After the Deep State Sabotaged His Presidential Bid, Bernie Sanders Mocks
Those Who Believe it Exists
Also ridiculing "rigged elections" and "fake news" -- two other weapons used
on him -- the Vermont Senator's relationship to the Democratic Party
descends from loyal support to abject subservience.
Glenn Greenwald
Dec 5
The seal of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is seen at CIA
Headquarters in Langley, Virginia, April 13, 2016. (Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP
via Getty Images)
At what would be the peak of Bernie Sanders 2020 presidential campaign, the
U.S. intelligence community, using anonymous leaks to The Washington Post,
dropped a devastating bomb on the Vermont Senator. U.S. officials have told
Sen. Bernie Sanders that Russia is attempting to help his presidential
campaign as part of an effort to interfere with the Democratic contest," the
paper announced, citing people familiar with the matter whom the paper
allowed to speak on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive
intelligence.
Subscribe now
At the time of this perfectly timed leak, Sanders was on a major roll. He
had effectively tied Pete Buttigieg for first place in the scandal-plagued
Iowa caucus, in which an app developed and sold by Democratic Party
operatives made it impossible to reliably count the votes, and then won the
first primary in New Hampshire (Joe Biden finished fourth and fifth,
respectively, declared all but dead by the punditocracy and Democratic
donors).
The Washington Post, Feb. 21, 2020
The leak to The Post was published on February 21 the day before Nevada
was to hold its caucus, as polls showed Sanders with a sizeable lead in that
state. The next day, Sanders had a blowout win, defeating Biden by
twenty-two points and scoring what The New York Times described as a major
victory in the Nevada caucuses that demonstrated his broad appeal in the
first racially diverse state in the presidential primary race and
established him as the clear front-runner for the Democratic nomination.
The Paper of Record added:
His triumph in Nevada, after strong performances in Iowa and New Hampshire,
will propel him into next Saturdays primary in South Carolina, and the
Super Tuesday contests immediately thereafter, with a burst of momentum that
may make it difficult for the still-fractured moderate wing of the party to
slow his march.
But that intelligence leak, as designed, plagued him from that point
forward, particularly heading into the South Carolina primary that would
prove fatal to his presidential bid. At the time, Sanders himself seemed to
acknowledge that the leak to The Post a paper he had long attacked for its
open hostility to him was intended to cripple his candidacy. After exiting
his plane on the day before the caucus, he was informed of the intelligence
leak by the press on the tarmac, and he responded sarcastically, ridiculing
its obvious purpose:
It is hard to overstate how damaging a leak like this would be for a
politician seeking the Democratic Party nomination. Democratic voters for
years had been fed a steady media diet of incessant xenophobic
fear-mongering over Russia, elevating Vladimir Putin from a leader of a
mid-sized regional power into the worlds most powerful and dastardly
villain.
That Putin wanted Tump to win was one of the leading themes used by
Democratic-Party-allied media outlets to attack Trump, rendering it
crippling for Sanders to be similarly tied to Moscow, particularly given the
perception that Putin would help Sanders because the Kremlin judged him to
be the weakest candidate against the GOP president. Indeed, The Post article
explicitly drew the Sanders/Trump comparison (emphasis added):
The disclosure of Russian assistance to Sanders follows a briefing to
lawmakers last week in which a senior intelligence official said that Russia
wants to see Trump reelected, viewing his administration as more favorable
to the Kremlins interests, according to people who were briefed on the
comments. . . . The prospect of two rival campaigns both receiving help from
Moscow appears to reflect what intelligence officials have previously
described as Russias broader interest in sowing division in the United
States and uncertainty about the validity of American elections.
Reflecting his 2020 strategy of trying to appease the Democratic
establishment in lieu of his more successful 2016 strategy of proudly
positioning himself as its adversary, Sanders by this point had repeatedly
echoed the maximalist conspiracy theories about Trump and Russia, leaving
him with little room to maneuver once this Cold War tactic was predictably
deployed against him. After suggesting the leak to The Post was intended to
harm his campaign, he had no other options beyond sputtering with
faux-toughness about how he would show Putin who was boss.
In other words both prior to the leak and after Sanders repeatedly
validated rather than scorned the CIAs Russia narrative (just as he did
with the equally cynical Bernie Bro attacks). So it put him in a defensive
crouch for the rest of the campaign, unable to explain why Putin Public
Enemy Number One among the Democratic Party base was trying to help him
win.
