The left’s encouraging “whistleblowers” from the intelligence community to file complaints for political reasons has a long history
I wrote a post recently about how the plan for leaks and “whistleblowers” to undermine, sabotage, and perhaps impeach Trump was hatched before he even was inaugurated.
But it may come as no surprise that this was not a new approach by the left. In fact, I wrote an older post in April, 2006 about the phenomenon as it was used against President George W. Bush during his term. Some excerpts [emphasis mine]:
Fast forward to now. National security officers presently are encouraged to spill information with which they disagree–and are provided with support groups, networking, and free legal advice–organized by none other than Daniel Ellsberg himself…
As I wrote previously, it appears that national security whistleblowers are being encouraged to act as virtual moles within their own organizations, remaining in their jobs in order to gain more of the sensitive material and to reveal it as they see fit, according to the dictates of their individual consciences, and often for political reasons. And the idea that there will be any serious legal consequences for the whistleblowers has been weakened; Ellsberg expected to be charged with treason (and was), but many whistleblowers today seem to consider such possibilities to be idle threats.
I believe that, as in so many things, the pendulum has swung too far in one direction. We would not want go back to the era when something of the scope of a My Lai could be successfully covered up. The exposure of My Lai was a shock, but one of the benefits is that My Lai has been studied in depth and used as teaching tool by the military, which has instituted reforms that make such an event far less likely to ever happen today.
But it hardly seems necessary–or productive–to allow national security employees to leak like sieves to the press, much of the time about matters that are not clearly illegal, and motivated sometimes by pure partisanship. And it hardly seems good to allow the press to be the final arbiter of whether their own disclosures will damage national security or not.
At the time I wrote that in 2006, Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers fame was a big mover in the drive to organize in that way. He’s eighty-eight now, and may not be involved anymore, but I have virtually no doubt that the movement goes on with newer leadership and fueled by self-righteous rage against Trump.
Ellsberg’s group was called “The Truth-Teller Organization.” It’s gone now; the links I had for it give you a 404, and there don’t seem to be new ones. A few remnants remain, such as this, but my guess is that whatever group has replaced it has become far more clandestine.
Note that the approach was already full-blown against Bush, so it is an error to think that this is a reaction to Trump – although the reaction is stronger to Trump because he is doing much more to go against the wishes of the intelligence community and the left than Bush ever dreamed of.
In this post from April of 2006 I also wrote about Ellsberg’s own history and how his leak of the Pentagon Papers was handled at the time. Contrast this to now [emphasis mine]:
Ellsberg hoped that the publication of the Papers would cause people to become upset on learning they had been lied to by their government, and then to clamor for the war to end. As such, his position was essentially political–although it was not narrowly partisan, since the Pentagon Papers was an equal-opportunity disclosure; the information obtained therein implicated both Democrat and Republican administrations.
Like Ridenhour, at the outset Ellsburg did not release the documents to the press, but sought instead to persuade certain sympathetic antiwar Senators (chief among them J. William Fulbright) to go public with them on the Senate floor. His motivation for this scheme was that he knew he would be liable to prosecution if he went to the press, and he fully expected to be sent to prison as a result, whereas Senators would be immune from such prosecution.
But no Senator would take the bait, not even Fulbright. As a result, Ellsberg gave the Pentagon Papers to the media. Initially, he made an effort to escape prosecution by hiding out…
However, Ellsberg surrendered voluntarily to authorities only a few weeks later:
“On June 28, Ellsberg publicly surrendered to the US Attorney’s Office in Boston, Massachusetts. He was taken into custody believing he would spend the rest of his life in prison; he was charged with theft, conspiracy, and espionage.”
