Collusion has acted like a political ambiguous gestalt image, dividing the nation’s psyche. Depending upon your perspective, Trump looks like either a crook or a victim of a hoax.
The way America’s polarized media presents news of the alleged Trump-Russia collusion has led the public to imagine two very different dramatic scenarios: either Trump has been colluding with the Kremlin or Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation represents the biggest political witch hunt since the Red Scare. Considering the national hysteria around Russiagate, it’s really hard to see any middleground between these two diametrically opposed and competing narratives. Yet, things have become a bit clearer since I last wrote about Trump & the deep state.
Mueller’s long awaited investigation establishes beyond doubt within the American polity that Russia covertly worked to secure Trump’s electoral victory, but found no evidence that his campaign had conspired with Russians. Yet, unlike Trump’s tweet “NO COLLUSION. NO OBSTRUCTION!” and Attorney General William Barr’s distorted whitewashing of the report, Mueller didn’t exonerate Trump from obstruction of justice. He rather left that decision up to America’s hyperpartisan congress.
People have a hard time separating Russian oligarchs and mobsters from the Kremlin. Now, the former have been using Trump as a laundromat for decades. Unfortunately, Mueller didn’t look too closely at them or simply follow the money. Yet, if you are going to impeach a president, you have to focus on a single argument, you can’t bring in all of Trump’s corrupt practices and violations of the law. So, Mueller focused on the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation of Moscow.1
Undoubtedly, Putin wanted Trump to win over Clinton. After all, Russia’s disruptive propaganda dovetailed with its strategy of undermining American power. Since Trump campaigned on improving US-Russia relations, Putin thought he’d have a better chance of getting Obama’s economic sanctions (which were put in place as punishment for Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014) dropped if hawkish Clinton were to lose.2
So, lifting sanctions in exchange for meddling in the election and a Trump Tower in Moscow seems to have been part of an implicit (yet unprovable) deal. We also know that Trump had, as early as January 2017, tried to lift Russian sanctions, but the Senate swiftly halted Trump’s efforts.3
While the circumstantial evidence pointing to Russian collusion is plausible, there isn’t enough evidence to criminally indict a sitting president. Nevertheless, that’s much more compelling than Trump’s unsubstantiated claim that the Mueller investigation is a witch hunt spawned by the deep state. Steve Bannon’s story only makes sense if you believe Trump is a patriot who is fighting to save America from a corrupt oligarchy of globalists.
Peripeteia or Reversal
The psychological dynamics of fighting enemies or simple-minded adversarial politics calls forth opposites. Moments after World War II, the wheel of fortune turns: Germans start becoming good democrats; Americans are transformed into Prussians; Stalin becomes Czar over an enlarged Russian empire; crusading, right-wing Birchers start to ape Communists methods inside affluent suburbia; Jews establish a homeland, develop the most efficient secret police and military in the world, and in the whirl of time, become “Judeo-Nazis” inside the occupied Palestinian territories.
The liberal message of hope signifies one of the weirder turns to occur in our post-truth age. The notion that the intelligence community is going to save America from Donald Trump and foreign destabilization comes as a surprise and a reversal of political roles. Republicans have traditionally been rooted to militarism and intelligence, and now Democrats are uncritically waiting for the military-intelligence complex to restore the world.4
Equally strange is the reaction of some commentators on the left, whose views superficially appear as a reversal, but may reflect an older habit of the mind. In the past, Marxists pointed to the evils of the American Empire while ignoring Stalin’s brutal crimes. Today, Glenn Greenwald — one of the most cynically, hard-boiled critics of America’s liberal national security state — arrives at a totally naive interpretation of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, whom vanish in the foreground of his scorn.5
Yet, lets stay focused on liberals whom seem to be suffering from a new bout of American exceptionalism–an ideology which implies that other countries, like Russia, have empires, but not America, because it’s an exceptional country.
In its latest manifestation, liberals are essentially arguing that the “deep state” is a product of the paranoid imagination, and link talk of it with the dangers of fact-free rhetoric, which populist authoritarians employ. Well, that may now be the case or tendency since Trump started tweeting about his heroic struggle with the deep state, yet that doesn’t make it less real.
