The election of Donald Trump is provoking internal divisions within the deep state, leading to some very interesting disclosures. Indeed, there is a battle being waged for influence and control in the presumptive Trump administration.

It might be useful to reexamine Mike Lofgren’s essay describing the deep state, to help suss out how and why this battle is being prosecuted. Lofgren was a congressional staff member for 28 years specializing in national security and possessing a top secret security clearance.

“There is another government concealed behind the one that is visible at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue, a hybrid entity of public and private institutions ruling the country according to consistent patterns in season and out, connected to, but only intermittently controlled by, the visible state whose leaders we choose.

The deep state is the big story of our time. It is the red thread that runs through the war on terrorism, the financialization and deindustrialization of the American economy, the rise of a plutocratic social structure and political dysfunction. 

The deep state does not consist of the entire government. It is a hybrid of national security and law enforcement agencies: the Department of Defense, the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Justice Department.” 

Lofgren says that members of the deep state, while pretending to be neutral technocrats with America’s best interests at heart, “almost invariably believe in the “Washington Consensus”: financialization, outsourcing, privatization, deregulation and the commodifying of labor. Internationally, they espouse 21st-century “American Exceptionalism”: the right and duty of the United States to meddle in every region of the world with coercive diplomacy and boots on the ground.”

So far Trump has resisted the daily presidential briefing by the CIA in favor of briefings by his nominee to be national security adviser, former Defense Intelligence Agency head General Michael Flynn.

Now, there’s the new CIA report alleging Russian meddling in the US election to favor Trump rather than Clinton. This report should be understood as a direct attack on the new administration by the CIA, who favored Hillary for president.

If you will recall, the CIA is strongly committed to regime change in Syria as part of its foreign policy mandate. Also, the CIA director, John Brennan, is very close to US ally Saudi Arabia, having served as the CIA station chief there before being named Obama’s national security advisor, and, then head of the CIA. Saudi Arabia is also committed to regime change in Syria, providing clandestine support with the U.S., Qatar and other Gulf States.

The dirty little secret of the war on terror is that for all the rhetoric about fighting terrorists the US is happy to use them to advance policy goals. To that end, the CIA has been funneling weapons and money through Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar and others who provide direct and indirect support to groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda. This support has allowed al-Qaeda and their fellow terrorist organizations to establish strongholds throughout Syria, including in Aleppo.

The goal of such support for the Sunni terrorists attacking Syria is the creation of a Salafist principality” in east-Syria and west-Iraq. Gulf countries’ and Israeli lobbyists have called for such an occupation strategy. A U.S./Saudi controlled proxy entity that interrupts the “Shia crescent” from Iran over Iraq and Syria to Lebanon and holds the ground for a planned natural gas pipeline from Qatar to Turkey and onto Europe.

Meanwhile, Syria is supported by Russia. And, Trump has promised to mend relations with Russia. The Russian and Syrian hope may be that a Trump administration will abandon the present regime change policy.

Intelligence, and foreign policy expert, Marcy Wheeler, helps unpack all of this, and what it portends for the deep state going forward.

“First, if Trump comes into office on the current trajectory, the US will let Russia help Bashar al-Assad stay in power, thwarting a 4-year effort on the part of the Saudis to remove him from power. It will also restructure the hierarchy of horrible human rights abusing allies the US has, with the Saudis losing out to other human rights abusers, potentially up to and including that other petrostate, Russia. It will also install a ton of people with ties to the US oil industry in the cabinet, meaning the US will effectively subsidize oil production in this country, which will have the perhaps inadvertent result of ensuring the US remains oil-independent even though the market can’t justify fracking right now.

The CIA is institutionally quite close with the Saudis right now, and has been in charge of their covert war against Assad.

This story came 24 days after the White House released an anonymous statement asserting, among other things, “the Federal government did not observe any increased level of malicious cyber activity aimed at disrupting our electoral process on election day,” suggesting that the Russians may have been deterred.”

So, what is the purpose of such a leak, as Trump prepares to take office?

Here’s Marcy again. “The propaganda effect of these leaks will be to dampen any movement of a Trump administration towards more friendly relations with Russia. Any such move by Trump will be responded with a chorus “but Russia hacked our election” even though there has been zero evidence or proof produced that such was indeed the case.”

The plot thickens.