Let’s go back to the beginning, when the very first revelations came out about Mike Flynn and the Russians, February, 2017, only two weeks into Donald Trump’s presidency.
Flynn had been fired for misreporting his meeting(s) with the Russian ambassador to Vice President Pence, bringing the simmering charge of latent Russian involvement in the Dem’s election loss front and center.
We didn’t know then many things we know now, but while the media were running wild trying to connect (imaginary, it now turns out) dots between Mike Flynn’s contacts with Russians in the ordinary course of meet-and-greets, the White House was already in DEFCON mode seeking to know how the New York Times even knew Flynn had ever talked with any Russians.
Who leaked these contacts, for, after all, in the classified meaning of the term, they were “classified”? A criminal violation. And by April there were several more and they had gone beyond Mike Flynn.
So who was doing the leaking? This was a critical question for the barely-in-place White House. Trump’s own staff? White House holdovers? The Intel community?…of which there were several, some of their departed leaders, James Clapper and John Brennan, none too friendly to the new administration.
Then there were career bureaucrats in all those agencies who’d spent decades putting their own imprimaturs on policies that covered all the Obama years. Many of the left, some even of the hard left, almost all were card-carrying members of the Bureaucrats’ Turf Protection Society, with deep personal and professional reasons having less to do with any political cause and more to do with a nice gated retirement villa in south Florida.
They felt, still feel, threatened by not only the possibility of a complete change in direction (and management) in their agencies, but that disgusting feeling life-long front office employees get when the boss’s daughter runs off and marries a guy who used to run the bowling alley.
This fleet of bureaucrats all watch the same news shows (six to choose from, all the same), read the same newspapers and opinion journals, and for a full year before the election their media had uniformly served up a daily diet about the things not to like about this “clown” (per Charles Krauthammer) long before it appeared he might actually win the nomination, much less the presidency.
This was the deep state Donald Trump faced from the day he was elected, three months before he was even inaugurated. Its sheer size was the perfect cover for dark ops, for much like Agatha Christie’s “Murder on the Orient Express”, how do you trap a killer when everyone on the train has a motive?
Under these circumstances I’m sure rooting out the individual leakers inside the deep state was recognized as something Trump’s sleuths probably couldn’t accomplish. Especially in a hurry. It takes months to lay traps. And the voting public already wanted to see, from several agencies and from the bowels of the White House, a frog march to the courthouse. A march in front of a judge by a Post or Times reporter, naming his heretofore “unnamed source” inside the agency would have been nice too.
Criminals all.
We then learned about “masking” and “unmasking” as when a foreign national speaks to an American citizen. The phone call can legally be monitored and recorded, by law, but the American’s identity must be kept masked, also by law. Then we learned of who can request that those names be unmasked, and the names Clapper and Brennan appear once again, along with Susan Rice and the ever semi-pretty Samantha Power. Those hearings will begin soon we hope, as there is much to learn and deduce, and perhaps some reporters may yet find themselves standing in front of a judge, or maybe a lineup, needing to name names.
Thanks to James Comey, of all people, the left-deep state leak nexus has been largely neutralized.
My title question here is: Did Donald Trump just stumble into this good fortune like a blind hog who found an acorn, or has there been a Hercule Poirot inside the Trump administration who wove this plan into a seamless fabric weeks ago, to cause Comey to become Trump’s Judas Goat based on what the observant eye at least should have realized is a very vain, ambitious, but also weak man.
Comey’s eyes and tone of voice betrayed him as early as the Hillary exculpation in July as one who needed to be understood and justified. And one who should never be fired. A needy man, actually.
Curiously, all of these things were missed entirely by the Democrats who didn’t look past their belief believed that Comey shared their blind hatred of Trump. And besides, he’d been their patsy for years, burying almost as many investigations as Bill and Hillary had real cadavers.
(Chesterton’s Father Brown might even had caught onto Comey quicker than Poirot. But who’s keeping score?)
What the Left have lost in this grand misadventure because of those James Comey’s miscalculations, is the loss of credibility of its entire deep state apparatus, for much like the boy who cried “Wolf”, no matter how reliable their leak is tomorrow or next week, no one except the paranoid-schizophrenic wing of the Democrat Party will believe them…all because no one any longer believes the messenger.
Bottom line: Donald Trump is either the luckiest stiff in history, or has buried somewhere in his organization an absolute genius in being able to get the Left’s major players to gut themselves like fish. Or maybe he keeps his own counsel?
Going forward, the problem for the media and the Left is that their pragmatists know all this to be true, but can speak of this only in hushed privacy. In public they must continue to squeal in high dudgeon that the impeachment game or the 2018 election fiction is still doable, the game is still afoot… knowing that they can do nothing if Trump only does 50% of the things he’s promised. Never good losers, even in the best of instances they will continue to wail and gnash teeth about the illegitimacy of Donald Trump.
And their pragmatists can also do the hard math: Trump voters do not pay much attention to the news, and those who do largely get their facts from the horse’s mouth, Trump Tweets, so therefore will remain unchanged, their voting enthusiasm rising or falling solely on Trump’s ability to keep his word…so far, very good. (It’s the GOP Congress who should worry, and they should look at the blowback Theresa May is already feeling about the opportunities lost that have diluted her Tory party’s power immensely) Meanwhile Trump’s ability to bring more people into the ranks of the employed, and hence the Republican fold, continue to gather new voters, many old Democrats who had waited 25 years for their own party to deliver, as a reason to vote for Bill Clinton in 1992, and now Trump appears poised to do.
So while there will be more anonymous sources (the editors at New York Times and Washington Post have their own vanities to bathe), no one will believe them, even if true, at which time the deep state will either ramp it up, or quietly break apart.
As God once replied to Noah (according to Bill Cosby) when he complained to the specifications of that big boat, “Noah, how long can you tread water?”
