On Wednesday afternoon, a collection of more than one hundred former government officials published an open letter to Congress demanding an “independent and bipartisan national commission” to “investigate” the January 6 disturbance at the U.S. Capitol.
Dear Members of Congress,
We are former senior national security, military, and elected officials who have represented or served Democrats, Republicans, or administrations of both parties. We write to encourage this Congress to establish an independent and bipartisan national commission to investigate the January 6th assault of the U.S. Capitol Complex and its direct causes, and to make recommendations to prevent future assaults and strengthen the resilience of our democratic institutions.
We also write to you with great urgency in light of what we collectively see as an exigent and growing threat. The events of January 6th exposed severe vulnerabilities in the nation’s preparedness for preventing and responding to domestic terrorist attacks. The immediate security failings that permitted a lethal breach of the Capitol Complex by armed extremists raise serious questions and demand immediate solutions.
But January 6th was also the result of complex national security threats. These include coordinated disinformation campaigns, nontransparent financing of extremist networks, potential foreign influences, and white supremacist violent extremism, which the Department of Homeland Security identified in an October 2020 report as among “the most persistent and lethal threat[s] in the Homeland.” As FBI Director Christopher Wray testified to you recently, “January 6th was not an isolated event. The problem of domestic terrorism has been metastasizing across the country for a long time now and it’s not going away anytime soon.” Understanding how these forces culminated in an attack on the infrastructure of our democracy is critical to preventing future attacks.
In the wake of September 11th, the administration and Congress jointly acknowledged that the attack’s causes were complex and that an independent and well-equipped national commission was an essential tool to aid the federal government. Congressional inquiries, law enforcement activities, and a national commission not only worked in parallel, but critically complemented each other’s necessary work. An independent commission should not supplant the ongoing work by the legislative and executive branches, but it can uniquely support them by providing comprehensive and expert recommendations for Congress to act upon.
Commissions — properly empowered, resourced, and led — can establish a full picture of events and an analysis of their causes, from which nonpartisan recommendations can authoritatively flow. With dedicated time, resources, and expert staffing, they can also exclusively focus on the matter at hand over an appropriate time horizon. Given the gravity of January 6th as a national security matter — the violent disruption to the transition of power and the continuing threat of future attacks — a national commission examining the lead up to the January 6th assault, and the attendant security lapses, is not only appropriate, but a critical component of the national response.
A failure to deploy the full suite of tools available to fully understand January 6th and address its causes will leave the Capitol, and the nation, vulnerable to future attacks. In bipartisan fashion, we have successfully marshaled these tools before, and we implore you to do so once again. [Former Nat. Sec., Military, & Elected Officials]
What an absolute masterpiece of cynical mendacity.
January 6 was not a case of “domestic terrorism.” There were no “armed extremists” executing a “lethal breach” of the Capitol Complex. Only one individual has been charged with illegally bringing a gun into the Capitol. The only shots fired at the Capitol on January 6th were fired by a Capitol policeman who shot unarmed civilian Ashli Babbitt through the neck. There was no planned assault. January 6 absolutely was an isolated event. The Capitol riot was the product of bad police crowd control rather than a concerted plan to attack anyone or anything.
This dishonest and error-ridden letter isn’t a call for an “investigation.” It is a call for an anti-MAGA Patriot Act. It’s a demand for a new War on Terror, this time aimed at the American people.
It’s all obvious from the wording of the letter, and all so predictable.
From the breathless wording of their letter, one can surmise that these federal goons believe that the only way to fight a so-called “coordinated disinformation campaign” is with restrictions on free speech, social media bans and criminal prosecutions for “disinformation.”
The Deep State will want to fight the so-called “nontransparent funding of extremist networks” with new financial laws to end anonymous political donations and dox those providing support to causes unpopular inside the Beltway.
They will use the phantom threat of “white supremacists” to transform patriots of all backgrounds into nascent terrorists who must be purged from America’s institutions as an internal ideological threat.
The wording of the letter isn’t unprecedented. The Deep State apparatchiks who authored the letter liberally employ rhetorical stunts that are typically used to stoke wars and color revolutions around the globe. What’s changed is that now, instead of targeting regimes that stand against the Globalist American Empire, their rhetoric targets domestic enemies instead.
