One of the first actions President Donald Trump took after his inauguration earlier this week was to launch his first strike against the shadowy entity known as the deep state that has managed to burrow its way into our federal government and is serving as a weapon in the hands of powerful and influential progressives. These progressives want to deconstruct our country and rebuild it resemble the vision Karl Marx had for the world: socialism.
Trump is a huge threat to their plans and thus they hate him with every fiber of their being.
Which is what makes what the president did so satisfying.
According to The American Conservative, Trump signed an executive order during his first few hours in office that stripped 51 former intelligence officers of their security clearances. These are the same folks who signed a letter during the 2020 presidential election that helped to bury the Hunter Biden laptop story. The list of names includes John Brennan, James Clapper, Leon Pannetta, Michael Hayden, and even John Bolton.
“For those who say the penalty will impair their livelihoods, I recall one of Secretary of State George Schultz’s maxims: trust is the coin of the realm. Well, If you violate the trust you forfeit the coin,” R. Jordan Prescott, a private defense contractor who knows what he’s talking about, went on to say.
There are 2.9 million (by last count) security clearance holders in the country and a backlog of almost 300,000 waiting to get into this club. But if you live and work in the Imperial City, you know that the above members form a VIP circle in which they have been able to trade their credentials and access to America’s secrets, along with their years at the top of the federal food chain, for very lucrative positions on the outside, fashioned to influence power inside. The clearance is the calling card. It’s like taking away a cowboy’s gun. This hits them where it hurts.
“Many retired Intelligence Community senior officials remain active as contract consultants to the U.S. government or as board members and advisers to defense and intelligence contractors who value their continuing connections to sitting U.S. government officials,” George Beebe, who formerly served with the CIA, at the Quincy Institute. “These positions depend to a significant degree on retaining active security clearances. Trump’s decision to revoke those clearances will have a material effect on the ability of these retired officials to serve as USG contractors or play the role of ‘rainmaker’ for companies seeking contracts with the Intelligence Community.”
As of this writing, it’s not clear how many of these former intel officials have active clearances right now, however since several of them have hired legal representation and are demanding “due process,” they likely have them and are impacted by the executive order.
Critics say they should have thought of that before signing a letter that said the New York Post story about emails found on Hunter Biden’s laptop in October 2020 “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
Actions come with consequences, the two being eternally linked by the philosophical reality we call “cause and effect.” You take action (cause) and something happens (effect). Simple concept, really. It somehow managed to elude these officials who should have clearly thought out where signing this letter might ultimately lead, later on down the road.
Then again, they were confident that after 2020, Trump would disappear from the political landscape. But that’s not what happened. He grew in popularity and completely obliterated the competition during the 2024 race. And now these enemies of the president, really the whole country, are going to pay for their sins.
“We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails, provided to the New York Post by President Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement—just that our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case,” the letter said.
This was enough to silence or degrade the story in major newspapers and disappear it on social media, including the powerful engines of Twitter and Facebook. Meta (Facebook) CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted as much years later. There was an info op, but it wasn’t Russian. It turned out there was a laptop, and emails, and the Russians had nothing to do with the story, as confirmed long after Biden won the election.
The letter, signed by 51 ex-officials, many who had axes to grind with Trump and/or had worked for and supported Democratic presidents and candidates in the past, indulged the Russian boogeyman narrative right before (and in many cases) during the early voting. If Americans hadn’t been paying attention, Joe Biden himself amplified the contents of the letter during the October 20 presidential debate and on 60 Minutes when he charged that “the intelligence community warned the president that Giuliani was being fed disinformation from the Russians. And we also know that Putin is trying very hard to spread disinformation about Joe Biden.”
“[They] breached an important unwritten rule against IC [intelligence community] involvement in domestic politics, and it should indeed be penalized,” explained Beebe. “Like any private citizens, retired IC officials have every right to free political expression and can and should support whatever candidates and parties they prefer. But when these individuals act collectively in ways that suggest that their views flow from information not accessible to the broader public, they by implication inject the IC itself into domestic politics in damaging ways.”
Two of the signers, former acting CIA director Michael Morell and former CIA Inspector General David Buckley, were both confirmed by the agency to be pulling a paycheck, working for contractors, when they signed the letter. In other words, members of Trump’s own administration were actively working against him and his campaign for reelection.
This is what Trump has been up against. But now, finally, he’s in position to start holding these individuals accountable for abusing their power against the American people. Yanking the security clearances sends a message to the rest of the deep state: you’re next.