John Durham failed to find Donald Trump's mythical FBI cabal but the Republicans aren't through with the Deep State. They're building their own in waiting if they win the White House next year. The story needs to be covered in detail.
The mainstream media and its right wing tributaries have spilt barrels of ink over the Durham Report, the investigation into the mythical FBI Deep Staters who have been out to smear Donald Trump by digging into Russia’s generous help for his 2016 campaign. Republicans have been peddling Durham’s dud as proof of the non-existent cabal’s anti-Trump malevolence. Unfortunately, while dutifully covering the disinformation, otherwise competent reporters are ignoring Trump’s very own Deep State ambitions right before their eyes.
The Republicans promised shocking revelations, but John Durham, the US attorney hand-picked by Trump’s Attorney General Bill Barr, produced a big time bust in court and in print: two not guilty verdicts that exonerated Durham’s accused; a minor plea deal that fined a journeyman FBI attorney over a dumb transgression; and a report that failed to unearth anything that hadn’t already been investigated in 2019. Then, the Justice Department inspector general called out the Bureau for its procedural missteps that the G-men subsequently corrected.
But the cost of Durham’s flop isn’t just the three years and $6.5 million he pissed away. It’s the fact the news media are helping Trump loyalists transform Durham’s underwhelming emission into agitprop for the 2024 presidential campaign, while ignoring Trump’s Deep State in waiting. Three years ago, Trump’s minions did all they could to turn the government’s international news services into his ministry of truth and to warp intelligence to suit his political needs. The same crowd is planning far more pervasive purges and politicization if he’s elected next year.
The latest evidence: a February 2023 report from the US Agency for Global Media’s general counsel. USAGM oversees Voice of America and other federally funded international information services. Their roles are crucial in providing access to a free press around the world. Unlike Durham’s publicity hounds, USAGM apparently didn’t intend its general counsel’s report to lead the nightly news. The title alone, "Review of Management Actions," appears handcrafted to throw even beagle-nosed reporters off the scent.
Rather than a post-mortem, the report is a preview of coming attractions. It’s in the news thanks to David Folkenflik, NPR’s media correspondent. His recent story provides the facts as enumerated by USAGM’s general counsel. It’s not the first. Folkenflik did superb work on transgressions at the agency under its Trump era Führers, reporting on partisan purges, political pressures on Voice of America and other reporters, and whistleblower revelations of suspect contracting then occurring and now laid out in the general counsel’s report.
The report focuses on David Pack, a conservative filmmaker and USAGM’s chief in Trump’s final year in office when the attempt to politicize the agency peaked. Among the abuses, Pack reportedly strongarmed journalists to toe the Trump political line; stacked the boards of USAGM international news outlets with conservative ideologues; fired career executives deemed anti-Trump; blocked federal funds for two companies he personally disfavored despite their successful technologies permitting news to penetrate firewalls in repressive regimes; and used a no-bid contract to pay a politically connected law firm $1.6 million in fees to investigate the cashiered federal employees.
The report on Pack’s gross mismanagement -- that’s how the general counsel describes his performance -- isn’t just the USAGM investigators’ view. Thirty whistleblowers were catalysts for the inquiry, and the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, which investigates federal whistleblower complaints, endorsed the findings. In Washington, Pack also wasn’t alone. When it comes to compromising the nonpartisan integrity of the federal government in 2020, other Trump Deep Staters were hard at work shaping intelligence to their political ends just a few blocks away.
A report to Congress in 2021 from the Director of National Intelligence’s "analytical ombudsman" laid out how Trump’s appointed officials misrepresented the facts and analysis on Russia’s election interference during the 2020 campaign. As the transmittal letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee stated, "ombudsmen from CIA, NSA, and ODNI report the widely shared perspective among … analysts that analysis on foreign election interference was delayed, distorted, or obstructed out of concern over policymaker reactions or for political reasons."
