The FBI’s Two Coups…

Today’s video was initially supposed to be two separate ones, one on the FBI coups, and one comparing the Russia hoax and the Iran panic. Rather than try to fluff up both videos with rants, to make them long enough for the algorithm, I thought I would try just tacking them together. The topics strike me as working well together. The structure that evolved also convinced me to drag in Robert Kagan, Victoria Nuland and Ukraine again, all topics I have been needing to cover for quite some time. I think the whole thing hangs together well. Is it too packed with info though? Let me know.

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Video Transcript after the jump…


Hey there last week I made the case that Biden’s best and easiest path to political victory is ending the Forever Wars, and by cutting off the US foreign policy community that is currently trying to bring about the Great Power politics of the run up to World War I. Today I want to talk about that foreign policy community, what it is, who it is, and how it presents an existential threat to the United States. There’s a ton to talk about today, the Russia Hoax, the Iran panic, a bit of a map of the metastasized military industrial complex, and an introduction to two of its most amusing members. But first I want to talk about something obvious and horrifying that nobody wants to talk about… the FBI totally picked the winner of the last two presidential elections.

It may not fit the dictionary definition, but I am completely comfortable saying that the results of the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections were both coups carried out by the FBI, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, a branch of the US military industrial complex. Now as crazy as that may sound, it’s important to point out that nobody denies the facts I am about to lay out here. People are just too wrapped up in looking at politics as sports teams to face reality. Because reality is kind of scary.

Hillary Clinton was a heavy favorite to win the 2016 US election. But then the US national security state got involved with the endless Banghazi investigation. Crucially, and we see this again and again, the investigation was carefully crafted to only implicate Clinton, and other politically appointed figures chosen by elected figures. The vastly more important question of why the hell the US government was in Libya in the first place was carefully ignored, in favor of an endless investigation of one bad day. No larger questions were even asked. The Benghazi investigation found nothing, but in the process it did reveal that Clinton, an elderly figure surrounded by Yes-men, had failed to keep up with changing government regulations regarding the preservation of emails. This controversy spent years dominating the headlines through a series of press releases and reports from various government agencies.

The FBI quite straightforwardly used this investigation to tank Clinton’s presidential run. Despite declaring in July of 2016 that Hillary Clinton had committed no crime with her emails, FBI director James Comey publicly declared the reopening of the investigation on October 28th 2016, just eleven days before the election. In a contest that was decided by a few tens of thousands votes the FBI gave Donald Trump the presidency. Then it took it away from him.

Donald Trump was a phenomenally unprepared and disastrous US president, and unquestionably the man most responsible for every aspect of his presidency’s failure. But that does not mean it’s OK that the US intelligence community worked so hard to unseat him. He was our elected president.

Trump and his clowns provided an embarrassment of riches for FBI investigators. They were far out of their depth, and they made a series of obvious mistakes that no sensible adult professionals ever would have made. His team was without the suave lawyers and polished political operators that have filled most presidential administrations for the past century.

Yes, all of these investigations underlined how unfit Trump was to be president, but that’s not the FBI’s job. The US intelligence Community was constantly laying traps for Trump’s idiots to fall into, and that is not their job. Democracy means that we are occasionally going to elect idiots. Our foreign policy establishment should not be sabotaging elected presidents and determining the outcome of the next election. But that’s pretty much what happened here. Two US elections, two FBI coups.

And as with Clinton, this was a carefully limited investigation. No investigation of why an ostensibly Democratic government agency gave Trump a Washington DC hotel to run in 2013. No investigation of Trump’s sordid ties with the Saudi royal family and other reliable buyers of US weapons. Nope, just massive prosecutorial resources aimed at the same target that the US military industrial complex has always been aimed at… Russia, Russia Russia. I have been pointing this out for years.

“The number of supposedly progressive people that are out there defending the CIA right now is deeply disappointing. What nobody seems to be asking is what do these agencies get out of going to such lengths to embarrass Trump and Russia. What do they get out of this. What they are doing is protecting a line of business. They are trying desperately to keep Trump from bringing about a real peace or real settlement with Russia. They find this prospect terrifying.”