But Ellsberg never went to prison. In a stunningly ironic turn of events, the actions of Nixon’s “plumbers” (who later carried out the Watergate burglary, but whose nickname came from their earlier attempts to fix Ellsberg’s “leaks”) ended up inadvertently freeing Ellsberg. As in a Shakespearean tragedy, Nixon’s wild overreaching against Ellsberg sowed the seeds of Nixon’s own downfall, through the mechanism of those very same plumbers:
“In one of Nixon’s actions against Ellsberg, G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt broke into Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office in September 1971, hoping to find information they could use to discredit him. The revelation of the break-in became part of the Watergate scandal. ..Because of the gross governmental misconduct, all charges against Ellsberg were eventually dropped.”
…[T]he above quote describes what a watershed event the publication of the Papers was. Before then, newspapers would have been reluctant to print such things–whether out of loyalty to the government or out of fear of repercussions, or both. After the 1971 [SCOTUS case allowing the publication of the Papers], the gloves were off.
Now take a look at yesterday’s piece by Daniel Greenfield entitled “Impeachment is Built on a Trap That Obama Created for Romney: A weapon against a Romney administration gets used against Trump.” In it Greenfield writes [emphasis mine]:
In the Trump era, whistleblowing and partisan leaks to the media have been conflated by the media. Partisan government workers, some openly aligning with the “resistance” and participating in partisan groups within government agencies, have sought to undermine administration policies through leaks. These leaks were in turn meant to generate congressional investigations of cabinet officials.
The impeachment effort against President Trump takes that ongoing tactic to the ultimate extreme.
The politicization of the civil service is a deeply troubling phenomenon. Efforts by members of the civil service to undermine elected officials is a threat to our entire system of representative government.
This problem goes beyond the ‘Deep State’ and has shown up in a wide variety of government agencies. But its appearance in national security agencies is deeply troubling because these agencies have the infrastructure to act as a police state. The existence of national security agencies in a free country is contingent on their subservience to elected officials. Anything else isn’t whistleblowing, it’s a coup.
Obama’s Presidential Policy Directive 19 opened the door by expanding whistleblowing protection to members of the “intelligence community” and other personnel handling classified information.
A few years earlier, Bradley Manning had ushered in a new era of espionage by enemy state actors using front groups to solicit spies as whistleblowers. While the court threw the book at Manning, Obama commuted his sentence. PPD19 was supposed to avoid another Manning case, which it utterly failed to do when Edward Snowden repeated Manning’s treason on a larger scale before escaping to Russia.
But PPD19 was never really meant to help the likes of Manning and Snowden. Instead it was part of a larger pattern of politicizing national security organizations that led directly to the current crisis.
Greenfield points out that at the time PPD19 was issued, Romney was doing well in the polls, and Obama must have been concerned that Romney was poised to win. So he put in place an insurance policy to be unleashed against Romney in the event that he became president.
Those who believe that the current push of the left against Trump is mainly about Trump himself would do well to ponder this history. The left is neither stupid nor lazy, and they have been working hard at this for a long long time.
“… at the time PPD19 was passed, …” — Neo
Sorry to nitpick, but Greenfield says “issued” not “passed.” I’ve never heard of a PPD but it seems to be akin to an Executive Order.
It’s interesting that Greenfield seems to suggest that the entire civil service is at risk of developing political moles. So it’s not just Deep State problems, which I would define as national security people plus DOJ and FBI; it’s Mid-Level State and Shallow State people as well.
I found the whole Lois Lerner, IRS scam to be appalling and yet when it was uncovered and the jerk Koskinen was put into the top spot, the corruption was never rectified. What do you call that? Shallow State or Mid-Level State corruption? The IRS does have criminal investigation (?) and modest secrecy systems.
I wish there was a way to go back and prosecute Lerner, her unidentified DC lawyer task master, and Koskinen. The failure to do so does immense damage to the integrity of our government. Do Republicans care about this, or have most of them resigned themselves to playing a losing game?
TommyJay:
I’ll fix that. I didn’t mean to suggest it was passed by any legislature. Definitely “issued.”
I was appalled to read Greenfield’s column, but do not disbelieve it at all. Greenfield does good work.
