The Deep State's war against Trump began before 2016 election

Steve Cortes:

The national security establishment of the United States recognizes a clear and present danger -- not a threat to America’s security, mind you, but rather to their own institutional power.

These Beltway apparatchiks determined early on in 2016 that Donald Trump and the “America First” movement he represented would strategically alter the way America interacts with the world. A Trump administration, they surmised, would directly challenge the prerogatives of the permanent national security apparatus that has operated as a sort of parallel government for decades. For too long, these power brokers have used positions of influence in government, lobbying firms, and media to plunge America into wasteful wars and global meddling. Such policy prescriptions served the ambitions of these operators, making them wealthy and powerful, while largely unaccountable to the American people, the ones who actually paid the massive price in blood and treasure.

As the national security establishment identified Donald Trump as a threat to this established order, it deployed the government’s substantial security capacities to interfere with his candidacy. When he won the presidency anyway, these deep state actors attempted to destabilize his presidency. As catalogued in an outline by my organization, the America First Action Super PAC, the pace of the intervention greatly accelerated as the Trump movement ascended. It culminated in the current Senate impeachment trial.

If you doubt the partisan nature of this exercise, consider that FBI Director James Comey claimed that he did not apprise the congressional “Gang of Eight” bipartisan leadership on his bureau’s “Crossfire Hurricane” operation vs. the Trump campaign in the summer of 2016 because of the “sensitivity of the matter.” Yet, former CIA Director John Brennan was concurrently already updating political allies on the matter, including Sens. Harry Reid and Dianne Feinstein, and Rep. Adam Schiff, all Democrats. Brennan later tried to claim he did inform the Gang of Eight, but Republicans Paul Ryan, then House speaker, and Rep. Devin Nunes, who headed the House Intelligence Committee prior to Schiff, say they were not briefed.

Meanwhile, the FBI obtained FISA permission in 2016 to surveille Carter Page of the Trump campaign, using accusations of wrongdoing from the salacious and unverified Steele dossier, a partisan report financed by the Clinton campaign through intermediaries. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has already determined, retroactively, that at least two of these warrants against Trump operatives were “not valid.” Moreover, it has since been revealed that the FBI concealed from the FISA court the fact it knew that much of the Steele dossier gossip about Page was untrue.

Once Trump won the election, the pace of high-level briefings intensified alongside increasing leaks to media figures highly antagonistic to Trump. On Nov. 17, 2016, National Security Agency Director Mike Rogers traveled to New York to brief Trump, without notifying his superiors. Rumors swirled that President-elect Trump was informed of ongoing surveillance of Trump Tower, and the transition operation moved to Bedminster, N.J., the very next day. On Nov. 19, the Washington Post reported that Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and other senior national security officials “recommended to President Obama that the Director of the National Security Agency, Adm. Michael S. Rogers, be removed.”

After Trump’s inauguration, the machinations of the national security apparatus to thwart him ramped up. For example, on March 30, 2017, Trump asked Comey to “lift the cloud” of Russian cooperation that hung over his new presidency. While the FBI director assured Trump privately that he was not suspected of any wrongdoing, he insinuated otherwise publicly and was subsequently fired. Once out of office, in a sharp break with precedence, Comey, Clapper, and Brennan all became prominent media darlings, with the latter two employed by cable news channels to constantly hector the president on air.
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There is more.

The people behind this treasonous coup must be found and prosecuted.   They are the biggest danger to democracy in this country right now.