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Trump's Foreign Policy Incoherence

April 3, 2017

Exclusive: Powerful forces are arrayed against any significant changes that President Trump may try to make in foreign policy, a dilemma made worse by his own ineptness and staffing troubles, writes Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
President Trump's emerging foreign policy is one of contradictions and chaos, caught up in a combination of old establishment orthodoxies and some fresh recognition of reality but without any strong strategic thinker capable of separating one from the other and leading the administration in a thoughtful direction.

Nikki Haley speaking at the 2013 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland. (Flickr Gage Skidmore)

The examples of new thinking include abandoning President Obama's fitful and bloody campaign to force "regime change" in Syria; accepting a more realistic solution to the political mess in Libya; and trying to cooperate with Russia on combating terrorism, such as the fight against Islamic State and Al Qaeda, and reducing international tensions, such as the ongoing crisis in Ukraine.
But Team Trump also is hobbled by its inability to break free from many of the groupthinks that have dominated Official Washington for the past quarter century or so as the foreign policy establishment fell under the domination of the neoconservatives and their junior partners, the liberal interventionists, virtually banishing the formerly influential "realists" as well as the few peace advocates.
This enduring neocon/liberal-hawk strength reflected in what all the "important people" know to be true has left senior Trump officials still pandering to the Saudis and the Israelis; repeating the neocon mantra that "Iran is the principal source of terrorism" (though that is clearly not true given the support for Al Qaeda and other Sunni terror groups coming from U.S. "allies" such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar); and falling into line with NATO's hype of Russia as the new global villain.
Trapped in Old Thinking
What is increasingly clear is that Trump's inner circle lacks a comprehensive understanding about how these various foreign-policy forces fit together. Beyond Trump's transactional approach in demanding that "allies" from Japan to Saudi Arabia to European nations in NATO pay more for their costly U.S. security umbrella Trump and his advisers lack a consistent foreign policy message.

White House adviser Jared Kushner, who is also President Trump's son-in-law.

Perhaps the most supple thinker is Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, who started out with a traditional fondness toward Israel and Saudi Arabia but now seems to be at the forefront of the administration's pragmatists, looking at novel ways of resolving the crises in Iraq, Syria and Libya, even if that means dealing with the Iranians and the Russians. Kushner, however, lacks knowledge and experience in foreign affairs and is hamstrung by a lack of support staff as his portfolio of responsibilities keeps expanding.
Other senior foreign policy officials the likes of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Defense Secretary James Mattis and United Nations Ambassador Nicki Haley fit more into the traditionalist mold, touting the unquestioned value of the alliances with Israel, Saudi Arabia, NATO and the European Union although even these more conventional voices have acquiesced on the recognition of reality in Syria, that Bashar al-Assad's government isn't likely to be overthrown soon and that the fight against Islamic State takes precedence.
Yet, regarding a more thorough overhaul of U.S. foreign policy getting tough with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States for their clandestine support for Sunni militants, demanding that Israel get serious in working out a peace agreement with the Palestinians, and forging a détente with Russia the Tillerson-Mattis-Haley triangle appears resistant to going outside the foreign policy frame that the neocons have built.
Haley, with her own political ambitions, appears to relish her role as a favorite of Israel and the neocons, getting a particularly warm welcome when she addressed the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) last week and vowed to shield Israel from U.N. criticism.
The Neocon Rise
Over the past 35 years, the neocons have managed to amass extraordinary power in Washington because unlike most of their adversaries they possess a purposeful vision of what they want to accomplish, principally protecting Israel's interests in the Middle East and lavishing money on the Military Industrial Complex. They also push a Western neoliberal economic model on the world that breaks down traditional social values and enriches a global financial elite.