The threat of PPD19 should be a double-edged sword that can cut both Republicans and Democrats. Alas, it appears not, and taken along with the Ellsberg case, the historical use of unauthorized disclosure seems totally one-sided. Why are Republicans always playing catch-up ball? Not that I want Trump or McConnell to go out and use the government against their opposition, but after two years of a Trump presidency, it is time that at least the senior levels of the civil service should be somewhat cleansed of partisan malefactors.
“The left is neither stupid nor lazy, and they have been working hard at this for a long long time.”
And their opponents try to buy a moment’s peace with periodic concessions but the war is well underway, now the better part of two centuries old. The left is truly the political Energizer bunny; it never quits, never surrenders. Look at Britain’s Tories: anything “conservative” about them? Look at our GOP, globalist, hand-in-glove with the Chinese totalitarians, sell-outs so easily bought.
The war is lost. The left are the victors. The left will dominate the planet, and it will become a Chinese-run Death Star, if you get my reference to Star Wars the movie. Forever is a long time.
It may be that the marxist cancer has metastisized so deeply and widely that the patient’s only hope of survival lies in the most radical of surgeries.
“A nation divided against itself cannot stand” Abraham Lincoln
“No man can serve two masters…” an obscure Israelite preacher
Like rabies, totalitarian ideologies have but one cure.
An organization called the Government Accountability Project says it’s the “Global Leader in Whistleblower Advocacy since 1977”. And on its “About” page, it traces its history specifically back to Ellsberg.
An organization called the Government Accountability Project says it’s the “Global Leader in Whistleblower Advocacy since 1977”. And on its “About” page, it traces its history specifically back to Ellsberg.
Recall Joseph Nocera’s crack about Ellsburg, ca. 1986: that it was arguably an act of courage to deliver the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times, but not so impressive how he’d spent the rest of his life dining off it. He was born in 1931. He admits to no employment history between 1971 and 1996 (or at any time since). His wife appears to be a professional squishead a la Marianne Williamson (https://www.patriciaellsberg.com/).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-tDb7SlkrA
The elohim, the Sons of God, have also been working hard for a long time. They are neither stupid nor lazy.
For those of you that have lost hope, fear not, reinforcements are on the way. Although those may not be in the form you are used to expecting in your life.
I once worked with an editor at a countercultural publication. He was proud to claim he was Ellsberg’s wingman, when photocopying the boxloads of files which became published as the Pentagon Papers.
It seems to me it ought to be a lot easier across the board to discipline, fire and even indict government employees.
Trump has got a lot on his plate, but I’ll bet he thinks about it.
“The war is lost. The left are the victors. The left will dominate the planet, and it will become a Chinese-run Death Star, if you get my reference to Star Wars the movie. Forever is a long time.”
Gosh, where have you been? I hope I’m not being rude, but the left has dominated the planet for generations already.
That’s why they’ve been able to carpet the planet with mass graves, mostly going back decades. That isn’t new.
What is new, it seems to me, is that people have now noticed the sheer utter worthlessness of such supposedly conservative organizations as the Geee Ohhh Peee and have Moved On to support such folks as OrangeManBad.
Plus, putatively leftist-run societies such as China have ditched the leftist nonsense in favor of merchantilism and more conventional tyranny, which works vastly better economically as well as being less murderous.
It’s the only severely pampered leftists of the West who have been able to ignore the anti-leftist tide of history, because they’ve been blessed for many years by such incompetent opposition.
That era is plainly ending, or else Trump wouldn’t even have won the GOP nomination, let alone won the Presidency and then withstood years of Leftist Deep State conniving.
Forever is indeed a long time- but most of the left’s forever has passed.
The Nixon impeachment which might have been, had he not resigned, was about covering up a crime (in which he had not been directly involved). The Clinton impeachment was about Clinton felonies (perjury, suborning perjury) for which the evidence was overwhelming. The Senate decided that wasn’t serious enough to remove Clinton from office. The current impeachment effort is about nothing. There’s no evidence of wrongdoing at all; as Neo said in an earlier post, it’s about removing a president the left wishes hadn’t been elected. This effort must be defeated, if we are to preserve our constitutional system of governance.