And after two years of hullabaloo the Mueller report offered very little. Even the famous Russian facebook manipulation turned out to be mostly bullshit. The FBI dropped the charges against all Russian companies that bothered to show up in court. That famous Russian spy, Maria Butina, whose reputation US media gleefully destroyed? Well she’s already back in Russia, because the FBI couldn’t really prove anything other than the sort of shady back door lobbying most countries do in Washington DC every day. In the final analysis Robert Mueller found nothing, mostly because he didn’t look for anything serious. But he did exactly what he intended to do, making the world safe for the US defense industry.

Now I am not saying there were no partisan political elements behind these two FBI coups. There absolutely were. Clinton isn’t wrong to talk about a vast right wing conspiracy, and there definitely were a range of media organizations who made crusading against Trump their bread and butter. But these explanations only go so far. Many folks on the conservative side fantasized about the Durham report and the dream that it would reveal a smoking gun that would somehow lead to the arrest of Susan Rice or even Biden or Obama for planning the whole Russia hoax. Democrats imagine that any one of a number of barely literate Republican congressmen were Hillary Clinton’s true persecutors. But all of these are just a side show hiding the horrifying truth. We are already living in a decaying empire where the security services choose our leaders.

The FBI and the Department of Justice were the instruments that decided the last two elections, but they represent just one part of what I like to call the metastasized military industrial complex. There are rivalries between different elements of our government and our defense industries but they also have interests in common that are far more important than the left wing and right wing marketing segmentations our cable news channels and political parties tell us to care about. All of these organizations and people want the US public to think the world is dangerous, because their budgets and their individual careers depend on that fear. Fear is the goal, and it carries people across this wider complex, regardless of political or dividing lines. One of my favorite examples is James Comey, whose only serious job outside of the Department of Justice and the FBI, nominally domestic law enforcement organizations, was working for Northrup Grumman, one of the country’s biggest sources of military international arms sales. US President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us about this sort of corruption 60 years ago, but I things have gotten a lot worse since he popularized the concept of the Military Industrial Complex in his farewell address.

The Military Industrial Complex is metastasizing. It’s not the thing Eisenhower warned us about 50 years ago, it’s much, much bigger. The crucial element is time. For 50 years this system has been growing. Defense contractors now include a surprising number of businesses you would never think of, but the US military buys a lot more than just guns. Military money funds an immense ecosystem of journalism, universities and think tanks, all of which are knowingly or unknowingly dedicated to the continuation of the current system. In Eisenhower’s day there were people in government, media and academia who remembered an era before militarization. Those people are all now dead. Very few people working within the system can see how absurd it is. And it is indisputably absurd.

Now it’s all well and good to talk about this on an abstract level, but I don’t think I have drilled down enough to show how this works on the day to day level of an individual career. The truth is that there is remarkably little difference in policy from one presidential administration to the next. And this policy has been pretty consistently wrong and destructive. Not just destructive to millions of foreign lives, but also directly against the US national interest in a peaceful world that’s open for business. We can get a great illustration of this consistent failure and consistent reward for failures by looking at the careers of just one married couple.

Robert Kagan, the undeservedly more famous member of the pair, got his start destroying regions in Latin America with the Reagan administration in the 1980s. His business in the State Department was propaganda, and he successfully defended the Reagan administration’s backing of death squads in Nicaragua, Guatemala and El Salvador to the point that victims from those devastated countries are still fleeing to our border to this day. In the 1990s Kagan helped found the Project for a New American Century, a now defunct think tank that argued for a more interventionist United States. It was with the invasion of Iraq that Kagan reached the true peak of his career though. He was probably the invasion’s most lauded intellectual, writing Of Paradise and Power, an eloquent justification of the Bush administration’s use of force… leading to the deaths of over a million people and counting and leaving yet another region of the world in ruins. You would think that this horrific failure would have led to him being laughed out of politics and media. You would be wrong. He is a member in good standing of the Council on Foreign Relations and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institituon. Every six months he writes some big think piece in foreign affairs or the Wall Street Journal that we are all supposed to respond to and take seriously. In 2016 this famous Reagan and Bush supporter became a Hillary Clinton fundraiser…

Which isn’t surprising when you consider the career of his much more powerful wife Victoria Nuland. Nuland quietly amassed progressively more powerful positions in foreign policy under Clinton, Bush and Obama, and we never would have heard of her if it weren’t for a famous conversation leaked by the Russians.

