Oh, those pesky laptop computers, and the problems they create for corrupt politicians in election years!

Just two or three weeks prior to the Presidential election in 2016, it was files on the Anthony Weiner laptop that became public as the subject of an FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton, which helped seal defeat in her 2016 Presidential bid.  This year, less than two weeks before the 2020 Presidential election, information retrieved from the hard drive of Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop revealing international money laundering and politically corrupt deals struck with the Chinese using the Biden name -- with new details breaking every day -- could and should doom the Presidential candidacy of Joe Biden.  Additionally, within the last week, two of Hunter Biden’s former business partners, Bevan Cooney and Tony Bobulinski have come forward with voluminous email and cell phone records that provide corroborating evidence on the Biden Family political crime syndicate.

While the Biden family corruption with ties to the Chinese Communist Party -- that alone have huge implications for national security -- the story of corruption in America is frighteningly bigger, transcending the immediacy of this election -- because it envelops so many of the institutions, agencies, and bureaucracies vital to keeping America a free and independent country.

First there is the media, which used to be thought of a fourth estate bringing another level of checks and balances to government.  For the first two hundred years of American history, no one doubted or questioned the fact that the media was a necessary institution to protect and ensure the integrity of the American democratic republic by informing voters of vital information -- like corruption -- bearing on candidates for public office, with the Presidency clearly being the most important office.

Now we have the spectacle of the mainstream media not only ignoring a record of political payoffs documented in Hunter Biden’s verified correspondence found on his computer’s hard drive -- corroborated by two former business associates -- but also a media blackout on the recently released Senate Intelligence Committee report that contains confirmation by the U.S. Treasury Department of a $3.5 million wire transfer from the wife of the former mayor of Moscow, Elena Baturina, to Rosemont Seneca Partners, a firm Hunter Biden cofounded with Christopher Heinz (stepson of Secretary of State John Kerry) and Devon Archer (who currently awaits sentencing from a securities fraud conviction).  

Social media is now the primary source of news for nearly half the population in America. The breathtaking audacity of censorship by Twitter and Facebook of America’s fifth largest newspaper, the New York Post, is there for all to see.  It was the Post that had the courage to break the Hunter Biden scandal and to document how Hunter cashed in on his father’s name and position in myriad politically corrupt business dealings with America’s adversary China.  Way beyond bias, this social media censorship reveals a new level of Orwellian manipulation and social control.     

The eyes and ears of the nation’s defense are the intelligence agencies.  The Federal Bureau of Investigation, the nation’s chief law enforcement agency, is also in charge of counterintelligence and internal security.  Political corruption and insubordination prompted the firing of FBI Director James Comey in May 2017.  But has much changed in the three years under his successor Chris Wray who took the helm of the FBI a few months later? 

The FBI’s handling of the Hunter Biden hard drive and laptop, of which they took possession some ten months ago, tells us all we need to know. In fact, we probably wouldn’t have known of the FBI possession of this evidence, unless reported by the Post or some other reputable media source.  

The information on that hard drive could have abbreviated and ended the politically motivated congressional impeachment coup that preoccupied Washington at that time.  Crickets on that from the FBI.  But more important and more disturbing… Why was there no action from the FBI when that hard drive provided clear and voluminous evidence of high-level Chinese Communist Party involvement with Hunter Biden and his partners and by implication the potential blackmail of Joe Biden that could compromise American security? Clearly the Deep State is alive and well in the FBI and the DoJ of which it is a part. 

Next, let’s look at the Central Intelligence Agency, and see what has changed since the disgraced Obama-appointed CIA Director John Brennan was replaced by Gina Haspel. First a refresher on Brennan.  Even before Peter Strzok hatched the FBI’s “Crossfire Hurricane” on July 31, 2016 Brennan had already stepped over a bright white line in establishing a secret “task force” out of CIA Langley headquarters with its own separate budget to ostensibly investigate the Trump campaign and alleged ties to Russia in hopes the Trump candidacy could be destroyed.    

