The Shadow Government
CIA whistleblower Kevin Shipp, a decorated CIA intelligence officer, has identified the CIA as the “central node” of the shadow government that controls all of the other 16 intelligence agencies, despite the existence of the director of national intelligence. According to Shipp, the Deep State is composed of the military-industrial complex and its lobbyists, intelligence contractors, defense contractors, Wall Street (through offshore accounts), the Federal Reserve, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, the US Treasury Department, foreign lobbyists, and central banks. To this list, we can reinsert Congress—the group President Eisenhower knew votes to fund and protect the Deep State’s massive, largely unchecked, clandestine operations. Shipp claims the CIA “controls defense and intelligence contractors, can manipulate the president and presidential decisions, has the power to start wars, torture, initiate coups, and commit false flag attacks.”5
Peter Dale Scott has come to view the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, the 1980 October Surprise involving the release of the US embassy hostages in the Iran–Contra affair, and 9/11 as Deep State events that “repeatedly have involved lawbreaking and/or violence, have been mysterious to begin with, and whose mystery has been compounded by systematic falsifications in media and internal government records.” Scott has come to see these incidents as “flowing in part from the sociodynamic processes of violent power itself, power associated with and deployed in the service of the global expansion of American military might.” Focusing on what he has called the “American War Machine,” Scott has advanced the understanding of the extent to which Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex has led to the operation of an extra-Constitutional Deep State willing to use the black political arts of false-flag attacks, funding of mainstream media propaganda, and even assassination of heads of state to dominate US politics by controlling both political parties.6
Obama Administration Illegally Unmasks and Leaks
The volume of mainstream media stories attributed to anonymous sources that were published during the 2016 presidential caused Senator Charles Grassley (Republican, Iowa), the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Representative Devin Nunes (Republican, California), the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, to become suspicious. Where did the Democrats get their information that Trump officials had conspired or otherwise colluded with Russia? Or even more specifically, unless the Obama administration had unmasked Trump campaign officials captured in NSA surveillance of foreign nationals, how did it begin to suspect that Trump officials were actively conspiring with Russian officials? “Unmasking” involves identifying the US citizens captured in FISA-authorized electronic surveillance of foreign nationals—a process that invites abuse when government officials decide to make the unmasked US citizens the targets of future surveillance. In other words, Obama officials appear to have done just this to get the dirt they needed on Trump officials to construct the Russian collusion narrative. Then, once in possession of the unmasked names, highly placed officials within the Obama administration appear to have committed a second crime by leaking to the press the highly classified information obtained on Trump campaign officials through the NSA Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court–ordered electronic surveillance.
Investigating the issue, Grassley and Nunes became convinced that the FBI and NSA went one step further, deciding to place foreign nationals believed to be in touch with Trump campaign officials under electronic surveillance, with the intent of capturing Trump campaign officials in communication with the targeted foreign nationals. Even if the FBI or the DOJ were not interested in investigating the foreign nationals, the Obama administration appears to have instructed the NSA to find a way to conduct surveillance on the foreign nationals because the Obama administration wanted to capture Trump campaign officials in conversations with Russian nationals or with foreign operatives that were working with Russian nationals.
Suspicion that unmasking had occurred quickly centered on Obama’s national security advisor, Susan Rice; US ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power; and CIA director John Brennan. The question was this: Had President Obama instructed or otherwise allowed Rice, Power, and Brennan to “unmask” Trump campaign officials captured in NSA surveillance of foreign targets in order to develop information that Trump campaign officials were conspiring or otherwise colluding with Russian officials to rig the presidential election?
It appears that once NSA electronic surveillance had captured intelligence appearing to link Trump campaign officials to Russian nationals, the Obama administration next illegally leaked that information to friendly reporters in the mainstream media. This would account for the number of reports accusing Trump campaign officials of colluding with the Russians that the mainstream media attributed to unnamed individuals “close to the investigation.” Within the White House, suspicion extended to former deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes as a lead culprit in leaking to the press the “evidence” of Russian collusion found after Rice, Power, and Brennan unmasked Trump campaign officials captured in NSA electronic surveillance of foreign nationals.7
On September 19, 2017, CNN reported that Rice admitted to House Intelligence Committee members that she had unmasked the identities of senior Trump officials to understand why the crown prince of the United Arab Emirates, Mohammed bin Zayed Al-Nahyan, was in New York in 2016.8 Months earlier, on April 5, 2017, President Trump told reporters that Rice may have committed a crime by seeking to learn the identities of Trump associates swept up in surveillance of foreign officials by US spy agencies. “I think the Susan Rice thing is a massive story,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “It’s a bigger story than you know. The Russia story is a total hoax. There has been absolutely nothing coming out of that. What’s happened is terrible. I’ve never seen people so indignant, including many Democrats who are friends of mine.”9
Rice attempted to explain that she asked for the unmasking because Zayed had scheduled a trip to the United States without notifying the Obama administration about travel plans. However, it’s more likely that Rice was suspicious that General Mike Flynn, Jared Kushner, and Steve Bannon had discussed opening a back channel to Russia in their three-hour discussion that focused on Iran, Yemen, and the Middle East peace process.
Representative Nunes, in a letter to Director of National Intelligence Dan Coates in July 2017, made clear his concern that all Obama administration leaks of classified information would be vigorously prosecuted. Nunes also alleged in the letter that “Obama-era officials sought the identities of Trump transition officials within intelligence reports.” Nunes’s concern was that the Obama administration, since before the November 2016 election, had actively conspired to build the “Russian collusion” case against Trump through a process of unmasking intelligence reports and leaking the contents to partisan, Clinton-supporting reporters in the mainstream media.
These suspicions had a basis in fact, given the record of the Obama Department of Justice under both Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch seeking to prosecute and convict political opponents in the press by orchestrating a campaign to leak secret grand jury information to reporters. This practice demanded the Obama administration FBI’s active complicity in leaking secret grand jury administration under both FBI directors Robert Mueller and James Comey.
Mueller Illegally Leaks Unmasked Political Intel
That the mainstream media built the case that Trump had colluded with Russia on a mountain of leaks is clear by examining any of a large number of stories that were informed only by anonymous sources and unnamed insiders. On May 27, 2017, for instance, the New York Times published an article titled, “Top Russian Officials Discussed How to Influence Trump Aides Last Summer.” The first paragraph of the article read as follows: “American spies collected information last summer