“The bureaucracy has power,” noted left-wing CNN’s John King on Sunday, during a speculative discussion panel on Inside Politics.
Forecasting President-elect Donald Trump’s pending conflicts with the federal government’s bureaucracy, CNN’s panelists inadvertently acknowledged the case against excessive centralization of political power in the hands of the government’s bureaucracy.
King pushed the narrative that Trump was undermining federal intelligence agencies, without acknowledging the agencies’ political and partisan dimensions: “[Trump] keeps essentially challenging the credibility, the motivation, of the spy agencies,” he said.
Julie Pace of the Associated Press (AP) spoke of possible future attempts by intelligence agencies to sabotage Trump’s agenda:
“What I think [Trump] is probably starting to learn is that the intelligence agencies do have a lot of power to leak information. I’m not saying that they were behind leaking this specific information, but we all live in Washington, we know how this works, they will have information, not just about what his ties may be to Russia but various things that happen throughout his presidency. And the more that he fights back against them publicly, the more I think you’re gonna see the intelligence agencies fight back by trying to get information out to the public.”
Pace neglected to note that the aforementioned possible future attempts by intelligence agencies to sabotage Trump’s presidency would require complicity from the news media in order to succeed.
Lisa Lerer of the AP joined her colleagues in their inadvertent acknowledgement of the quasi-autonomy of the federal government’s bureaucracy:
“It speaks to a larger misunderstanding that [Trump] has about government. The bureaucracy can bite back. It can not only leak things and whistleblow – and there are a lot of protections for whistleblowers – but they can also really slow things down. Bureaucrats in the EPA can say, ‘Okay, fine. You want to overturn this? Well, we gotta do this regulation until the exact date by which we are ordered to review it to.’ So they can really slow down his agenda, and complicate his agenda in a lot of ways.”
CNN’s Manu Raju interjected with more options for bureaucratic sabotage of Trump’s agenda. In so doing, he preemptively justified his own future reporting to push the narrative of Trump’s presidency as illegitimate via a compromised presidential election due to FBI Director James Comey’s “handling of the Clinton email investigation:”
“And investigate [Trump]. The inspector general investigation into FBI Director James Comey’s handling of the Clinton email investigation ensures that that story is gonna continue through Donald Trump’s [administration].”
Watch the segment below.
In a widely-read column published last week, left-wing journalist Glenn Greenwald described the intelligence agencies as an arm of the “deep state.” Greenwald posited that the CIA was invested in the perpetuation of conflict and war, drawing on Dwight Eisenhower’s admonition of the rise of a “military industrial complex.” The CIA was therefore more sympathetic to Hillary Clinton than the president-elect, according to Greenwald, due to Clinton allegedly being more belligerent towards Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russia more broadly.
Greenwald did not note, however, the simpler partisan dimensions of intelligence agencies’ directors, executives, and operatives in speculating on their motivations for pushing out information without evidence. At no point in the nearly 3000-word article does Greenwald mention CIA Director James Brennan, an appointee of President Barack Obama.
Left-wing Republican David Frum noted what he described as the CIA’s hostility towards Trump while similarly ignoring its partisan aspects:
Political and media observers would be wise to expect further collaboration between left-wing and Democrat-aligned news outlets and their political allies within the intelligence agencies and broader federal bureaucracy.
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