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis welcomes Saudi Deputy Crown Prince and Defense Minister Mohammed bin Salman to the Pentagon, March 16, 2017. (DoD photo by Sgt. Amber I. Smith)

This combination of goals ensures a steady flow of many millions of dollars into the neocons' coffers via think tanks, non-governmental organizations, consultancies and business interests. But the neocons have proven their worth. Generally speaking, they are bright, articulate and politically savvy.
The neocons made their first big move into the centers of power during the Reagan administration, filling a void for skilled functionaries. After getting credentialed in the 1980s, the neocons expanded their reach into the major media and big-time think tanks in the 1990s during the Clinton administration and fully claimed the levers of power in the 2000s under George W. Bush.
By the Obama administration, the neocons had so ensconced themselves in the centers of Washington power that they continued to exert great influence even though President Obama was never exactly one of them, coming more from the "realist" camp although he surrounded himself with liberal interventionists.
The world views of these liberal hawks matched closely with the neocons', differing mostly in the rationalizations used for sponsoring "regime changes." The neocons typically cited "terrorism" and "democracy-promotion" while the liberal interventionists would rally around "humanitarian concerns." But they usually ended up in the same place, such as supporting the Iraq invasion in 2003 and the proxy war in Syria from 2011-2016.
Lacking Control
Throughout his presidency, Obama never took firm control of his foreign policy. At the start, he enlisted a "team of rivals" seasoned players who ran circles around him bureaucratically, such as Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Gen. David Petraeus and even in his second term, Obama let liberal hawks and neocons, such as Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power and Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, respectively, box him in.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson at his swearing-in ceremony on Feb. 1, 2017. (Screen shot from Whitehouse.gov)

Obama would often resist the most extreme schemes that these hawks would hatch, but he rarely challenged them directly, behaving more like a foot-dragger-in-chief than a forceful President.
Obama also let the neocons and the liberal interventionists control the narratives, turning adversaries into "demons" and allies into "innocents." Whether it was the Aug. 21, 2013 sarin attack outside Damascus (blamed on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad) or the July 17, 2014 shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine (blamed on Russian President Vladimir Putin), Obama didn't let the dubious evidentiary cases interfere with the desired propaganda value of the incidents.
So, when Obama finally left office, he left behind not only a nettlesome batch of international crises Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Ukraine, South Sudan and a New Cold War with Russia but also a series of exaggerated or false narratives that made resolving these trouble spots doubly difficult.
Trump's Troubles
Under the best of circumstances, the Trump administration would have had a nearly impossible task unwinding the deceptive story lines and reaching out to foreign leaders who could actually help resolve these crises. But Donald Trump complicated the task with his own bizarre behavior, squandering his first days in office with silly complaints about whose Inauguration crowds were bigger and his absurd argument that he had really won the popular vote.

President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at joint press conference on Feb. 15. 2017. (Screen shot from Whitehouse.gov)

But the real challenge was how indoctrinated nearly all the "important people" in Washington had become after a quarter century or so of hearing almost exclusively the neocon point-of-view, which was built around the Israeli-Saudi viewpoint on the Middle East and on the need to demonize anyone who got in their way.
The cornerstone of Israel's regional strategy derives from the fact that Lebanon's Hezbollah militia bloodied the proud Israeli Defense Force when it was occupying southern Lebanon, forcing Israel to withdraw back to its borders and earning the Shiite militia the label of a "terrorist" organization. And, since Shiite-ruled Iran was helping Hezbollah, Iran soon became the chief sponsor of terrorism in Israeli eyes.
Because Israel insisted on that position, the U.S. government and the mainstream media fell in line. It didn't matter that Saudi Arabia, Qatar and other Sunni regimes were financing and arming Al Qaeda and other terror groups that were attacking the West. Between Israel's political clout in the United States and the Saudi financial power, Official Washington parroted what it was told. Even as Al Qaeda and later the Islamic State became the major terror groups attacking the West, all the "important people" in media and government still recited the mantra: "Iran is the principal sponsor of terrorism."
Israel/Saudi Alliance
Israel's obsession with Hezbollah and Saudi Arabia's sectarian hatred of the Shiites led to other strategic decisions in the region. Since Syria was allied with Iran and Hezbollah and was considered the centerpiece of the so-called "Shiite crescent" stretching from Tehran through Damascus to Beirut "regime change" in Syria would deal a powerful blow to the regional enemies of both Israel and Saudi Arabia.