In the only debate held in South Carolina prior to that states primary,
Michael Bloomberg wasted no time in using this leak, claiming to Sanders
just minutes in that Russian is helping you win the nomination because the
Kremlin viewed the socialist Senator as the weakest candidate to oppose
Trump. Because Sanders had been championing the CIAs Russiagate script
against Trump for years, he had no defense when the intelligence community
turned it against him and Bloomberg used it to attack him:
The rest is history. Biden destroyed Sanders in South Carolina. The entire
Democratic establishment instantly snapped into line behind Biden in an
effort to stop Sanders. Elizabeth Warren, fueled by millions in dark money
from a Silicon Valley oligarch pumped into a pro-Warren SuperPAC, stayed in
the race through Super Tuesday despite being unable to finish better than
third place in any state including her own. Biden cruised to the nomination
while Sanders was stuck in his defensive crouch, helpless against an
intelligence leak and accompanying narrative that he himself had repeatedly
endorsed.
________________________________________
The 2020 Democratic Party was hardly the first time Sanders has confronted
the clandestine evils of the intelligence community. During his early
political career, beginning with his two terms as Mayor of Burlington in the
1980s, he frequently denounced the CIA and other intelligence agencies,
including when he returned from trips to Nicaragua and Cuba. There are few
national figures in U.S. politics, if there are any, who know better than he
about the true face of this permanent Washington power faction.
That is why it was so jarring to see him on Thursday mock the idea that
there is such a thing as the Deep State the very entity that did so much
to help sink his 2020 campaign. As he did throughout 2019 and into 2020, the
long-time Independent posted a tweet in which he sounded very much like a
typical Democratic partisan, mouthing the MSNBC script about Trump even now
that the election is decided, in the process ridiculing the idea of a Deep
State (and, for good measure, also mocking the idea of rigged elections
and fake news):
Bernie Sanders @BernieSanders
Trump's rants about a "fraudulent election" are not a joke. They are the
most significant attack against our democracy in history. If the election
system's "rigged," if the media's "fake," if federal officials are part of a
"deep state," who can you trust? You got it. A dictator.
December 3rd 2020
9,556 Retweets71,505 Likes
Lets leave to the side the bizarre spectacle that Sanders is now mocking
the idea of fake news after he himself has repeatedly insisted for years
that corporate mainstream media outlets like The Washington Post are biased
against him due to its ownership by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, in the process
provoking those media outlets to compare him to Trump in the way he attacks
the press.
Share
Its somewhat difficult to understand how one can wage a revolution
against the political establishment while delegitmizing the obviously true
claim that establishment news outlets disseminate fake news against
establishment enemies. The belief that establishment media outlets battle
rather than disseminate Fake News is a hallmark of an establishmentarian,
not an anti-establishment revolutionary.
Let us also leave to the side the sad willingness of Sanders to mock the
idea that U.S. elections might be rigged given that the Democratic Party
systematically cheated in 2016 to prevent him from defeating Hillary Clinton
to the point that the top five officials of the DNC were forced to resign
when WikiLeaks published emails proving their corrupt rigging efforts. Even
Elizabeth Warren and former DNC Chairwoman Donna Brazille acknowledged that
the 2016 Democratic primary was rigged against Sanders a claim he now
apparently believes is the province only of dictators and fringe
conspiracists.
The truly stunning part of Sanders performance here is the mockery aimed at
those who believe that the U.S. is plagued by a Deep State. Apparently, as
the Democratic establishment and mainstream media outlets have long
preached, we are now to view murky intelligence officials who wield the dark
arts in order to interfere in our domestic politics like the kind who
intervened in the 2020 Democratic Party primary to strategically leak the
Kremlins supposed preference for Sanders at the exact right moment to
injure his candidacy merely as honorable federal officials.
That a Deep State lurks within and over the U.S. Government is now treated
in establishment liberal circles as if it is some new right-wing
conspiratorial concoction rather than what it is: a long-standing reality
recognized long before Trump by political science scholarship, left-wing
foreign policy critiques, and mainstream journalism.
This post-World-War-II truth of a U.S. Deep State entered mainstream
discourse when Dwight Eisenhower used his 1961 Farewell Address to warn
Americans that in the councils of government, we must guard against the
acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the
military-industrial complex because, he said, the potential for the
disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
The war hero and five-star General had seen the Deep State up close and
personal during his two terms as a Cold War President prior to its
explosive growth during the Vietnam War and in the wake of the 9/11 attack
causing him to lament that this conjunction of an immense military
establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience
and the total influence economic, political, even spiritual is felt in
every city, every state house, every office of the Federal government.