Since the current impeachment effort is entirely political, and the election is thirteen months away, it means Democrats are desperate in the face of what they think will be a defeat in November 2020.
Orwell was so, so right about language. Look at how the Dems have used language to roll out the impeachment reality TV show.
The term “whistleblower” signifies a brave and virtuous person trying to tell the world the Truth. This brave person needs protection from evil doers that want to take his job and, maybe, his life. That’s why the secret hearing has to be conducted away from the Capitol and behind a screen. Like the Mafia hearings in the movies and in the 50’s. His life is in danger! (Aside: Ask Steve Scalise and Ron Paul about violence from political opponents.)
In fact, these persons are anonymous Deep State leakers who have policy differences with their boss, the President, and are trying to get him fired. Think of that: The President was elected by the entire country and some low-level employee of the Executive is conducting a coup.
From my screenwriting experience, we are now at the Bad Guys (actually Good Guys) closing in on the protagonist.
Don’t think about this event in terms of legal or political terms. Think about it in terms of drama and reality TV. The Dems, of course, are in over their heads. Trump was the King of Reality TV and a WWF Hall of Famer. He will crush them.
Former Republican Rep. Trey Gowdy has been tapped to serve as outside counsel to President Donald Trump as the House impeachment inquiry expands.
…
The White House has notified the House that the Trump administration will not participate in what it is calling Democrats’ “illegitimate” impeachment probe.
“The Latest: Former SC Rep. Trey Gowdy joins Trump legal team”
https://www.apnews.com/8f2a9d08c0f448fcac3609e8d886eeca
All right! I have great respect for Trey Gowdy, though I worried when he left the House to pursue a legal career. But if this is the legal career he is pursuing…
I believe the gloves have come off and the real counter-punching has begun.
All right!
Kate,
About the Clinton impeachment, I found this piece by Ed Timperlake, who had a front row seat, fascinating. Apparently, there were multiple areas of possible criminal activity, but the House somehow decided to focus only on one area.
A great deal that I never knew.
Huxley.
I predicted Trey’s appointment in a comment at Power Line. Great news!
As in a Shakespearean tragedy, Nixon’s wild overreaching against Ellsberg sowed the seeds of Nixon’s own downfall, through the mechanism of those very same plumbers:
“In one of Nixon’s actions against Ellsberg, G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt broke into Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office in September 1971, hoping to find information they could use to discredit him. The revelation of the break-in became part of the Watergate scandal. ..Because of the gross governmental misconduct, all charges against Ellsberg were eventually dropped.”
There are some suspicious events for that break in.
If I was the Deep State and I wanted to free up Ayers and Ellsberg, I would ensure that the FBI or the ex FBI/CIA “pipeworkers” raided their place and found nothing. Which is what actually happened. Because they found nothing and as a result, their actions violated due process, thus ensuring that whatever they did find, would be useless in a court of law. Thus… why did they do it? Because the DS ordered it?
This is a rather covert and much more subtle way to pardon someone than to use up Presidential favors.
Liddy was the Nixon administration liaison and leader of the group of five men who broke into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate Complex. At least two separate entries were made in May and June 1972; the burglars were caught and apprehended on June 17.[20] The purposes of the break-in were never conclusively established. The burglars sought to place wiretaps and planned to photograph documents. Their first attempt had led to improperly-functioning recording devices being installed. Liddy did not actually enter the Watergate Complex at the time of the burglaries; rather, he admitted to supervising the second break-in which he coordinated with E. Howard Hunt, from a room in the adjacent Watergate Hotel. Liddy was convicted of conspiracy, burglary and illegal wiretapping.-from wiki
It appears that the plumbers wanted to see the extent of Ellsberg’s Pentagon papers leaks.
