What is happening now to President Trump was predictable. The plans were laid in plain sight, including the use of whistleblowers to disrupt the administration.
It is instructive to look back and realize that there was plenty of advance warning of the various attempts to set up grounds for the impeachment of President Trump. The basic approach was clearly described, and it is difficult to avoid the notion that this was planned from the start.
Consider, for example, this excerpt from an article published in Vanity Fair on February 1, 2017, twelve days after Trump’s inauguration [emphasis mine]:
Others, however, view resistance as a part of the job. “Policy dissent is in our culture,” one diplomat in Africa, who signed the letter circulating among foreign diplomats, told The New York Times. “We even have awards for it,” this person added, in reference to the State Department’s “Constructive Dissent” award. One Justice Department employee told the Post, “You’re going to see the bureaucrats using time to their advantage,” and added that “people here will resist and push back against orders they find unconscionable,” by whistle-blowing, leaking to the press, and lodging internal complaints. Others are staying in contact with officials appointed by President Obama to learn more about how they can undermine Trump’s agenda and attending workshops on how to effectively engage in civil disobedience, the Post reports.
Let me emphasize that again: whistle-blowing, leaking to the press, and lodging internal complaints.
And then we have this, from the same article [emphasis added]:
When asked how the opposition emerging at this stage compares to past administrations, Tom Malinowski, who served as Obama’s assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor, sarcastically told the Post, “Is it unusual? There’s nothing unusual about the entire national security bureaucracy of the United States feeling like their commander in chief is a threat to U.S. national security. That happens all the time. It’s totally usual. Nothing to worry about.”
The “nothing unusual” part was sarcasm, of course. But the rest was deadly serious. Indications are that a plan was in place from the start, and it’s not some wild conspiracy-mongering to say so because although this may be a clandestine conspiracy it is not a completely secret one in the sense that we were told about its general thrust in advance by the proud perpetrators themselves.
Mollie Hemingway of The Federalist also noticed the trend back in the beginning. She wrote the following in an article from January 17, 2017. That’s a few days before the inauguration:
Dwight Eisenhower warned that if we didn’t stay vigilant, the military-industrial complex would start creeping into politics with pernicious motives all its own. The intelligence community’s war of leaks against Trump before he’s even taken office is just the latest questionably politicized action in the decades since Eisenhower’s farewell address. And it’s safe to say that the intelligence community pushing unproven and absurd allegations about a president-elect’s sexual perversions is probably way worse than anything Ike imagined.In order to understand how we got to this perilous place and get a handle on what’s going on, it’s worth taking a closer look at the motives and allegations of political operatives in intelligence agencies, as well as the basic timeline of allegations of Russian electoral interference in the last few months. Far from discrediting Trump, it paints a worrisome portrait of the deep state gone rogue, desperate to stop a man who, whatever his considerable flaws, is an outsider to Washington.
She then goes into a series of warnings issued to Trump to beware of ruffling the feathers of the intelligence community. The most famous one, with which you might be familiar, was issued by Chuck Schumer:
…President-elect Donald Trump is “being really dumb” by taking on the intelligence community and its assessments on Russia’s cyber activities.“Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you,” Schumer told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow.
Remember, this was before Trump was inaugurated.
More:
Presidential historian Timothy Naftali said on a CNN panel that Trump should stay “silent” lest harmful information be released against him.
NeverTrumper David Frum wrote a tweet that said, “CIA message to Trump: you mess with us, get ready for a leakstorm of Biblical proportions.”
The rest of Hemingway’s article is well worth reading, despite its age. Or maybe because of its age. It’s a reminder of how many things happened very early in the game that are congruent with and that basically telegraphed what would happen with Russiagate and now Whistleblowergate.
[Neo is a writer with degrees in law and family therapy, who blogs at the new neo.]
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