Since Eisenhowers pointed warnings, and long before Trumps election, the
massive power and incomparable dangers of the U.S. Deep State have been
widely and explicitly documented from leftist foreign policy critics Mike
Lofgren and Peter Dale Scott to the 2013 book by journalists Marc Ambinder
and D.B. Grady entitled Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy
Industry.
A three-part Washington Post exposé in 2010, by two-time-Pulitzer-winner
Dana Priest and William Arkin, was entitled Top Secret America. It
described the hidden world, growing beyond control," which has become so
large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it
costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or
exactly how many agencies do the same work." This, said the Post, all
"amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret
America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight."
During the Trump years, the U.S. media alternated between vehemently denying
the existence of this well-documented Deep State to celebrating the Deep
States noble anti-Trump subversions. As I noted last week:
[Democrats and allied media outlets were] cheering reports that unelected
security state officials were concealing information they did not want the
elected President to have, and more recent reports that they misled him
about troop positions in Syria to prevent his withdrawal efforts: classic
Deep State coup behavior whereby unaccountable military and intelligence
officials prevent the elected president from implementing polices they
decide are misguided.
The more honest liberal pundits explicitly said they were grateful for the
Deep State. Writing under the headline God bless the Deep State,
Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson while dismissing right-wing
claims of a Deep State conspiracy nonetheless argued that the hidden
intelligence officials who operate in the dark are performing a vital
service in undermining Trump: with a supine Congress unwilling to play the
role it is assigned by the Constitution, the deep state stands between us
and the abyss.
Part I of The Washington Posts 2010 three-part series: Top Secret America
________________________________________
Sanders knows all of this. He knows it as well as anyone, since the very
weapons hes now suggesting are the hallucinations of authoritarians and
lunatics rigged elections, fake news and the Deep State were deployed
against him as much as anyone. But it is now standard Democratic Party
agitprop to ridicule anyone who recognizes their undeniable reality and, for
whatever reasons, Sanders continues to dutifully recite from that script
even now that the transition to Biden/Harris is well underway.
Many people were willing to give Sanders leeway in the name of stopping
Trump as they witnessed his remarkably loyal 2020 devotion to the very
Democratic Party establishment he long vowed to destroy. That this lockstep
devotion seems to be continuing after the election is far more difficult to
understand, or at least accept.
Joe Biden chose Neera Tanden as his Director of Office of Management and
Budget: the party operative who did more than any single individual over the
last five years to vilify and defame not only Sanders himself but his
millions of most ardent supporters as racists, misogynists, and uniquely
toxic poisons contaminating the body politic. Biden did so knowing that
Sanders will be depending on the outcome of the Georgia Senate run-offs
next month either the Chairman or ranking member of the Budget Committee,
responsible for Tandens confirmation hearing.
They thus knowingly put Sanders in the position of having to play the good
soldier by shepherding the nomination of a person who has spent years
viciously attacking and lying about him and his most ardent followers. Did
they do so without first consulting and obtaining the acquiescence of the
Vermont Senator? Or did they simply assume that he will continue his
subservient posture and do what he is told, even if it means debasing
himself and betraying his voters by championing the confirmation of Neera
Tanden?
Sanders has yet to speak one way or the other about this nomination, so it
is unclear what he will do. It is very hard to imagine that he would vote
against her if his vote were decisive. It is much easier to imagine him
standing up in the Senate and saying something along these lines:
As everyone knows, I have had my differences with my friend Neera Tanden
over the years, but now is the time for us to unite as Democrats and
Americans. Despite our differences, I believe she will do an outstanding job
in this position she has assured me she will steadfastly protect the
entitlement programs on which so many Americans depend [ed: despite a long
history of urging they be cut] and I am therefore proud to support her
nomination. Americans chose Joe Biden to be their President and he has the
right to choose those whom he trusts for key positions. President Biden
trusts Ms. Tanden for this office, and so do I.
I do not know if that will be Sanders position. But the fact that it is so
easy to imagine him speaking those words about one of the lowliest and most
unscrupulous neoliberal operatives is revealing and depressing. That, in
the name of loyalty to Democratic Party propaganda, Sen. Sanders now mocks
those who believe in the existence of the very weapons used twice to destroy
his candidacy makes it all the likelier that he will do this and worse.
Subscribe now
Thanks for subscribing to Glenn Greenwald. This post is public, so feel free
to share it.
