he clearly had the
ability to apply a deep understanding of historical events and inflection
points to contemporary trends and issues. Trump, while seeming to have the
gut-level instincts to recognize the erosion of the sources of America's
greatness, has never demonstrated or articulated a strategic vision to get us
back to the societal model envisioned by the Founders: that quaint notion that
the government answers to the people, rather than the other way around. He
needed someone like Bannon to provide that.
For someone whose career is now spent in the trenches of the war
against the Deep State, I looked forward with great anticipation to the launch
of the Trump administration. I expected many rapid victories once Trump assumed
office. I was sorely disappointed. A couple examples will illustrate the point.
A seemingly easy early win, which it appears the Trump
administration could have effected, would have been the many government records
that Judicial Watch had been battling the Obama administration in court to
release through its Freedom of Information Act requests. After all, it
would seem to be in the Trump administration's ideological and political
interests to have records disgorged which would have exposed the Obama team's
malfeasance, incompetence, and criminality. Yet the Trump Justice Department
and other agencies are as dug in as any good Obama apparatchik in denying the
release of those records.
The Benghazi disaster is a case in point. Judicial Watch has been
fighting for years to expose the purpose of the U.S. operation in Benghazi, the
events that led to the 2012 attack on the U.S. compound there, the reasons for
the non-response by the Obama team to our diplomats and intelligence operatives
in extremis that day, and the reasons behind the subsequent cover-up.
We've had much success to date in certain aspects of the
investigation by, for example, uncovering Obama's Deputy National Security
Advisor Ben Rhodes's "talking
points email," wherein Rhodes doctored talking points to show that the
Benghazi fiasco was not a "failure of policy." Those revelations in
turn forced John Boehner to constitute a House Select Committee to look into
the Benghazi matter.
However, Judicial Watch has had to continue to fight the
government, now Trump's, to provide other basic records surrounding that event.
It was only under
court order this month that Trump's State Department has been forced
to review the official State Department email accounts of Hillary Clinton's
aides Cheryl Mills, Huma Abedin, and Jake Sullivan for communications relating
to the Benghazi disaster and provide them to us. Why didn't Trump's
secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, not call his Freedom of Information Act
officers on his first day, in his first week, or even in his first six months
in office and order the records released?
Another example of the Trump administration's seeming
powerlessness or unwillingness to oppose the Deep State bureaucracy also comes
courtesy of the State Department. As Judicial
Watch reported recently, the State Department, through its Agency for
International Development (USAID), has been funneling millions of dollars to
George Soros-sponsored hard-left non-governmental organizations that seek to
undermine pro-American governments in multiple foreign countries.
One such case we highlighted was Macedonia, which thanks largely
to the United States, was a model of success after it threw off communism in
1991. It had a highly successful economy, strong free market policies and a
conservative, pro-American government. That was until Barack Obama came along
and started shoveling millions of U.S. tax dollars to some of Soros's 60-plus
leftist, rabble-rousing organizations in Macedonia that sought to unite the
members of the leftist SDSM party (former communists) of that country with the
country's sizable Muslim minority population to undermine the conservative
Christian government. Sadly, they were successful.
Obama's ambassador to Macedonia, Jess Baily, and his State
Department colleagues at the U.S. Mission in Skopje, whom a Macedonian official
described to me as being hardcore
leftists in the mold of Barack Obama, have worked closely with the
country's leftists. Yet Ambassador Baily is still
in place, and the U.S. continues to funnel those millions of dollars to
Soros's organizations there and in other countries through its Civil
Society Project. Why hasn't President Trump replaced Baily and ended the
money flow to Soros and Company? Soros’s organizations are receiving U.S. tax
dollars in other countries as well, such
as Albania, for the same leftist-fomenting purposes.
Perhaps I was naive to think that the Deep State, the Leviathan of
Big Government, could really be brought to heel, even by a brash, successful
businessman like Trump, who had zero experience, and even less of a vested
interest in, the political world. But the presence in Trump's inner circle of a
deep thinker like Bannon with a belief system rooted in the recognition of
America’s unique and revolutionary founding principles, which exalted the
individual over the state, was cause for hope. I should have remembered that
hope was the thing the last guy in the White House was selling.
Has the Deep State really won? I hope my pessimism is unfounded
and short-lived. And perhaps Bannon can be more effective from the
outside, if
rumors are true that he plans to build a media network (Breitbart or
otherwise) to replace the increasingly liberal Fox News as the voice of
Conservatism. After all, when God closes a door, he opens a window, right?
Maybe a window will open from which we can toss the Deep State.
William F. Marshall has been an
intelligence analyst and investigator in the government, private and non-profit
sectors for over 30 years. Presently he is a Senior Investigator for Judicial
Watch, Inc. (The views expressed are the author’s alone, and not necessarily
those of Judicial Watch.)
