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Trump’s Deep Connections to the Deep State Printer friendly page Print This
By T.J. Coles, Axis of Logic
Axis of Logic
Thursday, Jun 22, 2017

The mainstream media and even the so-called alternative media have painted Donald Trump as a victim of the Deep State. They infer that Trump is a rebel—like him or loathe him—who is up against the machinations of the CIA, FBI, NSA and other so-called Deep State organizations.

The firing of FBI director James Comey only adds to this narrative: that Trump is an enemy of the Deep State. But there are circles within circles and as this article, adapted from my new book President Trump, Inc., documents, Trump has long-standing, Deep State connections.

IN THE BEGINNING
Trump was tipped to become President as early as 1987. Richard Nixon’s wife, Pat, saw Trump on The Phil Donahue Show and told her ex-President husband that Trump could be the next big thing. Nixon wrote to Trump: “[Pat] is an expert on politics and she predicts that whenever you decide to run for office, you will be a winner!.” Shortly after, Trump started speaking with quiet confidence to Oprah Winfrey about making a bid for the White House. Since then, Trump has donated to both Democrats and Republicans, even joining the ephemeral Reform Party headed by billionaire independent, Ross Perot.
    
Trump is connected to America’s political police force, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and very likely to America’s foreign spy and subversion unit, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
    
In the 1970s Trump and his father Fred, together with the late lawyer Roy Cohn, were under investigation by the Department of Justice (DoJ) for alleged discrimination against prospective  black tenants. The DoJ asked the FBI to put a couple of agents on the case. Cohn famously accused the FBI of conducting “gestapo” style investigations into their alleged misconduct. But by the 1980s, Trump’s associates were providing the FBI with valuable information on organized crime and union activity.

Trump sought to develop property on land owned by Kenny Shapiro, who was connected to the Scarfo crime family which disrupted Atlantic City’s 20,000 strong construction unions. Shapiro’s associate at the Teamsters’ union was Daniel Sullivan, an FBI informant. The FBI was in touch with Trump as early as 1981 with questions about alleged mob involvement in the construction industry. By the 1990s, another of Trump’s associates was engaged in ‘extraordinary cooperation’ with the FBI over its secret operations. That associate was Felix Sater, a violent Russian émigré with connections to organized crime. Sater went on to lead New York’s development firm, the Bayrock Group.
    
It is also very likely that Trump’s extra-American activities stoked the interest of the CIA. Since 1987, he had planned to build in the Soviet Union/Russia. Until the fall in oil prices in 2015, Trump had building projects lined up in ex-Soviet Azerbaijan. He has business connections with an Azerbaijan born mogul, Aras Agalarov, whom Russian President Vladimir Putin awarded the national Order of Honour. Agalarov’s son, Emin, married the daughter of Azerbaijan’s human rights-abusing President, Ilham Aliyev.  Quite apart from this, Trump has or had building projects lined up in countries as diverse as Indonesia, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates.
  
“THE FBI IS TRUMPLAND”

The FBI was eager to ensure a Trump victory. “[M]ultiple bureau sources” informed the Guardian newspaper that “[d]eep antipathy to Hillary Clinton exists within the FBI ... spurring a rapid series of leaks damaging to her campaign.” WikiLeaks aided the anti-Clinton campaign with its targeted leaking of Democratic Party-related material. One agent told the Guardian: “The FBI is Trumpland.” The agent said that to many in the FBI, Clinton is “the antichrist personified.”
    
From the 1950s to the 1970s, the FBI ran COINTELPRO (counterintelligence program). It targeted unions, left-wing political groups, the New Left, students, women’s groups, Native American organizers, the Black Panthers and Civil Rights groups and leaders, sending letters to Martin Luther King, for example, urging him to commit suicide. The overall objective was to stop social progress. Today, the FBI—in conjunction with other agencies—is running a similar campaign against Black Lives Matter.

In 2014, mass demonstrations erupted in Ferguson, Missouri. It was the first major response in years by black people to police victimization and the underlying racist socioeconomic conditions. Obama’s Department of Homeland Security and FBI gathered files on the protestors, including data location, planned events and social media feeds. The scale of the spying stretched from Ferguson to Baltimore to Washington, DC, to New York. A law suits filed against the FBI and DHS by the Center for Constitutional Rights claims that activists are identified as “threat actors.”
    