The Yale historian, Timothy Snyder comes to mind here, whom I had the pleasure to hear lecture at Heidelberg‘s beautiful university last February. Timothy Snyder insists that Russia has weaponized information and has declared war on factuality itself, while downplaying American meddling in foreign countries. So, when asked what he thinks about the “deep state,” he dismissed it as a myth, then superciliously suggested that those who even talk about it don’t care about the rule of law. Finally, when he added the the deep state means the constitution, my jaw dropped.
How to explain this? Most of what Snyder had said seemed fairly logical and yet there’s this gaping omission regarding the phenomenon of deep politics, thus whitewashing its criminality. While Snyder doesn’t create alternative facts, he omits key things, such as the role of Ukrainian fascists in the Maidan coup/revolution and its aftermath.
Gangster State
It’s possible that the extra-legal, clandestine activities of the security services today are simply a residue of Europe’s baroque political heritage. Historically, the democratic state evolved out of the autocratic state. Carl Schmitt in Political Theology (1922) referred to the security state as the “sovereign” since it exercises veto power over the state. American history, however, is exceptional; the United States didn’t get a secret police until J. Edgar Hoover and a national security state until after WWII.
Now, in the middle of Western democracies you have a state within a state, the national security state, the deep State or as Michael Parenti calls the Gangster State. Parenti says the gangster nature of the state is cloaked by the democratic facade and democratic substance of the government. At certain moments, the gangster nature of the state is nakedly revealed, like CIA complicity in the JFK assassination, international narcotics trafficking, Watergate, Iran-Contra, which comes as an awakening, compelling us to question the social order.
The deep state is constituted by different elements. Donald Trump doesn’t come from the hereditary intelligence caste, who have been covertly running the country’s secret institutions since the early days of the Cold War. Nor does he come from the government or corporate side of the national security state. Trump’s connected to the criminal element, whose money he’s been laundering through his real estate empire. Though he claim’s he made his fortune through real estate speculation, Mr. Trump has served as a kind of bridge between the criminal underworld and overworld of financiers, Wall Street lawyers and bureaucrats. The CIA and mob have used the same offshore havens, like Castle Bank and BCCI, to avoid taxation, launder money and finance clandestine operations.
During the Cold War, Trump worked with the American mafia, but towards the end of the 80s, he turned to the Red Mafiya. The principle that connects Trump with global criminal enterprise is money and avarice, a characteristic that would have gotten the attention of the KGB.
The CIA has always had an arm’s length relationship with drug lords. Despite official secrecy, spies have gone public. According to ex-CIA officer, Victor Marchetti,
“the history of the CIA runs parallel to criminal and drug operation throughout the world, but it’s coincidental. . . . It goes all the way back to the predecessor organization OSS and its involvement with the Italian mafia, the Cosa Nostra in Sicily and Southern Italy. Later on when they were fighting communists in France and–that they got in tight with the Corsican brotherhood. The Corsican brotherhood of course were big dope dealers. As things changed in the world the CIA got involved with the Kuomintang types in Burma who were drug runners because they were resisting the drift towards communism there. The same thing happened in Southeast Asia, later in Latin America. Some of the very people who are the best sources of information, who are capable of accomplishing things and the like happen to be the criminal element.”
The CIA got involved with drug traffickers throughout the Cold War not for financial or personal gain, but to achieve a higher ideological goal. At every turn, the cold war was prioritized over the drug war, and so the latter was sacrificed to geopolitics. Drug cartels were assisted and used to advance American interests. “For instance,” the Medellin Cartel’s Miami accountant, Ramon Millian Rodriguez suggests, “[if a] drug group was involved in a war with a terrorist group, a communist terrorist group, well, it would behoove the CIA to give that drug group as much help and advice as possible so they could win their little war.”
In short, the world’s secret services finance covert wars and intelligence operations from the drug trade. Historically, the prohibition of drugs gave rise to organized crime syndicates, which then got protection from governments. Now, while George Herbert Walker Bush is nostalgically being commemorated, we should remember that, as Director of Central Intelligence (DCI), he was never entirely removed from the protection racket of the gangster state.
