Former CIA Chief Morell Reveals His Role in Deep State War on Trump

Politico’s piece on Mike Morell could be considered to be a cathartic one, wherein the ex-Chief of the CIA bemoans briefly his own role (and the role of others in the Agency and the intelligence community as a whole) in fomenting the type of combative relationship that currently exists between the president and the CIA.

It is certainly too early to be lauding his admissions of guilt for all of the many illegal leaks that were occurring on almost a daily basis under his leadership because the fact is that Morel is still, after all, a Deep State operative, former or no.  I, for one, am not going to jump on the congratulatory bandwagon to let him know how very courageous he was for doing such a thought-provoking and heart-seeking interview.  I might be so bold, he seems to be a lousy speaker, with muddled thoughts and hesitations that rival Bill Clinton’s famous nervous stutter and chuckle.

At the same time, as Freudian slips go, this guy appears to be the Master of his Domain in that regard.

An ex-spy chief who spoke out publicly against Trump while inspiring other career intelligence figures to follow suit has admitted his leading role in the intelligence community waging political war against the president, describing his actions as something he didn’t “fully think through”. In a surprisingly frank interview, the CIA’s Michael Morell – who was longtime Deputy Director and former Acting Director of the nation’s most powerful intelligence agency – said that it wasn’t a great idea to leak against and bash a new president.

Morell had the dubious distinction of being George W. Bush’s personal daily briefer for the agency before and after 9/11, and also served under Obama until his retirement. In the summer of 2016 he took the unusual step (for a former intelligence chief) of openly endorsing Hillary Clinton in a New York Times op-ed entitled, I Ran the C.I.A. Now I’m Endorsing Hillary Clinton, after which he continued to be both an outspoken critic of Trump and an early CIA voice promoting the Russian collusion and election meddling narrative.

As Politico’s Susan Glasser put in a newly published interview, Morell “has emerged out of the shadows of the deep state” to become one of Trump’s foremost critics speaking within the intel community. However, Politico summarizes the interview as follows:

But in a revealingly self-critical and at times surprising interview for this week’s Global POLITICO, Morell acknowledges that he and other spy-world critics of the president failed to fully “think through” the negative backlash generated by their going political. “There was a significant downside,” Morell said in the interview.

Not only had Morell during his previous NYT op-ed stated that he was committed to doing “everything I can to ensure that she is elected as our 45th president” but he went so far as to call then candidate Trump “a threat to our national security” – while making the extraordinary claim that “in the intelligence business, we would say that Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.”

The other important confirmation to come out of the discussion is the clear guiding assumption of the interview – that the intelligence “deep state” did in fact go to war with Trump – which has now been confirmed by Morell himself, which is essentially to hear it straight from the horse’s mouth.

The key exchange in the Politico interview begins as follows:

Glasser: Okay, so, flash-forward a year. Was that a mistake?

Morell: So, I don’t think it was a mistake. I think there were downsides to it that I didn’t think about at the time. I was concerned about what is the impact it would have on the agency, right? Very concerned about that, thought that through. But I don’t think I fully thought through the implications.

And one of the ways I’ve thought about that, Susan, is—okay, how did Donald Trump see this? Right? And from—it’s very important—one of the things we do as intelligence analysts is make sure that our guy—the president—understands the other guy. Right?

So, let’s put ourselves here in Donald Trump’s shoes. So, what does he see? Right? He sees a former director of CIA and a former director of NSA, Mike Hayden, who I have the greatest respect for, criticizing him and his policies. Right? And he could rightfully have said, “Huh, what’s going on with these intelligence guys?” Right?

Yet Morell in a round about way previously admitted that he is personally one of the chief authors of precisely this “demoralizing” scenario in which the president doesn’t fully trust his intelligence briefers.

But we should all remember that this is a man who on the one hand described “Russia’s hacking is the political equivalent of 9/11” and constantly hyped “Russian propaganda”, while on the other he went on a lengthy RT News segment in order to promote his newly published book.

I don’t know whether to trust this guy’s “confession” or not, but my gut simply says that all of his “rights” and “you knows” are indicative of a Deep State embedded habit of hedging your bets and not allowing any perception of impropriety to peek through, despite the fact that in one breath he’s claiming he was responsible for some unfortunately turns of events, while then in the next claiming that Trump was responsible for his own issues and problems with the intelligence community.

The Swamp is the Swamp and attempting to pull all of the rank, filthy water out of the lungs of these intelligence officers (former or currently serving) is like trying to convince Barack Hussein Obama that he wasn’t responsible for the Trump Bump in the economy these days.

Source:  ZeroHedge

Image: Wikicommons