“So that would be great I think to help glue this thing, and have the UN help glue it… and you know Fuck the EU”

You see in 2014 Nuland was in charge of the Obama administration’s Ukraine policy. This conversation was leaked in February 2014.

“and you know, Fuck the EU”

While this passage made for better headlines, It was this bit that I have always found more striking.

“I don’t think Klitsch should go into the government, I don’t think it’s necessary, I don’t think it’s a good idea”

In terms of him not going into the government, let him stay out and do his homework and stuff I’m just thinking in terms in sort of the process moving ahead, we want to keep the moderate democrats together. the Problem is going to be Donnybrook and his guys, and that’s probably what Yakunovich is calculating on all this.

I think Yatz is the guy who’s got the economic experience the governing experience. What he needs is Klitsch and Donnybrook on the outside, he needs to be talking to them four times a week.

You see this was before the coup in Ukraine.

That was Nuland basically organizing the government that would replace Ukraine’s popularly elected president after the 2014 coup. What followed our coup was the Russian annexation of Ukraine, and the death of thousands of Ukrainians in a Russian supported uprising elsewhere in the country. This was the genesis of the first major shooting war in Europe since the 1990s, the solidification of Russia as a rogue state, and a fault line that still kills people to this day, over 7 years later. And Nuland’s name is on it directly. So I guess you would expect her to have been fired right? If not for everything else, at least for offending the EU right?

Hell no! Obama thought she did such a great job that he kept her there for another three years, and Biden has already nominated her as an under secretary of state. She hasn’t been confirmed yet, but it’s amazing that she’s even up for the job You can not make this stuff up.

Now I don’t want to hold this couple up for any kind of special ridicule. They are one among thousands, if not tens of thousands of smart, well meaning professionals who truly believe that they are doing the right thing. The fact that the death and destruction they cause pays their mortgage keeps them from even seeing the death and destruction that they cause. These are tragic figures not evil ones. But that doesn’t mean we have to follow their insane suggestions!

When you realize that it’s the same people running the foreign policy in all of these administrations, you can begin to see that their strategies are very similar. The FBI investigations they use to control and discredit elected politicians become more obvious. Strategies that are supposedly political in a Democrats vs. Republicans sense are really about the Military Industrial Complex vs. All of us. The best examples of this might be the Russia Hoax and the Iran panic, which are basically the same thing. Republicans rightly see the conspiracy theory claiming that Trump was working for Russia as a Hoax executed by the deep state, yet at the same time they work as hard as they can to put forward deep state conspiracy theories about Barack Obama and Iran. The better kinds of Democrats are outraged that the foreign policy Blob is trying to kill Obama’s greatest diplomatic achievement, the Iran nuclear deal, yet at the same time, they eagerly participate in the Russia hoax perpetuated by the exact same foreign policy blob.

And yes, if it wasn’t clear already the deep state and the foreign policy blob are the exact same people.

Why don’t we close with a world war II analogy? It often seems to be the only piece of history that US foreign policy professionals are aware of. Well many claim that Trump was a modern day Hitler. Well if that’s true, then the foreign policy community is Stalin. The deep state may have helped save us from Trump, but now it’s time for a Cold war against it. Now that Trump is gone, we have a ton of free outrage floating around. People are just itching to do some boycotting and cancelling. Well instead of focusing on Major League Baseball and Dr. Suess, how about we focus on the foreign policy establishment that just chose our last two presidents for us. Next week we will talk about the best way to stick it to these guys… pressuring the Biden administration to rejoin the Iran Nuclear Deal…

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