So you had someone breaking the law, to catch people breaking the law. But Batman isn’t popular any more I am sure.
The break in and surveillance of Ellsberg’s office was also suspiciously incompetent. All kinds of shenanigans happened there, to the team doing the op.
And reading the overall “accepted wisdom” of these events, I have to wonder just how much has been doctored over the decades (absent internet hive mind checkers). How much of the truth do we know? Did the Rule of Law really prevail with the help of Social Justice Journalists? If so, why is the IRS allowed to get away with stuff that these “Pipeworking burglars” never could imagine?
Pay close attention to the term FBI and CIA.
George Gordon Battle Liddy (born November 30, 1930), known as G. Gordon Liddy, is a former FBI agent, lawyer, talk show host, actor, and figure in the Watergate scandal as the chief operative in the White House Plumbers unit during the Nixon Administration. Liddy was convicted of conspiracy, burglary, and illegal wiretapping for his role in the scandal.
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Frank Anthony Sturgis (December 9, 1924 – December 4, 1993), born Frank Angelo Fiorini, was one of the five Watergate burglars whose capture led to the end of the presidency of Richard Nixon.[1] He served in several branches of the United States military and in the Cuban Revolution of 1958, and worked as an undercover operative for the Central Intelligence Agency.[2] He was named as one of the men who along with Miami CIA head David Morales, met with E. Howard Hunt, shortly before the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
…
Some authors believe Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer John Paisley was a member of the Plumbers. Paisley was assigned to the CIA’s Office of Security, of which Nixon campaign security coordinator and Watergate burglar James McCord was once a member. On August 9, 1971, Young’s memo indicates he met with Paisley and OS Director Howard Osborn, in which Paisley provided a list of objectives for the Special Investigations Unit.
….
He was employed by Hullin, Ehrlichman, Roberts and Hodge, the Seattle law firm of family friend John Ehrlichman, and joined Ehrlichman in the counsel’s office of Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign. After Nixon was elected, Krogh helped with the arrangements for the inauguration. Krogh joined the Nixon White House as an advisor on the District of Columbia and later served as liaison to the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. It was there he met G. Gordon Liddy.
Special Investigaton Unit
Ehrlichman made Krogh head of the “Special Investigation Unit” in the White House, charged with investigating information given covertly to the press by administration staffers. Krogh and his associates were known familiarly as the “Plumbers”—a secret team of operatives charged with fixing “leaks.” It was an unlikely choice: Krogh had a reputation as someone who obeyed the law so scrupulously that his friends gave him the ironic nickname “Evil Krogh”. Theodore White would write “to put Egil Krogh in charge of a secret police operation was equivalent to making Frank Merriwell chief executive of a KGB squad.” Krogh brought Liddy into his new office.
When the administration decided to pursue the Pentagon Papers leakers, it was Krogh who approved the September 1971 burglary of the office of Lewis Fielding, the psychiatrist seeing Daniel Ellsberg. Liddy and E. Howard Hunt would commit the actual break-in. Ironically, Ehrlichman, who himself went to prison for Watergate related crimes, would later write in his memoirs this was an example of “such doubtful personal judgment … that it has to be said [Krogh] materially contributed to the demise of the Nixon administration.” Krogh’s employment with the SIU was terminated when he refused to authorize a wiretap.
When the Watergate scandal broke, Krogh was implicated. On November 30, 1973, Krogh pleaded guilty to federal charges of conspiring to violate Fielding’s civil rights and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors. He was sentenced to two to six years in prison, though he served only four-and-a-half months.[1] Krogh was disbarred by the Washington State Supreme Court in 1975.[2] In 1977 he petitioned to be readmitted to the practice of law, based on his recognition and acceptance of his wrongdoing. This petition was rejected.
….