King Salman of Saudi Arabia and his entourage arrive to greet President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama at King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Jan. 27, 2015. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

So, "regime change" in Syria became an important priority shared by the American neocons and because Bashar al-Assad could be painted as a ruthless dictator by the liberal interventionists as well. Half-heartedly, Obama went along with the call that "Assad must go," but Obama still resisted pressure from Secretary of State Clinton and Ambassador Power to commit the U.S. military too deeply to what was becoming a messy sectarian war.
Despite this hesitancy, Obama joined with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, Israel and others in arming and/or supporting various rebel factions some deemed "moderate" that coalesced under Sunni extremists associated with Al Qaeda (Nusra Front), Nusra's ally Ahrar al-Sham, and Al Qaeda's spin-off (Islamic State).
Still, Assad and his government proved more resistant to "regime change" than had been expected. But the neocon/liberal-hawk hopes were raised in August 2013 when a mysterious sarin attack outside Damascus was blamed on Assad although the evidence seemed to point to a provocation by Al Qaeda-linked terrorists. Nevertheless, the mainstream U.S. media, key "human rights" groups, and much of the U.S. government pinned the blame on Assad amid expectations of a major U.S. bombing campaign to devastate his military.
But Western intelligence analysts shared with Obama their doubts about who was responsible and the President called off the bombing at the last minute to the fury of many in Official Washington who chastised Obama for not enforcing his "red line" against chemical weapons use.
The Putin Problem
Then, to make matters worse for the "regime change" advocates, Russian President Putin intervened with a face-saving plan in which Assad surrendered his chemical weapons while still denying responsibility for the attack. With that move, Putin who was also assisting Obama on negotiations to constrain Iran's nuclear program and thus heading off another neocon-desired "regime change" mission jumped to the top of international targets.

Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, who pushed for the Ukraine coup and helped pick the post-coup leaders.

The neocons recognized the need to punish Putin and drive a wedge between Putin and Obama before they might turn their joint attention to something as sensitive as an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal. Ukraine became the convenient wedge.
By late September 2013, neocon Carl Gershman, president of the U.S.-government-funded National Endowment for Democracy, had identified Ukraine as the "biggest prize" as well as an important step toward eventually removing Putin from power in Russia. Between Gershman's NED lavishing money on activists and Assistant Secretary Nuland's machinations supporting violent protests in Kiev, the stage was set for Ukraine's "regime change," ousting elected President Viktor Yanukovych and installing a fiercely anti-Russian regime.
After Yanukovych's ouster with neo-Nazi and ultranationalist street fighters leading the charge on Feb. 22, 2014 Crimea, an ethnic Russian stronghold where Russia's Black Sea naval fleet was based, reacted to the coup in Kiev by voting to secede from Ukraine and rejoin Russia. Putin committed some Russian troops already stationed on the peninsula to protect Crimea's decision, a move that Western propaganda portrayed as a "Russian invasion."
Across Europe and the U.S., an anti-Russian hysteria took hold that entrenched the neocons/liberal hawks in even greater control of Western thinking. At this point, Obama essentially capitulated and joined in the Russia-bashing.
His expected successor, Hillary Clinton, was even more committed to the neocon/liberal-hawk narrative. But Clinton's inept campaign and the last-minute intervention by FBI Director James Comey (briefly reopening an investigation into her use of a private email server while Secretary of State) led to the surprise result of Donald Trump's victory.
Oddballs and Outsiders
Trump, however, was unprepared for victory. He had around him a motley crew of oddballs and outsiders. Many detested and distrusted the Washington foreign policy establishment, which was dominated by neocons and liberal hawks, but Team Trump had no sophisticated understanding of the complex global and political challenges that faced the new and inexperienced President.
Many of his advisers also had absorbed the dominant groupthinks, especially those pushed by Israel, such as the falsehood that Iran was the principal source of terrorism.

Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, appearing on CBS' "Face the Nation."

