Guardians Of The Deep State

Well known NeverTrumper Holman Jenkins has a nice article today at the WSJ in which he concludes: Our politics will be healed only when voters know what our secret agents know (subscription wall). Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, he doesn't suggest when or even whether we should start holding our breath.

Jenkins begins with an example that has received surprisingly little attention. Jenkins' example has to do with Carter Page's commencement address at the New Economic School (NES) in Moscow in July, 2016. Mueller (cf. pp. 98-101 of the Mueller Dossier) tries to play up this incident as an example of how

Page's affiliation with the Trump Campaign took on a higher profile and drew the attention of Russian officials after the candidate named him a foreign policy advisor,

further noting that

The NES commencement ceremony generally featured high-profile speakers; for example, President Barack Obama delivered a commencement address at the school in 2009.

Obviously, Carter Page is hardly in the same "high-profile" category as POTUS, so the suggestion that Page's appointment as foreign policy adviser to the campaign had made him a celebrity of some sort is little short of laughable. And that leads one wonder: just what was going on with this invitation? Could this invitation have been part of an attempt to puff up the centrality of Russia to the Trump campaign? Was the idea of inviting Page suggested to the NES by Western intelligence operatives? That's speculative of course, but then nobody--least of all Mueller--has shown much interest in that angle. Why not?


Page himself appeared to view his NES appearance as an opportunity to raise his own profile in the Trump campaign, and actively sought to get the campaign interested in having Trump step in to deliver the address. Not only did this not raise Page's profile with the campaign--he was told that if he made the trip he would not do so as a representative of the Trump campaign--but he was told in no uncertain terms that Trump had no interest. Thus, then campaign manager Corey Lewandowski emailed Page:

If you want to do this, it would be out side [sic] of your role with the DJT for President campaign. I am certain Mr. Trump will not be able to attend.

Nevertheless, at the Russian end there were people at the NES who attempted to link Page up with Russian officials, claiming that Page was a top adviser to Trump. Dmitri Klimentov contacted Russian Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov about Page's visit to see if Peskov wanted to introduce Page to any Russian government officials. That suggestion got the same cold water treatment that Page had received from Lewandowski. A Putin aide, Dmitry Peskov, responded:

I have read about [Page]. Specialists say that he is far from being the main [adviser]. So I better not initiate a meeting in the Kremlin.” 

As Jenkins notes:

So much (again) for the idea that the insubstantial Mr. Page was collusion’s Mr. Big. 

And yet, it is suggestive that there seemed to be a concerted push from persons outside the Trump campaign to align Page with officials--any officials--in the Russian government. Where did this come from?

Moreover, in Page's testimony we find interesting echoes of the Steele Dossier that, on closer reading, raise niggling questions as to whether our secret agents may know more about this than we thought we did. According to the Mueller Dossier:

Page said that, during his time in Moscow, he met with friends and associates he knew from when he lived in Russia, including Andrey Baranov, a former Gazprom employee who had become the head of investor relations at Rosneft, a Russian energy company. Page stated that he and Baranov talked about "immaterial non-public" information. Page believed he and Baranov discussed Rosneft president Igor Sechin, and he thought Baranov might have mentioned the possibility of a sale of a stake in Rosneft in passing. Page recalled mentioning his involvement in the Trump Campaign with Baranov, although he did not remember details of the conversation. Page also met with individuals from Tatneft, a Russian energy company, to discuss possible business deals, including having Page work as a consultant.

This business about Sechin and Rosneft appears almost immediately after Page's return in the Steele Dossier--but transformed by Steele into "secret" meetings with Sechin himself and a wildly implausible story about Page being offered a 19% stake in Rosneft. Mueller shows no interest in that line of inquiry, but one wonders how this ended up in Steele's Dossier so quickly--who was learning about Page's private conversations and transforming them into narratives that could be used to advance the Russia Hoax "collusion" story? Could it be the work of Western intelligence operatives working with Steele, Fusion GPS, British and US intelligence agencies? The similarities to the targeting of George Papadopoulos should at least give inquiring minds pause for reflection.

Jenkins moves on from this interesting episode, to briefly touch on another area that we really are being kept in the dark about--the Hillary email case. Here there appears to be a real Russian angle that's being kept from all but a select few. Could this be the real motive for deep sixing the Hillary case?

Likewise a few hundred officials with security clearances know the truth behind FBI Director James Comey’s serial interventions in the Hillary Clinton email case—interventions that began, we learned only belatedly from press leaks, with some kind of intercepted Russian intelligence that someone placed in Mr. Comey’s hands.

Jenkins concludes by rightly drawing attention to the unsettling issues regarding our constitutional order that the whole Russia Hoax--"one of the biggest lies in U.S. history," as he terms it--raises. And these are issues that remain hidden in most of their really essential detail:

The questions raised by these episodes are monumental and will outlast the war over whether Mr. Trump is a nice man or not. Did Mr. Comey and his colleagues turn us into Russia, where the [intelligence services] secretly and incompetently pull the strings of domestic politics? 

If Mr. Trump’s historically assigned task was to expose Washington’s media and leadership class, with Robert Mueller’s help he has succeeded. Nobody (including me) would have guessed how much our intelligence sector had come to regard itself as the guardian of a particular class’s right to rule, or see its job as punishing voters when they vote wrong.

Here Jenkins probably gives too much credit to Comey as the evil genius, and not enough to other Intel Community players--especially James Brennan. Still, Libya, Syria, ISIS, Ukraine--all roads lead to Hillary. And they also lead to CIA machinations in collusion with British intelligence--a globalist Deep State. And then there's Brexit, too, which offers a motive for British Deep State willingness to interfere in a US election.

Slowly but surely we're beginning to learn more about this tangled web that hitherto only the secret agents knew. This warning coming from a devout NeverTrump defender of the Establishment status quo is perhaps a sign of where we're heading. And about time.