A Deep State Conspiracy
While right-wing extremists seem to have something of a monopoly on conspiracy theories, the absence of further protests against Joe Biden’s election provides a fitting moment for me to expound on one of my own theories. It’s a conspiracy theory in that it engages in conjecture to explain some unusual events during the final days of the Trump administration; but unlike many right-wing conspiracy theories it doesn’t require a disbelief in established facts.
When President Trump realized that he had lost the election, he also realized that certain sensitive conversations between himself and other foreign leaders (such as Vladimir Putin) that had been routinely recorded by the National Security Agency might soon become available to the incoming Biden administration. He, therefore, set into motion a plan to purge those recordings from the agency’s files. At this point you are probably thinking that I’ve allowed my feelings toward our nation’s 45th president to cloud my judgment and steer me into the dark world of conspiracy theories. For those of you who think that might be the case, I am setting forth how I arrived at this theory.
Shortly after the national news organizations (including Fox News) declared Joe Biden to have won the election, President Trump fired Defense Secretary Mark Esper. Even though cabinet members frequently resign during the lame-duck period (think of Bill Barr), it’s rare that they are fired at the very time when their knowledge of what their department has been doing will be needed in the presidential transition process. Even so, Trump’s action was not altogether unexpected as Esper had publicly disagreed with Trump on a couple of occasions and, more importantly, he had expressed the view that the U.S. Military should not be involved in issues involving presidential succession. With Trump, such acts of disloyalty could not be allowed to go unpunished. Trump’s action also seemed normal in that Esper’s firing was conveyed via a presidential tweet.
Esper was replaced by Christopher Miller who had previously served in the White House as the Director of the National Counterterrorism Center and prior to that as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Combatting Terrorism. Until 2018, Miller had been a Green Beret commanding the 5th Special Forces Group in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even though Miller seems to have had the considerable experience necessary for the job, he hadn’t been out of the military for the requisite seven years required by the National Security Act of 1947. Therefore, he still needed a Congressional waiver to serve as the Secretary of Defense but it doesn’t appear that such a waiver was even sought, much less obtained. This alone raises the question of why Miller was chosen to replace Esper. If the President’s purpose was simply to express his displeasure with Esper’s unwillingness to allow U.S. Military personnel to quell the protests over the murder of George Floyd, it would have been much more expedient, if not effective, to simply appoint the then Deputy Secretary of Defense to become the Acting Secretary of Defense.
Perhaps even more unusual was the fact that Esper’s dismissal was followed a few days later by the replacement of three other political appointees within the Defense Department: the Chief of Staff, the Deputy Secretary of Defense for Policy and the Under Secretary for Intelligence and Security. The Chief of Staff was replaced by Kash Patel, who had been serving in the White House as the Senior Director of National Security. Replacing the Deputy Secretary for Policy was General Anthony Tata who had previously been unsuccessfully nominated for a Defense Department position. Finally, Ezra Cohen-Watnick, another former White House aide, was named to serve as the replacement for the Under Secretary for Intelligence and Security.
There’s no indication that any of the three individuals who were replaced had made any public comments that might have displeased the President, so one might conclude that they may have taken positions within the Defense Department that the President found objectionable. If the issue was simply one of the use of U.S. military personnel to assist the President to retain the White House, why did the President also deem it necessary to replace the Under Secretary for Intelligence and Security whose job is to oversee the two principal intelligence agencies that operate within the Defense Department; namely the Defense Intelligence Agency (or DIA) and the National Security Agency (or NSA)?
It’s no secret that the President was not happy with the unanimous conclusion of all of the nation’s seventeen intelligence agencies that Russia had meddled in the 2016 election, a conclusion also reached by the Senate Intelligence Committee. In fact, the only inquiry that found otherwise was the one conducted by the House Intelligence Committee while it was being run by Devin Nunes, a California Congressman who had been one of Trump’s early supporters. Still, it doesn’t seem likely that the President would have waited three years to express his displeasure with the oversight of these two agencies, particularly since the intelligence agencies are staffed solely with career civil servants and there is a strong tradition that political appointees (with the notable exception of Dick Cheney) do not involve themselves in shaping intelligence findings. Thus, there was little likelihood that either the Deputy Secretary for Policy or the Under Secretary for Intelligence and Security would have even thought to become involved in the findings of those two agencies.