At first, Trump and son-in-law Jared Kushner seemed to think that they might be able to broker an Israeli-Palestinian peace by getting Saudi Arabia to strong-arm the Palestinians into accepting Israeli dictates for a solution, called the "outside-in" plan. So, initially, there was the usual cozying up to the Israeli and Saudi "allies."
Meanwhile, Official Washington was busy trying to repel the Trump presidency much as a body deploys white cells to kill an infection. The chief method of attack was the charge of "Russian meddling" in the election and suspicions that it was coordinated with the Trump campaign. To achieve the goal of Trump's ouster, the mainstream media and the political elite adopted a revisionist history of the campaign, ignoring Clinton's numerous missteps and the key role played by Comey when he revived the FBI investigation into Clinton's email server just days before the Nov. 8 election.
Instead, the new groupthink was that some leaked emails earlier in the campaign revealing how the Democratic National Committee had tilted the playing field against Sen. Bernie Sanders and how Clinton's campaign had been hiding details of her speeches to Wall Street had somehow decided the election and that Russia had hacked into those email accounts and passed the information onto WikiLeaks.
WikiLeaks denied getting the emails from Russia but that claim was brushed aside, along with memories of the earlier analysis of what had caused Clinton's surprising defeat: her own incompetent campaign and Comey's intervention.
The poisonous climate created by Russia-gate further constrained Trump's possible outreach to Moscow for cooperation on resolving a number of global hotspots.
Although the Russia-gate accusers lacked evidence of collaboration between Team Trump and the Kremlin, the endless repetition of the charges had a powerful effect. In effect, the neocons and the liberal hawks exploited the "scandal" to protect their core interests. It now will be difficult for Trump to resolve Ukraine or cooperate with Russia on Syria and Libya or to team up with Russia to finally compel Israel to accept a reasonable agreement with the Palestinians.
Saudi Arabia also came up a winner with the Trump administration extending its support for the Saudi war on impoverished Yemen and the lifting of human rights constraints on arming Bahrain. In both cases, Sunni rulers are repressing Shiite-related populations and the violence is rationalized by the old mantra: "Iran is the principal source of terrorism."
There's also the hope among many in Official Washington and inside the mainstream media that Russia-gate can be transformed into an impeachment proceeding to remove Trump and put neocon-friendly Vice President Mike Pence in charge. He, in turn, would likely turn control of U.S. foreign policy over to the likes of neocon Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham. The status quo ante would be restored.
That is why wielding the anti-Russia stick has been so tempting, offering a way to both bludgeon Trump and beat to death any nascent détente with Russia, which would give new hope for more "regime change" wars. For the neocons and their liberal-hawk sidekicks, that would be a win-win-win.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America's Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).

Quote:Cernovich Explains How He Learned About Susan Rice


by Tyler Durden
Apr 4, 2017 6:20 AM


Ever since Mike Cernovich dropped the bombshell report over the weekend outing Obama's National Security Advisor, Susan Rice, as the person behind the unmasking of the identity of various members of Trump's team who were 'incidentally' surveilled during the 2016 campaign (see "Confirmed: Susan Rice "Unmasked" Trump Team"), a report which was subsequently confirmed by Eli Lake of Bloomberg earlier this morning, everyone has been wondering who within the Trump White House or the intelligence community supplied him with such a massive scoop.


But, as it turns out, Cernovich didn't need a 'deep throat' within the NSA or CIA for his blockbuster scoop, all he needed was some well-placed sources inside of a couple of America's corrupt mainstream media outlets. As Cernovich explains below, his sources for the Susan Rice story were actually folks working at Bloomberg and the New York Times who revealed that both Eli Lake (Bloomberg) and Maggie Haberman (NYT) were sitting on the Susan Rice story in order to protect the Obama administration.


"Maggie Haberman had it. She will not run any articles that are critical of the Obama administration."

"Eli Lake had it. He didn't want to run it and Bloomberg didn't want to run it because it vindicates Trump's claim that he had been spied upon. And Eli Lake is a 'never Trumper.' Bloomberg was a 'never Trump' publication."

"I'm showing you the politics of 'real journalism'. 'Real journalism' is that Bloomberg had it and the New York Times had it but they wouldn't run it because they don't want to run any stories that would make Obama look bad or that will vindicate Trump. They only want to run stories that make Trump look bad so that's why they sat on it."

