Life as a Deep State Target

By Bruce Bawer

Even for those of us who are keenly aware of the dark reality of the Deep State, Adam Lovinger’s new book, The Insider Threat: How the Deep State Undermines America from Within, is both eye-opening and hair-raising. The author, a former strategist at the Defense Department and National Security Council, admits that during his early years in Washington he thought that the lurid stories he was told of Deep State perfidy – the worst examples of which were said to occur at the highest levels of the “national security, intelligence, and law enforcement bureaucracies” – were fairy tales. He learned better during the administration of Barack Obama, a foreign-policy ignoramus but determined mischief-maker who, Lovinger soon discovered, viewed the U.S. and its Western allies “as oppressors that had unjustly subjugated and exploited the non-Western world.”

Hence the “Obama Doctrine,” which sought to “superimpose a race-based grievance politics paradigm onto international relations” in order “to intentionally erode U.S. and Western power, and augment that of non–Western countries.” Alas for the golden god from Indonesia and Hawaii by way of Chicago, when the American public started to get wind of his intentions, his job rating plummeted. But instead of abandoning his treacherous scheme to remake the world, Obama decided to pursue it just as fervently as planned, only with a minimum of publicity. Lovinger, who at the time was working at the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment (ONA), whose task “was to ensure U.S. primacy,” watched from “a front-row seat” as Obama “abandoned U.S. primacy, dismantled the Pax Americana that upheld the liberal global order, and mobilized a secret army of hyper–empowered bureaucrats to implement the Obama Doctrine by stealth from within.”

Needless to say, this perverse new policy was utterly at odds with the ONA’s mission. And Obama knew that. So in 2011 and again 2013, he tried to put the kibosh on the ONA, only to be foiled by congressional resistance. In 2015, then, he changed his tack, removing from the ONA (as well as other bureaucracies) those officials who didn’t share his vision and replacing them with loyal apparatchiks. First, the ONA’s founder and longtime director, the highly principled and immensely capable Andrew W. Marshall, was fired and the utterly unqualified James H. Baker, whose background was not in strategy but in airplane maintenance, installed in his place.

From the outset, Lovinger was uneasy about his new boss, who proclaimed that “radical Islam was no longer a strategic threat to America,” opposed America’s mutual defense treaty (ANZUS) with Australia and New Zealand, and criticized America’s commitments to Taiwan and Israel. Then there was Baker’s enthusiastic support for the “Iran Deal,” which would enable the Iranian regime to acquire a nuclear weapon and thereby serve Obama’s preposterous (and perilous) wish to effect a “balance of power” in the Middle East. Lovinger also reacted with concern when Baker hired as ONA’s chief researcher one Andrew D. May, co-founder of an outfit called the Long Term Strategy Group (LTSG), which was owned by Chelsea Clinton’s best friend, and into which the ONA began funneling “millions of taxpayer dollars annually” even though its callow employees lacked the skills (and security clearances) required to do serious strategy research.

But it turned out that there was one big reason why Obama had put Baker in charge of the ONA: to subvert the U.S. relationship with Japan. When Lovinger became aware that an LTSG employee assigned to a project intended to strengthen that relationship was being investigated by the FBI for being a Chinese spy, Lovinger told Baker that they  had an obligation to inform the Japanese. But Baker said no. Indeed, he and a flunky who was involved in the Japan-U.S. task force blatantly lied to Japanese officials about the suspected spy. Nor was Baker disturbed to learn that LTSG staffers had compromised classified Japanese documents. Instead, he was angry at Lovinger for expressing concern about these leaks. Tensions between the two men intensified further when Lovinger told his boss that because the CIA is barred by law from keeping security files on U.S. citizens, Baker’s accessing of a CIA security file about a civilian Pentagon consultant was itself a criminal act.

Then Trump was elected president, and Lovinger was invited to work at the White House as a member of Trump’s NSC. Michael T. Flynn, the retired Lieutenant General whom Trump had named as his National Security Advisor, was “appalled” to discover that during Obama’s presidency, the ONA – in a breathtaking violation of the law – had not produced any assessments. Hence his hiring of Lovinger, whom Flynn tasked with “do[ing] ONA’s job for it.” Part of that job would involve “crafting strategies to end America’s directionless wars” – an activity that, Lovinger realized, “posed a strategic threat to the Deep State-contractor nexus, which had become invested in perpetuating those wars as long as possible.”

Lovinger, then, had accepted a position that directly threatened Baker’s machinations. So it was that Baker, who’d already concealed ONA materials from Trump’s transition team and used the CIA “to gather dirt” on the members of that team (both of which actions were, naturally, a part of the Obama regime’s wide-ranging effort to crush Trump, and, not incidentally, amounted to serious crimes) now tried to scotch Lovinger’s move to the White House, telling Flynn that he had “serious concerns” about his former underling. But Baker’s attempt to deny Lovinger the White House job backfired. For Flynn knew that he, too, had been the subject of “serious concerns” on the part of Obama’s crew. When Obama had met with Trump after the 2016 election, he hadn’t focused on policy but had instead “seemed monomaniacally fixated on Flynn, telling Trump not to appoint Flynn as his national security advisor.” At other points during the transition, Obama stalwarts Susan Rice and James Comey also strove to change Trump’s mind about Flynn.