At this point, it’s instructive to take a closer look at the individuals involved in these personnel changes. Anthony Tata, a West Point graduate, had served in the U.S. Army for 28 years and had advanced to the rank of Brigadier General. Although he was honorably discharged and was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal, his future in the Army had been placed in jeopardy by a nasty legal battle with his ex-wife who complained that he had twice committed adultery (a terminable offense in the Army) and had failed to pay court-ordered alimony. His defense was further clouded by his having submitted a forged document to the Inspector General looking into his ex-wife’s allegations. After leaving the Army he had short tenures as the administrator of two school districts and as the Secretary of Transportation for the State of North Carolina. Like so many Trump appointees, he had auditioned for his position as a commentator on Fox News and during his appearances he had voiced support for some of Trump’s controversial decisions and various conspiracy theories including some involving President Obama. In the Spring of 2020 President Trump had nominated him to serve as the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy; however, his nomination was later withdrawn because even Mitch McConnell couldn’t muster enough votes to confirm his nomination. His background, however, provides ample basis for the President’s confidence in him.
Kash Patel was born in Garden City, New York of Indian parents and became an attorney, first serving as a public defender for eight years. In 2014, he landed a job in the National Security Division of the Department of Justice. Because of his experience in intelligence matters, in 2017 he was able to secure a job as a legal counsel on the staff of the House Intelligence Committee then being chaired by Devin Nunes. Patel is credited with having authored the House Committee’s report discrediting the findings of the Mueller Report and exonerating the Trump Campaign from having conspired with the Russians in the 2016 election. As a reward for his service on the House Intelligence Committee, he secured a job in the White House where he first served as an assistant to the Director of National Intelligence and in 2019 was elevated to become the Senior Director of the Counterterrorism Directorate within the National Security Council. He has been characterized by one news source as having been the “most influential person in the Trump administration on issues of national security” and during the final stages of the 2020 presidential campaign, he is reported to have traveled extensively with the President. As the new Chief of Staff of the Defense Department, he would be in charge of coordinating with transition team sent by the incoming Biden administration.
Ezra Cohen-Watnick, a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, seems to have started his adult life working for the software company Oracle in its high security cloud computing division. His first government job was in the Office of Naval Intelligence during which employment he spent some time on loan to the Defense Intelligence Agency. He also received some training with the CIA. In 2014 he was assigned to the DIA where he became a protégé of Michael Flynn. When Flynn became the National Security Adviser at the beginning of the Trump administration, Cohen-Watnick became a member of the National Security Council. Shortly thereafter, when Flynn was forced to resign, H.R. McMaster, Flynn’s successor, sought to form his own staff and was successful in transferring out all of Flynn’s appointees except for Cohen-Watnick because Jared Kushner and the President insisted that he remain. In April 2018 Cohen-Watnick became an advisor the Department of Justice on counterterrorism and counterintelligence matters and in 2020 he moved to the Department of Defense where he enjoyed a meteoric rise. In May, he was appointed the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Counternarcotics and Global Threats; in September 2020 he was promoted to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflicts; and in November he was again promoted to become the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security. Finally, in December 2020, he was given the additional responsibility of chairing the Public Interest Declassification Board.
Besides the unusual timing of these personnel changes, why did Trump choose to replace the terminated individuals with universally described “White House loyalists”? If he was just trying to express his displeasure with the individuals whose employment he was terminating, he could have simply allowed their assistants to carry out their duties for the remaining three months of his presidency. No, what seems clear is that his selection of these individuals was a clear sign that they were being positioned to carry out a mission which needed to be done before he left office. It’s also instructive that both Patel and Cohen-Watnick, whom at least one news source credited as being the most influential of the new appointees, have a strong background in intelligence matters.