During the 80s, the very last person to be suspected of trafficking drugs was the Vice President of the United States, whose boss was leading the nation’s second war on drugs plaguing America’s urban cities. The notion is so appalling, so melodramatic, so sinister, that few still would even entertain it, let alone give expression to it.
Yet, the more you look into the whole Contra Affair, the more it looks like the drug cartels of Latin America were assisted, or even created, by the CIA, if only indirectly. We know that Mexico’s Dirección Federal de Seguridad (DFS) founded the Guadalajara Cartel in the 1970s along with other drug kingpins in Mexico, and that Miguel Nazar Haro, the head of Mexico’s Federal Security Directorate, must have been backed by the CIA. The bottom line is the US government covertly supported the Dirty Wars in Latin America and Bush had been a key figure inside the National Security Council.6
Donald Trump, who lacks Bush’s sense of noblesse oblige, personifies pure market rapaciousness; it’s hard to imagine Trump striving towards a higher ideological goal beyond his own immediate self-interest. With Trump there is no pretense of statesmanship or principled decision making, which is what drives liberal establishment figures and neo-conservative ideologues crazy. Yet, his tyrannous tendencies ought to make even conservatives skeptical.
1 See: David Cay Johnston, The Making of Donald Trump (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2016), and Craig Unger’s House of Trump, House of Putin: The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia (London: Penguin, 2018), which documents the organized corruption inside Putin’s Russia and Trump’s dense connections with Eurasian criminals.
2 Aside from wanting economic sanctions dropped, Putin wanted to work with America in exploiting oil and gas in the arctic. The Russian energy company Rosneft played a central role in Steele’s dossier, and had all of kinds of Trump associates as well as Exxon, whose ex-boss was Tillerson, Trump’s first secretary of state. Considering his Russian connections, Tillerson also seems like an obvious choice for a back-channel, but, of course, Mueller wasn’t going to investigate such establishment figures; he’s going to look at nobody’s like Carter Page and dirt bags like Paul Manafort and Roger Stone.
3 Russian hawks, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham and Democratic Sen. Ben Cardin introduced the Russia Sanctions Review Act on February 8th.
4 As Republicans increasingly cozy up to Moscow, the GOP is no longer considered the party of George H.W. Bush and John McCain, whom have recently been praised in the liberal press for their political civility and responsible statesmanship.
5 Greenwald simply ignores the findings of David Cay Johnston, who has been covering Trump and white collar crime for decades. Indeed, it looks like the international detente that Trump seeks so badly with Putin and other authoritarians leads to domestic repression. As during the Holy Alliance, the real enemies exist from within, be they Russian dissidents or American dissenters: ungrateful minorities, liberal college students, gays, and atheists, whom stand in the way of the restoration of traditions and values. Ironically, Greenwald is now being targeted by Brazil’s Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, whose government is reportedly investigating Greenwald for money laundering.
6 Official deniability has become a black art. Perhaps, nobody has written about it more eloquently than Don DeLillo, whose penetrating imaginary account of deception below concisely illuminates the machinations of high level government bureaucrats, like Bush.
“In many cases the DCI, the Director of Central Intelligence, was not to know important things. The less he knew, the more decisively he could function. It would impair his ability to tell the truth at an inquiry or a hearing, or in an Oval Office chat with the President, if he knew what they were doing …. The Joint Chiefs were not to know. The operational horror were not for their ears. Details were a form of contamination. The Secretaries were to be insulated from knowing. They were happier not knowing, or knowing too late. The Deputy Secretaries were interested in drifts and tendencies. They expect to be misled. They counted on it. The Attorney General wasn’t to know the queasy details. Just get results. Each level of the committee was designed to protect a higher level. There were complexities of speech. A man needed special experience and insight to work true meanings out of certain murky remarks. There were pauses and blank looks. Brilliant riddles floated up and down the echelons, to be pondered, solved, ignored. It had to be this way. — Libra (New York: Viking Penguin, 1988)
DoubleThink Tank 