Joseph Wilson's death this week at 69 is a reminder that Republican presidents are always fighting a rearguard action against the Intelligence Community. 

For those who don't remember, Wilson was the Deep State diplomat who worked in tandem with his CIA agent wife, Valerie Plame, and the corrupt media-Democrat establishment to bring down a Republican administration back in 2003.

It had all the same features of today's greatest hits: endless investigations, innocent men destroyed, nonstop thunderous media attention, Deep-State string-pullers, and intelligence agents gone bad.

It fell to President Donald Trump to finally put an end to that terrible injustice when he pardoned Scooter Libby in 2018.

What we are seeing now are the sequels to this Intelligence Community hit.  The Wilson-Plame affair was a prelude to John Brennan, James Clapper, and James Comey turning the weaponized Intelligence Community Death Star against first a Republican candidate and then president.  The creepy intelligence coven's attempted coup likely was foiled by the one intelligence leader who refused to play along: Navy vice admiral Michael Rogers, who directed the NSA at the time. 

There are a lot of parallels to the current dementia sweeping the nation.  As with the Plame-Wilson hit, this attack also involved a CIA agent, the nonsense-blower who started us back down Impeachment Lane.  Thanks to the Intel Community changing the rules by secretly eliminating the requirement for whistleblowers to "provide direct, first-hand knowledge of alleged wrongdoings," this chap gets to be the first whistleblower who didn't actually witness anything at all.  To paraphrase '70s band REO Speedwagon, he heard it from a friend who heard it from a friend who heard it from another Trump's been messing around.

But, unlike President George W. Bush in the Wilson-Plame saga, Trump is refusing to play by the media's script, which made Shifty Schiff look like a buffoon.

The common thread in these three stories is that the Intelligence Community is no longer to be trusted by any Republican president.  It has been politicized to serve liberal and globalist interests and will seek to destroy any president who doesn't play ball. 

A Republican president is hamstrung in this environment, where he has to watch every word he says to any foreign leader out of concern that his own government will burn him at the stake for any perceived thoughtcrime.

Democrats attach quid pro quos to everything, even as they hunt for Republican scalps, sure that the media and the Democrat bureaucracy will never hold them to account.  But the new standard of "perceived" quid pro quo is attached to the object of their hatred in a massive goal post shift.

Democrats love the status quo of having this intelligence fifth column in their pocket.  Chuck Schumer could barely contain his joy in commenting, "Let me tell you: you take on the Intelligence Community — they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you."  Those six ways he is so excited about are usually aimed at Republicans by the increasingly Democrat-staffed agencies, but what he is arguing is that the intelligence agencies run the country because they have unlimited power to bring down any president. 

This speaks to a crisis with no easy way out, as Scott Adams recently recognized when he argued that only President Trump can stand against these agencies, since he is effectively blackmail-proof.  

The Republicans need to focus on reforming and curtailing the power of these agencies.  A good first step would be holding to account all those who took part in the first coup attempt.  We often talk about the importance of the military being nonpartisan, but it is far more important when it comes to the Intelligence Community, since they are positioned to do so much damage. 

A good first step in changing the status quo is recognizing that the intelligence agencies are far too powerful, are hopelessly compromised, and need serious reform.  And as Scott Adams noted, Trump is best positioned to bring about real reform in this area.

Fletch Daniels blogs at deplorabletouchdown.com and can be found on Twitter @fletchdaniels.