"So where did I get the story? I didn't get it from the intelligence community. Everybody's trying to figure out where I got it from. I got it from somebody who works in one of those media companies. I have spies in every media organization. I got people in news rooms. I got it from a source within the news room who said 'Cernovich, they're sitting on this story, they're not going to run it, so you can run it'."

"If you're at Bloomberg, I have people in there. If you're at the New York Times, I have people in there. LA Times, Washington Post, you name it, I have my people in there. I got IT people in every major news room in this country. The IT people see every email so that's how I knew it."





And while this could certainly be interpreted as a clever ploy to protect his real sources, Cernovich's video comments seem to be validated by both his tweet from yesterday afternoon...




...and the fact that Eli Lake of Bloomberg was able to conveniently confirm Cernovich's story with his own article this morning.


All of which just begs the question of what other stories the mainstream media is sitting on in an effort to protect their chosen candidates.

Magda Hassan Wrote:Yep. Funny how some people's blind hatred of all things Trump creates this blindness and amnesia about the past occupants of the White House. And if they can just get rid of Trump all will once again be wonderful in the world.

Quote:Say hello to America's shadow government: a corporatized, militarized, entrenched bureaucracy that is fully operational and staffed by unelected officials who are, in essence, running the country. This shadow government represents the hidden face of a government that has no respect for the freedom of American citizens. No matter who sits in the White House or who allegedly represents us in Congress, this shadow government is here to stay. Indeed, as leaked documents by the FBI reveal, this shadow governmentalso referred to as "The 7th Floor Group"essentially runs the government out of Washington DC. And as the Wikileaks data concerning the CIA's tapping into all of our electronic devices reveals, everything we're doing is being watched by government eyes.

Quote:Mike Whitney has written an excellent expose of the "Russiagate" cover story for Obama's political use of national security to help his party oppose Republicans. Covert surveillance of politicians on Obama's Nixon-like "Enemies List" has been going on for many years, but is only now being unmasked as a result of the failure of its cover story ("We weren't spying on enemies; only on Russians to protect America").

Democratic-leaking mass media have passed on the cover story authored by former Obama-administration officials led by CIA director John Brennan, FBI director James Comey, the DNC, and Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff. The loose ends in this cover-up have now been so widely exposed as hearsay and political that only 13% of Republicans believe the fact-free story but, according to a poll, 67% of Democrats.

Whitney reports that Comey began the investigation in July 2016. As of last Friday (March 31, 2017) not a scrap of evidence has turned up. This did not deter Comey from telling Congress that Putin "hated Secretary Clinton so much that the flip side of that coin was that he had a clear preference for the person running against the person he hated so much." So the Russians allegedly "engaged in a multifaceted campaign to undermine our democracy."

Comey based this conclusion on what has become a hilarious bit of gullibility. The Russians, he said "were unusually loud in their intervention. It's almost as if they didn't care that we knew, that they wanted us to see what they were doing."

Alternatively, someone wanted investigators to infer that the Russians were doing the hacking. They were careful to insert the signature of GPU-NKVD founder Felix Dzerzhinsky for anyone to find. As Wikeleaks Vault 7 releases prove, the CIA can hack computers and leave anyone else's signature. Due to poor security, the CIA's cybertechnology ended up in the Internet domain.

"They'll be back. They'll be back, in 2020. They may be back in 2018," warned Mr. Comey. But who is the "they"? "They" seem to be "us," or at least what numerous former national security officials have suggested: either the NSC, CIA or its "Five Eyes" partner, British MI6.

Wall Street Journal editorialist Kimberley A. Strassel poses the real question: Why hasn't the Trump administration had the Secret Service arrest Comey, Brennan, Schiff, the DNC and Hillary for trying to overthrow the President of the United States? "Mr. Nunes has said he has seen proof that the Obama White House surveilled the incoming administrationon subjects that had nothing to do with Russiaand that it further unmasked (identified by name) transition officials. This goes far beyond a mere scandal. It's a potential crime."

What we are watching is turning out to be traces of a plot against a government elected by the American people. Attempts by House national security committee Chairman Devin Nunes have been countered with demands by his potential victims to recuse himself so as to stop his exposé of how "Team Obama was spying broadly on the incoming administration."

