Donald Trump and William Barr have a whole new problem
The deep state conspiracy never held much water to begin with – that somehow some insurgents had it in for Donald Trump and were trying to frame him for colluding with Russia. That’s kind of the point, though. Trump and his followers don’t necessarily need a plausible explanation with supporting evidence for what looks like a whole lot of collusion with a hostile foreign power – they only need to create the appearance of a heavy Trump bias in American intel agencies.
Since Donald Trump tends to attract people who see things as rigged against them, it wasn’t necessarily hard for his administration to pull off. Of course, things like the Peter Strzok and Lisa Page testimony or the Senate inquiry fall apart when looked at in a larger perspective, but Donald Trump and his Republican lackeys don’t much care for the truth and hope their voters don’t either. The goal is to keep the country in a state of uncertainty – not being sure who to trust. To that end, William Barr launched an investigation into the CIA’s probe of Russian interference.
There’s a bit of an unfortunate complication for both Trump and Barr, however. Despite however Barr’s new inquiry turns out, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo already looked into the matter extensively when he was still head of the CIA. Two years ago, according to a new story from Politico, Pompeo looked into the CIA’s findings regarding Russian interference and “ultimately found no evidence of any wrongdoing, or that the analysts had been under political pressure to produce their findings.”
According to people familiar with the matter, Pompeo wasn’t simply briefed about Russian interference, he grilled operatives on their findings before the news went public. Despite the best efforts of Barr and Trump to discredit intelligence agencies in order to simply make a scandal go away, Barr is actually making things worse for the increasingly unstable Trump administration which is already dealing with a woefully understaffed state department.
James Sullivan is the assistant editor of Brain World Magazine and an advocate of science-based policy making