All of this seemed to point to the possibility that the Defense Department’s intelligence agencies might have been the focus of these changes. In particular, their agencies might have uncovered some information that the President wanted to bury before the arrival of Biden’s transition team. Recall that during his first impeachment proceeding, President Trump had given strict orders that no one was to cooperate with the investigations being conducted by the House of Representatives. Thus, whatever information those intelligence agencies had uncovered had not previously been made available. However, once Joe Biden had won the presidential election, any restrictions on disclosing that information would no longer be in force. Thus, if these agencies had information injurious to Trump, that information needed to disappear. The fact that Cohen-Watnick had suddenly been placed in charge of declassification of intelligence data seems to point to the specific nature of his mission.
The next curious event involved the transition of government as it related to the Department of Defense. While the General Services Administration had held up the transition process for over a month until the Electoral College had voted on December 13th, the Department of Defense further delayed that process until after the beginning of the new year, claiming that the Biden transition team had agreed to adjourn their transition meetings until after the holidays. Although the President-elect’s transition team promptly contradicted that assertion, no transition meetings took place until after the first of the year. This incident certainly seemed to reflect that there was something going on within the Defense Department that the newly positioned appointees had been dispatched to hide. Moreover, the fact they they were pressing to further delay the transition process pointed to the possibility that they had yet to accomplish that mission.
This raises the question of why their mission could not have been accomplished within a few days after their arrival at the Department of Defense. The answer seems to lie in the fact that the intelligence agencies are wholly staffed by civil servants and are not run by political appointees. For this reason, the agencies might have been reluctant to jettison any intelligence they had uncovered unless it clearly had no further use. In addition, there are undoubtedly agency rules governing when intelligence findings can be discarded. Thus, it’s highly likely that there had been a stand-off between the agencies’ personnel and the political appointees now running the Department of Defense.
All of this seemed to come into further focus this past week when it was reported that the newly installed Acting Secretary of Defense had given an ultimatum to four-star General Paul M. Nakasone, the Director of the NSA, to appoint Michael Ellis as his agency’s new General Counsel. The NSA’s General Counsel’s position had been open for several months and the candidates for the job had been whittled down to three, with Mr. Ellis not being the top contender. His selection, which was pushed by the White House, had been resisted by General Nakasone because of Ellis’ prior partisan political activity. It should not come as a surprise that Mr. Ellis while on the White House Counsel’s staff had participated in the ousting of Colonel Alexander Vindman who testified in Trump’s first impeachment proceeding. He had also led the fight to prevent the publication of John Bolton’s book about his tenure as Trump’s National Security Advisor. Perhaps coincidentally, he had also served as the conduit delivering information about the Obama administration’s alleged spying on Trump Campaign officials that the House Intelligence Committee was able to use as a red herring to distract from the allegations of the Mueller Report.
It’s been suggested that the appointment of Mr. Ellis as the NSA’s new General Counsel was simply an effort to place him in a key position within the intelligence community before the arrival of the Biden administration. His pending appointment was the subject of a scathing letter from House Speaker Pelosi to Acting Defense Secretary Miller admonishing that it was wholly inappropriate to place a political operative within an intelligence agency. Notwithstanding the Speaker’s unusual warning, Mr. Ellis was finally installed as the NSA’s General Counsel just two days before the inauguration of President Biden. Accordingly, it seems unlikely that Mr. Ellis arrived in time to facilitate the destruction of the agency’s files before the Biden administration took over.
There appears to be two morals to this story: First, not all conspiracies actually prove to be successful. This has also been made clear over the past three months as President Trump has engaged in multiple unsuccessful plots to overthrown the popular vote in the recent election. The second moral seems to be that the deep state conspiracy, first identified by Richard Nixon, remains alive and well. Its co-conspirators consist of civil servants who direct their loyalty to their nation and its Constitution and laws; and their mission has been to undermine the efforts of those elected officials bent upon abusing their authority.