All posts tagged "Deep State"

Right-wing commentators Benny Johnson and Mike Cernovich blamed "The Deep State and Ukraine" for perpetuating two assassination attempts on Donald Trump as he campaigned in Butler County, PA, last July; and Palm Beach County, FL, in September.

Johnson hosted Cernovich on his podcast and posted to X Friday, "Unravel the assassination plot against Trump, it's going to implicate many Senators and members of Congress. The Deep State and Ukraine tried to take out our President."

On the podcast, Johnson asked, "What should happen if Ukraine is found to have been assisting in the assassination of Donald Trump? Even if this is a low-level military guy — and the 17-year-old that was nabbed, all we know according to the FBI is that he was communicating with a Ukrainian number, that he thought was Ukraine. We said on the show it might have been an undercover agent. Who knows?" ...

The self-styled “secretary of retribution” for Donald Trump, who created a “Deep State target list” a prominent congressman describes as a “vigilante death warrant for hundreds of Americans,” received an audience earlier this month with the very people he’s sought to attract: law enforcement officers.

Ivan Raiklin, a retired Army lieutenant colonel with designs on conducting “live-streamed swatting raids” against the more than 350 politicians, federal employees, journalists and others on the list, detailed his plans to about two dozen police officials gathered earlier this month for a sheriffs’ association conference in Fort Worth, Texas.

RELATED ARTICLE: Trump’s ‘secretary of retribution’ has a ‘target list’ of 350 people he wants arrested

Raiklin’s 20-minute presentation to the Texas law enforcement officials took place in a private meeting room on July 22 in a restaurant in Fort Worth, according to a video reviewed by Raw Story....

Retribution is at the center of Donald Trump’s third presidential election campaign.

“I am your warrior,” Trump proclaimed earlier this year. “I am your justice, and for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.”

Trump’s loyal surrogates have duly embraced the project — perhaps no one more zealously than Ivan Raiklin, a retired Army Reserve lieutenant colonel and former U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency employee, who bills himself as the former and would-be president’s “future secretary of retribution.”...

Former Trump Administration official and right-wing activist Kash Patel was grilled in Colorado during the trial over whether Trump is ineligible for the state ballot under the 14th Amendment — and in particular was cornered about his writings about the supposed "Deep State" conspiracy against the former president.

"You wrote another book called Government Gangsters, is that right?" said the attorney. "And Government Gangsters is about your view that there's a cabal or Deep State out there that is trying to ruin our country."

"Not my view in the book, it's outlined further action," said Patel, who was there as a witness for Trump....

Donald Trump is arguably the most high-profile defendant to allege he’s the victim of political persecution, but he’s not the only right-wing figure to play that card, Mother Jones reports.

The report notes that at the time of Trump’s Manhattan court appearance for his April arraignment on charges in connection with alleged hush money payments to Stormy Daniels, disgraced Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.) and exiled Chinese mogul Guo Wengui, who had been arrested on fraud charges weeks earlier, among others, were outside the courtroom making the same unsubstantiated claims of political persecution as the former president.

Mother Jones’ Dan Friedman writes that, “It was clear then what was going on. Anyone with a legal problem and a fleeting link to Trump would attempt to claim that they, too, were victims of the vast Deep State conspiracy that the former president insists is targeting him and his backers.”...

Former President Donald Trump is enraged over his federal indictment for hoarding classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago resort, with he and his GOP allies — and even his rivals for president, like former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy — baselessly claiming that he is the victim of political targeting by the state.

But one of the less-discussed reasons he is so angry, argued former federal prosecutor Shan Wu for The Daily Beast on Friday, is "Deep State envy": he really wants to use the FBI to target his political enemies, exactly the way he is wrongly claiming is being done to him.

"Of course, what Trump and these Republicans really want is to control the DOJ and FBI themselves so that they can deploy law enforcement against their political enemies," wrote Wu. "We know that is their real goal because they propose making the DOJ and FBI less independent as a solution for what they claim is politically weaponized federal law enforcement — aimed at Republicans. Their illogic — not to mention hypocrisy — is perfectly illustrated by Gov. DeSantis’ argument that 'Republican presidents have accepted the canard that the DOJ and the FBI are ‘independent.’ They are not independent agencies. They are part of the executive branch. They answer to the President of the United States.' Accordingly, DeSantis promised to fire people at these agencies upon his becoming president."...