Revolver warned about the rise of “counter-American intelligence” a few weeks in the seminal expose, “Dark New Dem Bill Uses “Counter American Intelligence” To Wage War on MAGA”:
What we are witnessing, in effect, is a foreign counterintelligence operation turned inward and aimed directly at the American people. “Counterintelligence” concerns insider threats to the operational integrity of US military-intelligence organizations and missions. As originally designed, American counter-intelligence is meant to prevent the American security apparatus from being infiltrated by hostile foreign actors.
What we are seeing now, however, is something quite different — a deliberate effort to cleanse our entire security apparatus of patriots — perhaps as preparation for a full scale effort to cleanse the entire country of American patriots, or anyone, for that matter, who objects to the open air prison that the Globalist American Empire has become.
Traditional counter-intelligence techniques, strategies, and mindsets are being re-purposed domestically, in order to cleanse the entire U.S. national security apparatus, including the DOD, of latent political sympathies.
Today, the top target of this Counter-American Intelligence operation is President Trump’s MAGA movement.
Adding insult to injury, the U.S. national security state’s pretext for launching this operation was itself based on the wild-eyed conspiracy theory that thousands of Trump supporters in military and law enforcement are training in state-sanctioned violence by day, then secretly moonlighting as vigilante militiamen plotting government overthrow by night. They’re forming networks, the theory goes, and now it’s the nation’s top national security threat. [Revolver News]
But the most offensive part of the letter isn’t its hideous demands for a MAGA witch hunt. No, the worst part is simply the list of “senior officials” who put their name to the letter.
At least twelve of the signatories of this obscene and atrocious letter held senior positions at the Department of Defense. Thirteen are veterans of the CIA. Twenty-three were ambassadors. More than two dozen were members of Congress. The list of more than 100 names is a (sometimes literal) murderer’s row of the American ruling class from 1990 through the present; the class of dilettantes, mediocrities, incompetents, and frauds who squandered America’s superpower status, bankrupted the middle class with wars and bank bailouts, and led this country to the brink of ruin.
President Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement arose in part to simply repair the damage caused by the Deep State’s catastrophic mismanagement of foreign policy. Now, the entrenched career bureaucrats of the Deep State want that movement annihilated.
The events of January 6th provided them with a fig leaf they needed to excuse their war on Trump and the America First movement. Without January 6th, they’d have found or fabricated some other excuse to say the exact same thing.
But if any group of people deserves a bipartisan commission to investigate their crimes, it’s the signatories of this letter.
James Clapper committed open perjury before the Senate Intelligence Committee. When asked directly whether the NSA collected bulk data from ordinary Americans, Clapper categorically said they did not. Mere months later, whistleblower Edward Snowden exposed Clapper’s lie. While Clapper should have been arrested and sent to prison, he was instead left untouched, and rewarded with a CNN job after leaving the White House.
Michael McFaul was Barack Obama’s ambassador to Russia, who in the last five years has reinvented himself as one of the leading advocates for “color revolutions,” or as McFaul prefers to label them, “democratic breakthroughs.”
Besides literally writing the book on such revolutions, McFaul spent years trying to foment a “democratic breakthrough” here in the U.S. Not always the brightest bulb, McFaul was shockingly blunt about what he was trying to do. In September 2020, he tweeted (and then deleted) the following:
Now, having executed his color revolution in America, McFaul wants an ideological crackdown to make sure the new regime cannot ever be challenged, externally or internally.
As CIA Director, Michael Hayden built his reputation telling one lie after another to bolster the U.S. intelligence apparatus while threatening its critics.
In 2017, Hayden reacted to President Trump’s allegation of wiretapping by saying it “couldn’t happen” since that would be illegal.
How quaint! In fact, after the 9/11 attacks, Hayden himself spearheaded a program to spy on Americans’ phone calls without running it by a single court.