Trump, who has taken a pro-policing, pro-military, anti-immigration and social justice position, will be expected to crack down on Black Lives Matter. Trump expressed his contempt for the movement by announcing a new campaign to strengthen the police, called Blue Lives Matter. 

After the “PussyGate” scandal (the leaked audio of Trump talking about molesting women), it looked all over The Donald. His approval rating was at record lows. Then the FBI under director James Comey did what the FBI often does and interfered politically; this time in violation of the Hatch Act which forbids government employees from interfering in elections to influence the outcome. Comey wrote a letter to Congress, which was quickly brought to public attention by the media, announcing the FBI’s intention to re-launch an investigation into Clinton’s alleged email server misconducts. At that point, Clinton’s approval rating plummeted to about the level of Trump’s.
    
Comey’s father J. Brien Comey worked in real estate. Comey himself was Acting Attorney General during the NSA wiretapping scandals which culminated years later in the Edward Snowden revelations. Comey became senior Vice President of Lockheed Martin weapons manufacturer, General Counsel at Bridgewater Associates hedge fund and served on the board of  directors of HSBC bank in London, whose American branch had previously been found guilty of laundering money for al-Qaeda and Mexican drug gangs.
    
On election night 2016, the Associated Press (which in its own words has been “declar[ing] winners since 1848”) called Pennsylvania before the ballots had been counted. As usual, the mainstream media—BBC, CNN, C-SPAN, Sky—failed to wait until the results were officially in and simply quoted the AP. This gave Trump the Electoral College lead over Clinton. For her part, Clinton effectively conceded defeat by going to bed before all the states were called. It later emerged that President Obama had advised Clinton to officially concede. Clinton was so dedicated to losing that she even tried to block Green Party leader Jill Stein’s efforts to force a recount to stop Trump.

In his 60 Minutes interview Trump immediately flip-flopped on his promise to put his friends the Clintons under a criminal investigation for alleged email misconduct. (“I don’t wanna hurt them. They’re good people.”) If it wasn’t a set-up for Trump’s victory, it sure smelled like one.
    
TRUMP & THE CIA
In 2015, ex-CIA director and Democrat-voter Leon Panetta joked that a Trump administration “scares the hell out of me.” But the “biggest national security threat in this country [is] the  dysfunction in [Obama’s] Washington ... They can’t even come up with War Authority for the  President of the United States”—referring to giving Obama a blank cheque to bomb Syria and Libya—“and I worry about that.”

The hope was that a hard-line Trump would give the CIA a free pass to kill more foreigners on behalf of its big business backers. After Trump compared the CIA to Nazis because of their ludicrous allegations that Russia had hacked the US election campaign in favour of Trump, outgoing head John Brennan said it is “outrageous … equating the intelligence community with Nazi Germany.”
    
Trump seemed nervous a week later during his address to the CIA at its headquarters in Langley Virginia. He fawned over the CIA: “I am so behind you. And I know maybe sometimes you haven’t gotten the backing that you’ve wanted, and you’re going to get so much backing.  Maybe you’re going to say, please don’t give us so much backing … Mr. President, please, we don’t need that much backing.” 
    
Trump’s advisor, the billionaire Peter Thiel, has connections with the CIA and other agencies. Palantir is a big data analysis company chaired by Thiel. It has won $1.2bn in federal contracts “from the Marine Corps, Defense Intelligence Agency, Department of Justice, FBI, State Department, CIA, Internal Revenue Service, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Department of Homeland Security and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children,” says Politico. Its offshoots specialize in counterterrorism and are allegedly hired by hedge funds to help them bet on world events. Thiel convinced the CIA to invest $2m in the company through its In-Q-Tel venture capital firm.
    
By 2016, 40% of Palantir’s profits came from the federal sector. Palantir lobbied congressmen, including John McCain and Tom Cotton, to help it compete against established contractors, including Raytheon and Northrop Grumman. Former senators John Breaux and Trent Lott lobbied for Palantir military-intelligence contracts via the Patton-Boggs firm, as did Alexander Silbey (of ATS Communications) and Marine Corps Brig. Gen. Terry Paul (of Cassidy & Associates).


T.J. Coles is a columnist with Axis of Logic. His books include Britain’s Secret Wars, The Great Brexit Swindle and the recently published President Trump, Inc..

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