It seems that this has been going on for many years now. Former Rep. Dennis Kucinich has dropped a bombshell about what appears to be his own illegal surveillance under Obama's NSC.

"When the president raised the question of wiretapping on his phones in Trump Tower, he was challenged to prove that such a thing could happen. It happened to me."

Here's what happened, which was revealed two years after he left office in 2013 when the Democrats were overjoyed to see Ohio Republicans redraw the election district lines to get rid of his candidacy. The Washington Times asked him to authenticate a secret recording of a cell phone call "from Saif el-Islam Qaddafi, a high-ranking official in Libya's government and a son of the country's ruler, Moammar Qaddafi."

Before taking the call, Rep. Kucinich "checked with the House's general counsel to ensure that such a discussion by a member of Congress with a foreign power was permitted by law."

"I was assured that under the Constitution a lawmaker had a fundamental duty to ask questions and gather informationactivity expressly protected by the Article I clauses covering separation of powers and congressional speech and debate."

Given the quality of the recordings was excellent on both ends of the call, Kucinich concluded that "the tape was made by an American intelligence agency and then leaked to the Times for political reasons. If so, this episode represented a gross violation of the separation of powers."

His repeated Freedom of Information Act requests made in 2012 before leaving office have been stonewalled by the intelligence agencies for five years.

We are now in a position to see the real story behind "Russiagate." It's not about Russia, except incidentally. The Obama regime abused the government's surveillance powers and spied on Donald Trump and other Republicans in order to build a dossier for the DNC to leak to the press in an attempt to slander or compromise Trump and throw the election to Hillary.

They've been caught, but we can now see that they took steps to protect themselves against this. They prepared a cover story. They pretend they were not spying on Trump, but on Russians which only by fortuitous happenchance turned up incriminating smoke against Trump.

This cover story was buttressed by the fake news story prepared by former MI6 freelancer Christopher Steele. As Whitney reports, Steele "was hired as an opposition researcher last June to dig up derogatory information on Donald Trump." Unvetted and unverified information paid for by so-called informants "somehow" found its way into U.S. intelligence agency reports. These reports were then leaked to Democrat-friendly media.

This is where the crime lies. Obama regime and DNC were using these agencies for domestic political use, KGB style.

The Obama/Clinton cover story is now falling to pieces. That explains the desperation in the attack byAdam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, on Committee Chairman Devin Nunes to stop the exposure. Russiagate is not a Trump/Putin collusion but a domestic spy job carried out by Democrats.

Law requires Trump to arrest those responsible and to put them on trial for treason and conspiracy to overthrow the government of the United States. If Trump fears to prosecute the Obama operatives within the Deep State, they will try all the harder to attack him to the point of forcing his removal, or at least discrediting him and his fellow Republicans to pave the way for the 2018 elections.

Quote:A secret civil war is being waged right now in Washington D.C...

It is about to have a HUGE impact on our country.

We're approaching what will be the most dangerous period in our country's political history since the Great Depression. What could happen next scares me. But I continue to be optimistic that what will unfold will be great for our country.

I'm certain that you simply won't believe much of what I'll tell you today. In fact, until I did my own follow-up research to verify what I could from my sources, I disregarded this story as "political nonsense" or just another D.C. conspiracy theory.

Besides... it was all too horrible to believe. But then... almost everything my sources told me would happen started happening.

Let's begin...

Did you know the U.S. government has a secrecy designation so restricted that virtually nobody not even lifetime members of the intelligence community even knows what it's called?

It's not "TOP SECRET." It's way beyond that level.

In late 2009, President Obama created this new level of secrecy inside our government with an executive order (No. 13526) so Congress never approved it. Administered by the CIA, this new level of secrecy has created a covert government-within-the-government that almost nobody knows... and absolutely nobody is monitoring.

If you've ever heard the term the "Deep State" the secret government-within-the-government that actually holds power then you know why a level of secrecy beyond "top secret" is so important. This new, more restricted level of secrecy was created so that the most powerful leaders of our government could communicate in total isolation.

This level of secrecy is such a closely guarded secret that the name of the program itself is classified and divulging the name is a crime, punishable by at least 10 years in a secret prison. So this level of security clearance is known only as "codeword."

