Throughout this week, the Washington Examiner‘s Restoring America project will feature its latest series, “Reforming the Deep State: Reining in the Federal Bureaucracy.” We invited some of the best policy minds in the conservative movement to speak to the issues of what waste, fraud, abuse, and unaccountability exist throughout the federal government and what still needs to be done. To learn more about the series, click here.
The president of the United States is often hailed as the most powerful figure on the planet. Yet lurking just below the surface of every administration lies an unseen, but extraordinarily potent web of unelected officials and entrenched agencies, immune to the ballot box and enduring beyond any changes in leadership. Some call it the administrative state, others the deep state, or simply permanent Washington. Whatever the name, this shadow government wields formidable power.
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Composed mainly of left-leaning actors, its priorities tend to align when a Democrat occupies the Oval Office. One exception may have been the Kennedy administration, but that’s a story for another day.
The reverse is generally true when a Republican holds power — especially when that Republican is President Donald Trump. Under Trump, the usual tension between the White House and permanent Washington escalated into open warfare, as the bureaucracy brought its full weight to bear against a commander in chief it regarded as an existential threat.
As hard as it is to imagine, the brash billionaire from New York arrived in Washington with little sense that an administrative state even existed — much less that, by the end of former President Barack Obama’s second term, it had become virtually indistinguishable from the Democratic Party. Worse still, the legacy media, Big Tech, and the most powerful government agencies had closed ranks with a single aim: to bring down Trump, America’s interests be damned.
Unaware of the traps that had been so painstakingly set for him during the transition, Trump assumed the presidency. In some cases, he placed his trust in the wrong people and took advice from those who wanted him to fail. It’s actually amazing he was able to accomplish as much as he did during his first term.
Two weeks before Trump’s 2017 inauguration, the Obama administration released an Intelligence Community Assessment on Russian interference that concluded with “high confidence” that Russia had acted to benefit Trump.
Documents declassified in July by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe show that CIA case officers vehemently disagreed with this determination at the time. Citing the newly discovered information, Gabbard became the first Trump administration official to publicly use the words “Obama” and “treason” in the same sentence.
The documents revealed that just days before Obama ordered a new ICA in December 2016, the consensus among U.S. intelligence agencies was that even though Russia meddled in the election, it did not change the result.
That judgment displeased both Obama and then-FBI Director James Comey, who refused to endorse it. So, Obama called for a new ICA to be prepared and placed then-CIA Director John Brennan and Comey in charge.
The corrupt new version of the report worked like a charm: It cast a shadow of illegitimacy over Trump’s impending presidency.
RICHARD NIXON ENABLED THE ADMINISTRATIVE STATE
Ten days before Trump’s inauguration, Comey briefed him on the Steele dossier, a collection of bogus stories commissioned by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign and conjured up by former British spy Christopher Steele and his sub-sources.
Once Trump had been told about the dossier, an Obama administration official, likely then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, signaled to the media that the document could be published. BuzzFeed, a left-leaning outlet, promptly released it in full, sparking a media firestorm and setting the stage for years of investigations over alleged Russian ties.
As duplicitous and possibly illegal as these efforts were, the strategy worked with ruthless efficiency as propaganda. A Rasmussen poll released in July found that 69% of Democratic voters surveyed still believe Trump colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election.
The FBI inquiry, which evolved into Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation, kept the Trump administration under a cloud of suspicion for more than two years, a period that included the 2018 midterm elections, helping Democrats reclaim the House of Representatives and setting the stage for two impeachments.
When the New York Post published emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop that strongly implied Joe Biden’s involvement in his family’s alleged foreign influence-peddling business just weeks before the 2020 presidential election, it was permanent Washington that came to the rescue.
In April 2023, Rep. James Comer (R-KY), the chairman of the House Oversight Committee that was investigating the Biden family’s financial dealings, announced that Antony Blinken, then a senior adviser to Biden’s campaign, was the “impetus” behind the October 2020 letter signed by 51 prominent former intelligence officials released just before the presidential election.
The signers, all members of permanent Washington, claimed that the New York Post’s devastating story about Hunter Biden’s laptop had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
This was no small thing. Their pivotal letter arguably saved Biden’s candidacy. The Biden campaign and the spies who signed the letter knew that the leftist media would pick up their narrative, and they were not disappointed. Politico immediately published the letter with the headline, “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former officials say.”
Just days after the letter was released, then-candidate Joe Biden used it to shut down questions from Trump, who raised the matter of the Biden family’s alleged overseas influence-peddling operations in a critical debate.
The “Twitter Files” revealed that an unholy alliance between the Democratic Party, the FBI, Big Tech, and the legacy media worked together to interfere in the 2020 presidential election. These powerful entities abused their power to achieve a common goal: the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story. The revelations about Twitter’s inside dealings exposed a concerted effort to manipulate the free flow of information to voters ahead of a critical election.
The corruption that began under Obama deepened and accelerated to a dangerous degree during the Biden administration, which advanced the practice of lawfare to a perilous new level.
Shortly after the 2022 midterm elections, Trump launched his 2024 presidential campaign. Permanent Washington went into overdrive to invent ways to bankrupt and even imprison him. Between March and August 2023, four criminal indictments, two federal and two state, were filed against Trump, along with several civil lawsuits.
The strategy was for Democratic prosecutors to hit Trump with so many indictments and lawsuits that, rather than campaigning, he would spend the entire election season defending himself in courtrooms. Surely, one of the charges would result in a conviction before Election Day, and Joe Biden would cruise to victory.
FOIA FOLLIES: HOW THE DEEP STATE AVOIDS TRANSPARENCY
But, as they say, the devil fools with the best-laid plans. District attorneys and prosecutors have love affairs and even perjure themselves, trials get delayed, and there are still a few judges left who believe that no one should be “deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law” — not even a defendant as reviled as Trump.
The unhappy reality for Democrats is that their lawfare campaign against Trump didn’t work out quite the way they’d anticipated.
In May 2024, Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts for falsifying business records by a New York jury at the end of a Soviet-style show trial. It was a seminal moment for people who grasped that the Democratic Party had corrupted the justice system to influence a presidential election.
Naturally, the Left was delighted with the jury’s decision. ABC News anchor Mary Bruce reported that “there were cheers inside the Biden headquarters in Wilmington as the verdict was read. These guilty verdicts are a political gift to Democrats, a political gift to the president. He is now running against a convicted felon.”
But Bruce was mistaken.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE ‘REFORMING THE DEEP STATE’ SERIES
Less than an hour after the verdict was read, a surge in donations to the Trump campaign caused the website to crash. In the first 24 hours after the verdict was read, the Trump campaign received $52.8 million in donations.
The tide had turned. The deep state had been exposed.