House and Senate testimony in March 2020 by William Evanina, then Director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, is a good example. The briefings presented analytical judgments on Russian election meddling that had been stood on their head. Evanina’s talking points downplayed evidence of the interference and ignored Russia’s aim to help Trump. Tapped as a last-minute stand-in to testify, Evanina, a respected career FBI agent, later made clear DHS officials snookered him, assuring that the script fully reflected the analysts’ views.
The DNI’s investigators discovered memories were foggy about who specifically had torqued Evanina’s intelligence presentation but not their office address. "Most officials," the ombudsman wrote, "say (the distorted conclusions) were drawn from 'existing reporting, albeit selectively,' and 'shaped by other ODNI officials and … acting Director of National Intelligence (Richard) Grenell.'" The misrepresentations were bad enough, but as Campaign 2020 heated up, the effort by Trump loyalists to cook the intelligence books didn’t stop there.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) last year released its inspector general’s investigation into similar intelligence meddling in 2020. According to its IG, then acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf repeatedly intervened in the review of a pending intelligence report on Russian plans to sow disinformation denigrating then candidate Joe Biden’s health. Acting Secretary or not, Wolf had no formal role in the review process. The report, meant for state and local officials, was held for months because, Wolf said, it would embarrass President Trump.
How much do such findings matter? Are they a record of a few missteps by a handful of political appointees or a harbinger of what a second Trump presidency will bring? And after all, what difference can they make? Presidents already fill some 4000 appointed jobs overseeing policymaking as well as the government’s career civil servants. Would a few more zealots in corner offices have an impact on how, say, foreign and national security policy, or the FBI’s law enforcement decisions are made?
Trump seems to think so. As Jonathan Swan reported in detail in Axios last year, he made that clear as president with his Executive Order that created "Schedule F," a new employment category stripping away civil service protections for federal workers in policymaking jobs. If he had won election in 2020, Schedule F would have allowed the reclassification of tens of thousands of positions, enabling their occupants to be fired without cause. President Biden rescinded the order. Reinstating it, according to Swan, is at the top of Trump’s "to-do" list.
Compared to writing copy on Trump’s latest lie on the campaign trail, digging into reports from an agency general counsel or an ombudsman may not amount to flashy news. But the call to politicize the federal government’s career service isn’t simply red meat for MAGA crowds. For one, Trump isn’t shy about his plans. "Either the Deep State destroys America, or we destroy the Deep State," he said at a March campaign rally. Allan Smith’s report on the NBC News website reveals that other GOP presidential hopefuls see a valuable campaign plank as well.
It’s not a surprise. Consider the results when Axios polled the then-wanna-be GOP nominees last year on Trump’s aborted executive order. Mike Pompeo and Ted Cruz each said he supported the idea, while Josh Hawley, Marco Rubio and Rick Scott were open to the concept. Since then, Ron DeSantis has endorsed Schedule F in his 2023 memoir and most recently, Vivek Ramaswamy, a newcomer in the GOP scrum, said he doesn’t think Schedule F goes far enough. Last month, he vowed to shut down the FBI and IRS and end all civil service protections.
In short, John Durham may have come up empty handed but the Republicans remain focused on the Deep State, especially their own. Some 64 conservative organizations are backing Project 2025, among other things a head-hunting operation to fill the openings created by Schedule F if the GOP wins the White House. Former Trump officials are deeply involved, but the Heritage Foundation, the project’s prime contractor, has briefed all the presidential contenders to make sure they know where to find loyalists if they grab 2024’s brass ring.
Deconstructing a modern civil service, of course, won’t be easy, nor will covering the story. But the threat to a nonpartisan, professional government service as well as the potential consequences for the country, including its national security, are hardly a secret. Ask the USAGM general counsel or the intelligence community’s ombudsman.
Or ask Russ Vought, Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget who authored Schedule F. "I think Schedule F is basically doctrine now on the right," Vought told NBC News’ Alan Smith. "Schedule F is getting to the point where I cannot see anyone who runs on the Republican side who doesn’t put this into play."
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