Hayden “joked” about putting Edward Snowden on a targeted assassination list. He bragged that stealing the emails of foreign political parties is “what we do.” A 2014 Senate report on the CIA’s torture program concludes with more than three dozen pages of appendix breaking down all the lies Hayden told to the Senate Intelligence Committee. In the words of the Columbia Journalism Review:
Hayden has a long history of making misleading and outright false statements, and by the estimation of many lawyers, likely committed countless felonies during the Bush administration. It is something of a wonder that someone responsible for so many reprehensible acts is now considered a totally above-the-fray, honest commentator on all issues intelligence. [CJR]
Alexander Vindman is the Ukraine-born defense official who decided that he, not the elected U.S. president, had the right to set America’s foreign policy toward his home country. Vindman, who was three times offered the post of Ukrainian defense minister, went rogue after deciding his policy for Ukraine was better than President Trump’s. After President Trump requested an investigation into Hunter Biden’s corruption, Vindman violated Article 88 of the Code of Military Justice, deciding that he, not the Commander in Chief, got to dictate American foreign policy. Vindman more or less admitted this in his own 2019 impeachment testimony:
I was concerned by the call. I did not think it was proper to demand that a foreign government investigate a U.S. citizen, and I was worried about the implications for the U.S. government’s support of Ukraine. I realized that if Ukraine pursued an investigation into the Bidens and Burisma, it would likely be interpreted as a partisan play which would undoubtedly result in Ukraine losing the bipartisan support it has thus far maintained. This would all undermine U.S. national security. [NPR]
Byron York’s 2020 book Obsession reveals that Vindman himself was the one who got the impeachment ball rolling by encouraging Eric Ciaramella’s politically-motivated “whistleblower” report to Congress. Vindman’s stunt did far more to undermine America’s democratic government than anything that happened January 6, but he’ll never face real consequences for it, because his rebellion was on behalf of the status quo rather than against it.
Zach Wamp, a 16-year Congressman from Tennessee, is one of the more obscure signatories of the petition. But Wamp’s signature is proof that nothing in the letter is motivated by actual fears of an insurrection against the government. In 2010, Wamp suggested that ObamaCare might be bad enough to justify a secession movement:
“I hope that the American people will go to the ballot box in 2010 and 2012 so that states are not forced to consider separation from this government.” [US News]
Wamp broaching secession is far more extreme than anything from Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, or the vast majority of the MAGA movement, and thus reveals the sham at the heart of this narrative. This isn’t about stopping secessionist or insurrectionist rhetoric. It’s about crushing anyone who wants serious changes to the American system. Even the most restrained and reasoned attack on the Globalist American Empire’s agenda of open borders, endless wars, and cultural imperialism, must now be met with maximum force–the full force of the American national security state.
Similarly, former Connecticut Congressman Chris Shays is very concerned about danger of “violent insurrectionists,” most of whom attacked nobody. This is a break from the past, where Shays has been tolerant of all kinds of wrongdoing:
“Now I’ve seen what happened in Abu Ghraib, and Abu Ghraib was not torture,” Shays said at a debate Wednesday. “It was outrageous, outrageous involvement of National Guard troops from (Maryland) who were involved in a sex ring and they took pictures of soldiers who were naked,” added Shays. “And they did other things that were just outrageous. But it wasn’t torture.” [AP]
Perhaps Shays was just eager to protect American troops from vicious attacks. Surely he’d be more incensed about sexual abuse of Americans.
The congressional sex scandal threatening House Speaker Dennis Hastert got even nastier yesterday, as Republican Rep. Chris Shays of Connecticut delivered a searing indictment of Sen. Ted Kennedy’s fateful actions at Chappaquiddick.
“I know the speaker didn’t go over a bridge and leave a young person in the water and then have a press conference the next day,” Shays fumed.
“Dennis Hastert didn’t kill anybody,” he told the Hartford Courant.
Shays slammed Kennedy after Shays’ Democratic opponent, Westport Selectwoman Diane Farrell, called on Hastert to resign because of his handling of Rep. Mark Foley’s seduction attempts on boys. Kennedy made a campaign appearance with Farrell last week. [NY Post]
Hmm, guess not.
Revolver could continue on for ages. Signatory Francis Fukuyama’s vision of The End of History provided the framework for the Iraq War and three decades of disastrous neoconservative interventions dressed up as campaigns to promote “democracy.” Eric Edelman agitated for the U.S. to impose sanctions on Turkey, because America evidently doesn’t have enough enemies and should punish its nominal allies. Tom Daschle, Dick Gephardt, and other lawmakers on the list spent years providing the votes for the globalist agenda of endless wars coupled with zero border security at home.
In a sane country, the signatories of this letter would be the ones getting investigated, or at least exiled from public life before they could utterly destroy the land they rule. Instead, they’re making a bid to render dissent against their corrupt, dysfunctional, evil, and illegitimate regime a criminal offense.
Just another day in the Globalist American Empire.