The ‘Evil Genius’ of an Evil Administration”
Slate magazine writer David Plotz described Colson as “Richard Nixon’s hard man, the ‘evil genius’ of an evil administration.”[11] Colson has written that he was “valuable to the President … because I was willing … to be ruthless in getting things done”.[12] Nixon’s White House Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman described Colson as the president’s “hit man”.[13]-Further background intel is needed on any potential CIA/FBI connections.
This is basic connect the dots stuff. Something journalists didn’t do back then. They all connected the plumber shenanigans to Nixon. But what about the Deep State? What about Mark Felt? What about the CIA/FBI and the black budget operations/factions? Nobody cared about them.
The Plumbers’ first task was the burglary of the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s Los Angeles psychiatrist, Lewis J. Fielding, in an effort to uncover evidence to discredit Ellsberg, who had leaked the Pentagon Papers. The operation was reportedly unsuccessful in finding Ellsberg’s file and was so reported to the White House. However, Fielding himself stated the file was in his office; he found it on the floor on the morning after the burglary and quite clearly, someone had gone through it.[6] In a September 1971 conversation, John Ehrlichman advised Nixon, “We had one little operation; it’s been aborted out in Los Angeles which, I think, is better that you don’t know about.” Eventually, the case against Ellsberg was dismissed due to government misconduct.
Aside from the Fielding burglary, there are few other activities the Plumbers were known to have been engaged in. Hunt reportedly looked into the Ted Kennedy-Chappaquiddick incident and Liddy reported purported Kennedy administration involvement in the assassination of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem.[4]
After the California break-in, Liddy—who was general counsel, a member of the finance committee of the Committee to Re-elect the President (CRP) and promoted from aide to Krogh and Young—worked with Campaign political-intelligence operations. Ehrlichman, the Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs and Special Investigations Unit, knew about Liddy’s goal to perform an intelligence-gathering operation for the CRP. Liddy involved Hunt in the operations which would later include the Watergate burglary.[7]
Powerline has a must-read based on the must-read of the scorching official reply the White House Counsel, Pat Cipollone sent to Pelosi, Schiff re: the sham impeachment inquiry. A taste:
For example, you have denied the President the right to cross-examine witnesses, to call witnesses, to receive transcripts of testimony, to have access to evidence, to have counsel present, and many other basic rights guaranteed to all Americans. You have conducted your proceedings in secret. You have violated civil liberties and the separation of powers by threatening Executive Branch officials, claiming that you will seek to punish those who exercise fundamental constitutional rights and prerogatives. All of this violates the Constitution, the rule of law, and every past precedent. Never before in our history has the House of Representatives–under the control of either political party–taken the American people down the dangerous path you seem determined to pursue.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2019/10/trump-refuses-to-participate-in-impeachment-farce.php
Pelosi and Schiff will be lucky if their eyebrows are intact after reading this fiery letter.
High-effin’-time.
In 2016 I feared Trump was entirely impulsive and his administration would go quickly over the rails, doing terrible damage to the country and the party.
Yeah, Trump is impulsive … when it comes to things he can afford to be impulsive about, i.e. his tweets. Maybe that’s how he lets off steam, maybe that’s part of some grand design, or both. Tweets are not official actions and are not impeachable, as much as Trump’s opponents wish they were.
But when it comes to long-term strategy and the things he must not treat impulsively or frivolously, Trump’s patient handling of this three-year coup effort would do a saint proud.
I’m pretty sure I would have cracked and gone “Ready, fire!, aim.
Trump is 100% correct in his vigorous response to the anti-Constitution Democrats.
But, all this chatter is about impeachment by the House. Impeachment is analogous to indictment by a grand jury. In criminal law, truth or innocence are determined by trial before a jury, after an indictment. After. In the impeachment process that trial is held by the Senate, which Sen. McConnell assures us will go nowhere.
That I despise all-anti-Trump Democrats goes without saying. In the House and in the nation they have descended into a lynch mob led by truly foul demagogues.
Generally, anything that has “Truth” in its title should be suspected of serious slanting and omissions, if not outright lying. Think “Honest John’s Used Cars.”