Why? Because Flynn, while still in the military, had made tactical changes that “resulted in radical improvements in mission outcomes” in Afghanistan; later, as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), he’d tried to eliminate corruption in its ranks. But although Admiral Michael Rogers, director of the NSA, considered him the “best intelligence officer for the past twenty years,” Flynn had been forced out of his DIA job by Obama because his actions both in Afghanistan and at the DIA had threatened Deep State interests. Now Flynn, with Lovinger at his side, was set to take power in Trump’s White House – which, in the eyes of Obama & co., made both men “insider threats.”

Thus began an elaborate Deep State campaign to bring them down. Had Lovinger stood up for Japanese officials’ right to know about the suspected Chinese agent at LTSG and the leak of classified Japanese documents? Never mind the truth: now Baker flew to Tokyo and told his Japanese counterparts that Lovinger was the leak. An honest investigator actually exonerated Lovinger and incriminated Baker and company; but his report made no difference; the swamp creatures were too powerful. “If a Deep State operative doesn’t get the investigative results he wants the first time,” explains Lovinger, “he simply conducts ‘do-over’ investigations until he does.” Eventually the target is destroyed while the Deep Staters remain in place – not infrequently (with the utmost in cynicism) giving one another medals or promotions.

And so there were more “investigations” into Lovinger – which the swamp creatures tried illegally to hide from him, and which involved the illegal doctoring and destruction of evidence. As a result of one swamp creature’s illegal recommendation that Lovinger’s security clearance be revoked, Lovinger lost his White House job. There ensued a tsunami of attempts at personal destruction that involved serious criminal charges invented out of whole cloth, massive cover-ups, “blackmail files,” corrupt judges, blatant violations of due process, outrageously (and illegally) long delays in compliance with Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, the complete redaction of documents that were finally released in response to those requests, and the audacious refusal of some swamp creatures to refer other samp creatures, when “caught…in numerous egregious lies,” to the Justice Department for prosecution. Then, when it looked as if the Deep State’s intrigues against Lovinger were actually starting to unravel, the New York Times came to the rescue, running an article that smeared Lovinger to a fare-thee-well. And what happened when Lovinger provided one of the article’s authors with evidence fully exonerating him of the charges leveled in the piece? The Gray Lady hack refused to issue a correction.

As we all know, of course, the Deep State, even as it was going after Lovinger, also had a far bigger target: Donald Trump. Lovinger takes a long detour from his own story to discuss the Deep State’s war on Trump, which – packed as it was with Big Lies, unjust prosecutions, and criminal accusations by people who were themselves guilty of colossal crimes and knew very well that Trump was not – mirrors Lovinger’s story of woe, only on a larger and more consequential scale. For example, while both Obama and Hillary were highly solicitous of the Russians (with the former famously mocking Mitt Romney in 2012 for describing Russia as an adversary, and the latter, in 2016, naming Russia as an ally), both had the gall to call Trump a tool of Putin. That charge was, of course, “supported by the Steele dossier, which was packed with Russian disinformation, and which Hillary had engineered, fully knowing it was 100% bogus. And even though FBI director James Comey knew that she knew, he protected her, just as he did in regard to her emails.

Lovinger examines Comey’s perfidy at some length. Comey used fake dirt on Flynn to get him removed as Trump’s National Security Advisor after only three weeks on the job – a removal whose necessity, in the view of the Obama squad, was confirmed by the fact that Flynn, in his first days at the White House, immediately recognized that a certain high-level document contained Russian disinformation, leading him to wonder whether Obama was “collaborating with Moscow to smear” Trump. Meanwhile Comey “was ‘investigating’ Trump and his campaign for precisely what he, by then, knew Clinton’s team was guilty of.” And while the Mueller “investigation” (another Deep State charade) was dragging on, Hillary asserted in an op-ed that a “crime” had been “committed against all Americans” in the 2016 election – but, as Lovinger sardonically notes, she “left out that it was she who had committed that crime.”

Today Lovinger is out of government, but he still works as a professor, teaching West Point or Annapolis graduates who are earning master’s degrees and want to go into public policy or the Foreign Service. To a man, writes Lovinger, they’re “idealistic, patriotic, and public service-minded.” But in recent years, having become aware of the Deep State’s corruption and treachery, they realize that if they pursue government careers with their principles intact, they stand a good chance of sooner or later being labeled as “insider threats.” Consequently, many of them have changed their future plans.

Others, like Lovinger, see the grim reality of the Deep State – “a criminal, even murderous, enterprise” – as “a call to action” on behalf of their country, its Constitution, and its people’s freedom. Yet they’re up against a formidable enemy. Yes, there are honest actors in Washington: a 2022 Defense Department report fingered the ONA as “a vehicle for Moscow and Beijing.” But it made no difference. More typical is a later “report” by a Deep State operative – containing no fewer than 42 explicit lies – that brazenly repeated smears against Lovinger that had long since been debunked. Not long after this report appeared, Lovinger’s lawyer, who specialized in representing whistleblowers, threw in the towel: realizing “the impossibility of getting justice for his clients against a rogue Deep State,” he closed his office.

First published in Front Page Magazine