At the highest levels of our D.C. government, only two dozen or so people have codeword clearances...

I learned about this earlier this month. I was invited to lunch with someone who has held that level of security clearance. He told me about the existence of the codeword-level program. This isn't a rumor. It's a fact.

For the last 30-plus years, my source has worked for and around the highest levels of our government. He is currently regarded as the president's most likely choice to become our next Federal Reserve chairman.

Today, however, his clients include the world's top hedge-fund managers and the leaders of America's biggest corporations. He is, in short, America's corporate representative of the Deep State.

We call him the "Metropolitan Man."

We met about a year ago. He reached out to me through a mutual friend one of the best, young hedge-fund managers in New York. He asked me to join him for dinner at the Metropolitan Club in New York, one of the most elite clubs in the United States.

(Legendary banker J.P. Morgan founded the club. It's where billionaire investor Warren Buffett held his 50th birthday party. And it sits at the southeast corner of Central Park, across from The Plaza Hotel, with a great view of Columbus Circle.)

At the time, the Metropolitan Man was forecasting correctly that the world's central bankers and their negative-interest-rate policy were failing... and that they would soon trigger a global run out of paper money and into gold. Over the next several months, gold and gold stocks soared (as you may remember).

A few days ago, the Metropolitan Man asked to see me again...

He wanted to talk about something he had never seen before in all his years working in the government.

For the first time ever, a codeword-level secret was leaked to the press. Nothing this sensitive has ever been leaked before ever.

Among senior leaders in D.C., it is widely believed that the director of the CIA himself was responsible for the codeword leak. And it's rumored that this information was then passed to the press through New York Senator Chuck Schumer's office.

What was leaked?

It was the codeword-level secret CIA briefing about a meeting in Trump Tower last December... between a Russian ambassador and two senior Trump administration officials Jared Kushner and Michael Flynn.

When Flynn lied about the meeting to the White House staff, he was fired. But the deeper question is: How did the CIA know about the meeting? How did it know how long the meeting lasted? How did it know exactly what was discussed? And how did that information end up in the hands of a New York Times reporter?

This backstory explains how Trump knows the CIA was spying on Trump Tower. And the counternarratives Trump's claim that Obama was spying on him and the Democrats' claim that Trump is in league with Russia are the beginning of a serious war. A civil war inside the Deep State itself.

Reading the newspapers won't explain how this war is being fought...

They will never publish a clear explanation of the battle lines or even who is fighting or why. But the outcome of these battles is likely to determine the fate of our economy for the next several decades.

Let me explain why... and tell you what this fight is really about...

For the last 40 or so years, the U.S. economy has been built around a model that created vast power in D.C.

This model has a few important components...

First, we have a highly "progressive" income tax. Without extremely progressive income-tax rates where about half the country pays nothing and the top 10% pay for roughly 80% the electorate would never continue to vote for more and more government. But it does, mostly because it doesn't have to pay for it.

Second, the government has a powerful regulatory regime in place. This allows D.C. to essentially control vast segments of our economy. Take Wall Street, for example. Who gets to sell a bond or a stock to the public? Nobody the Securities and Exchange Commission doesn't like (i.e. yours truly). This power results in tremendous amounts of "tribute" legal fees, fines, and hidden lobbying that flows into D.C. and feeds its economic ecosystem.

And finally... there's the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and "free" trade. Our country has the ability to export all of the inflation generated by our central bank. This has led to decades of lower and lower interest rates and the government's ability to borrow essentially endless amounts of money without any serious inflationary consequences.

These three components form the foundations of Washington's power. Attack any of them, and you risk a huge fight with the Deep State.

What Trump is doing right now via his border-adjustment tax, additional tax reform, and regulatory rollback is targeting all three of them at the same time. If he wins, all of the power that has been consolidated in D.C. over the past 40 years will evaporate.

Trump has put a metaphorical gun to the head of the Deep State...

And now, the Deep State is fighting back, tooth and nail, to protect the system it has built.

Look at what has happened to the middle class in America over the last 40 years...