Now Brennan’s successor Gina Haspel is stonewalling the declassification of documents detailing her predecessor’s corruption and the compromises at the highest level of the intelligence community during the 2016 election -- preventing the American people from understanding the truth of what happened.  Why?  Many might assume she’s doing that out of a sense of loyalty to the CIA.  But she must also be concerned about her own culpability. 

Haspel was endorsed by Brennan to serve as CIA Chief of Station in London -- arguably one of the agency’s most important and powerful positions overseas -- responsible for the relationship with British Secret Intelligence Service, the MI6, and by extension the intelligence services of the British Commonwealth. In her London position, Haspel was made aware of Mifsud’s contact with a Trump campaign adviser, George Papadopoulos, by Australian diplomat Alexander Downer and was likely made aware of the FBI’s plans to interview Papadopoulos and use an informant  --  University of Cambridge professor Stefan Halper -- all part of the Crossfire Hurricane operation. 

According to Charles “Sam” Faddis, a retired CIA operations officer and former head of the CIA’s Counter Terrorism Center (CTC)’s Weapons of Mass Destruction unit, Haspel had to have been briefed on the existence and scope of Brennan’s task force and the FBI’s related Crossfire Hurricane. This was of course the “Russian collusion” smear campaign against Donald Trump that originated with Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and the leadership of the CIA and the FBI.  After the election that effort simply morphed into a coup attempt, based on Russian collusion, to depose a duly elected President.  

As the head of the CIA, Haspel should be a willing supporter of efforts to get to the bottom of the conspiracy to overthrow the President and circumvent the Constitution. But the stonewalling and obfuscation suggests that her enmeshment in the Deep State continues and the coup still has legs.

The problems of corruption and circumvention of the Constitution that exist in the U.S. intelligence agencies are also manifest in the DoD and its four military branches. Two initiatives were undertaken by President Obama that resulted in extensive damage to morale and order within the U.S. military. Starting in his first term and continuing into the second, Obama purged almost 200 senior officers who were known as traditionalists committed to the idea that the job of the military is to win wars, not engage in social engineering and social justice.

Those fired and lapsed officers were all replaced with Democratic loyalists, many of them leftists whose allegiance was to political correctness and the Deep State rather than the Constitution. One such officer, Admiral William McRaven, gave bin Laden a respectful private burial, and once out of the military he wrote an op-ed for the New York Times suggesting a military coup against Trump was a viable option. On the occasion of the U.S. military’s success in taking out ISIS caliphate Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Obama-appointed Joint Chiefs Vice Chair James Winnefield was deeply offended by Trump’s masterful psychological war move of verbal telegraphing to Baghdadi’s followers that “he died like a coward.”

The success in politicizing much of the officer corps was complemented by Obama’s second action, the issuance of Executive Order 13583 directing “government-wide diversity and inclusion training,” which by 2020, focused on Marxist critical race theory training conducted in all government agencies, including each of the military service branches of the Department of Defense.

The result of these two initiatives has not only done irreparable harm to troop morale, but has engendered insubordination within the officer corps, which has been on display during Trump’s first term with multiple incidents of DoD officials and officers publicly disagreeing with, disavowing, rebuking, and disobeying the commander in chief. In early September 2020, five days after President Trump signed a new executive order to override the prior order no. 13583 banning all government agencies from engaging in sensitivity training involving anti-American propaganda and Marxist critical race theory, Vice Admiral Sean Buck, the 63rd superintendent of Annapolis, defied that order, proclaiming that “Training sessions about the importance of diversity…are scheduled…for all faculty and staff and …[and] for all classes of midshipmen throughout the fall semester.”

Even those who doubt the existence of a Deep State have to acknowledge that gross insubordination would destroy the military. Nearly four years into the Trump administration it’s time for America’s so-called “elite” to own up to the fact that however much they dislike Trump or any other political leader, a coup that succeeds also overthrows the Constitution and the imperfect virtue in the sovereignty of the people established through elections. A coup, however accomplished,  relegates the United States to the status of banana republics, which are invariably characterized by incessant violent power struggles and pervasive economic destruction and mass poverty. Just who are these “elites” who entertain these ideas while being oblivious to their consequences?    

Scott Powell is senior fellow at the Discovery Institute.  Reach him at scottp@discovery.com

Image: Pxfuel