Did NAFTA prevent price inflation by allowing America's consumer economy the luxury of accessing the world's cheapest labor? Yes, it did. But the flip side was devastating to the entire manufacturing industry in the U.S.

And where did the resulting wealth flow? To D.C., and to the top 1% of America's wealthiest people who were able to access foreign markets (and shield the resulting income from America's tax system).

Meanwhile, America remains the only industrial country in the world with global income taxation (you have to pay federal income tax, no matter where you live) and without a value-added tax. In short, we've chosen a system that punishes wage earners, while rewarding individuals and corporations who use overseas labor. The result has been a decline in real, after-tax wages over the last 40 years. That's a recipe to destroy the middle class and that's what has happened.

Trump's plan to effectively lower income taxes to 25% (maximum) and implement a value-added tax to discourage foreign production of U.S. goods will turn this entire economic structure on its ear and disenfranchise the Deep State that controls it. The winners will be the middle class, small-business owners, wage earners, and America's manufacturing base. The losers? Those who have invested heavily in the current Deep State regime.

Why is this scary?

Well, unlike the health-reform issue, the Metropolitan Man assured me that Trump's tax-reform agenda would certainly pass. "It's a done deal," he said. He told me that his job lately "has been to help major corporations understand what will be in the new laws and how they will impact various markets." That means the Deep State has been pushed into a corner. What it might do next, no one knows.

"That it would leak a codeword secret... Well, I would have told you that couldn't happen. I've never seen it before, not in more than 30 years in D.C. It's scary because if it'll do that, it'll do anything. Stage a terrorist attack? Start a war with China? Nothing is impossible anymore."

That's the downside.

The next several months could see our government erupt into open civil war. The FBI accusing the president of treason... The president accusing a director of the CIA of breaking the law and having him arrested. Who knows where this will lead?

On the other hand, assuming the government doesn't collapse into a civil war, Trump's new economic model will become a reality before the end of the year. A new economic regime is coming in America. For some industries (and for most Americans) these changes will bring massive prosperity. And for others especially for companies and individuals who have been living at the government trough, tough times are looming.

Here's the best part...

I believe these coming changes are so important and could lead to so much wealth creation that I've convinced the Metropolitan Man to come forward.

We will hold a meeting with him, at our offices in Baltimore, tomorrow night.

The meeting with start at 8 p.m. Eastern time. It will last approximately two hours.

At this meeting, the Metropolitan Man will "take off his mask" and tell you about his role in the Deep State. He'll explain the importance of the codeword-secret leak.

And he'll discuss what the new Trump economic model will mean for various industries and parts of our country. He'll also explain how he knows the tax-reform/border-adjustment laws are certain to pass Congress and what those policies will mean for our country.

Quote:If anyone expected former National Security Advisor Susan Rice, the same Susan Rice who "stretched the truth" about Benghazi, to admit in her first public appearance after news that she unmasked members of the Trump team to admit she did something wrong, will be disappointed. Instead, moments ago she told MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell that she categorically denied that the Obama administration inappropriately spied on members of the Trump transition team.

"The allegation is that somehow, Obama administration officials utilized intelligence for political purposes," Rice told Mitchell. "That's absolutely false.... My job is to protect the American people and the security of our country. "

"There was no such collection or surveillance on Trump Tower or Trump individuals, it is important to understand, directed by the White House or targeted at Trump individuals," Rice said....

...We doubt that anyone's opinion will change after hearing the above especially considering that, in addition to Benghazi, Rice is the official who praised Bowe Bergdahl for his "honorable service" and claimed he was captured "on the battlefield", and then just two weeks ago, she told PBS that she didn't know anything about the unmasking.

Unfortunately, Mitchell's list of questions did not go so far as to ask about her false claim in the PBS interview, in which she said "I know nothing about unmasking Trump officials."

It is thus hardly surprising that now that her memory has been "refreshed" about her role in the unmasking, that Rice clearly remembers doing nothing at all wrong.

On Monday night, Rand Paul and other Republicans called for Rice to testify under oath, a request she sidestepped on Tuesday. "Let's see what comes," she told Mitchell, when asked if she would testify on the matter. "I'm not going to sit here and prejudge."