CNN: Deep State Bureaucrats Threaten To Sell State Secrets If Trump Isn’t Nice To Them
Brace yourself as the propaganda press tries to stop President Donald Trump from culling corruption from the deep state. Expect “news” stories screaming about ordinary budget and staff cuts that would happen in any bloated private business but under Trump will be described as unfair or even dangerous.
Take, for example, the Feb. 24 number from CNN, “How Trump’s government-cutting moves risk exposing the CIA’s secrets.” The short report required four CNN writers, Katie Bo Lillis (who was involved in a story that led to a defamation trial in which a jury found that CNN was literally fake news), Phil Mattingly, Natasha Bertrand, and Zachary Cohen.
Exposing CIA secrets? That sounds pretty dangerous. Just how much danger are we in?
In the piece, CNN warned, “As the CIA weighs staff cuts, current and former intelligence officials say that mass firings could offer a rich recruitment opportunity for foreign intelligence services — like China or Russia — who may seek to exploit financially vulnerable or resentful former employees.”
The piece goes on.
“… on the CIA’s 7th floor — home to top leadership — some officers are also quietly discussing how mass firings and the buyouts already offered to staff risk creating a group of disgruntled former employees who might be motivated to take what they know to a foreign intelligence service.” (So “quietly,” apparently, that CNN could hear them, as Federalist Editor-in-Chief Mollie Hemingway pointed out.)
Is that a threat from the CIA? Is CNN reporting that Trump should keep everyone employed because, if he doesn’t, former CIA agents will spill U.S. secrets to our enemies? Apparently so.
But if that’s the case, these are exactly the employees who should be fired. Those with too little integrity to exit with grace should not be employed in jobs with access to sensitive information. The CIA employees CNN describes should not be trusted with any more secrets.
Within the same piece, CNN ridiculously makes it sound as if valued, model intelligence employees will get the axe — and that those same employees have loose lips and are ripe for the picking. Which is it, CNN?
The media want you to be worried because they are worried. If Trump cleans house, it will destroy their business model. CNN and other propagandists have exploited unethical leaking of deep state sources, treating their whispers as gospel, and amplifying their aims through high-profile “news” stories.
If Trump fires their sources, it will be harder for the media to collude with the intelligence community to craft propaganda to sell to the public. The connection between CNN and the deep state has been too cozy for too long.
As Hemingway has detailed, the CIA and other intelligence agencies leaked information to CNN to advance the Russia collusion hoax. Intelligence agency personnel gave CNN and other outlets bogus news scoops, and they ran with them.
In 2017, a piece was published by four CNN reporters, Evan Perez, Jim Sciutto, Jake Tapper, and Carl Bernstein. The piece falsely pushed the narrative that Russian operatives had “compromising personal and financial information” on Trump. Hemingway called out these intelligence leaks right away.
Top reporters are sometimes approached by high-level officials with incredible story pitches. The wise reporter independently vets the information and asks himself, ‘Why is this person or agency pitching this story to me? What is his motivation?’ Using the media as a tool is a tired trick of politicians in large and small media markets, and it’s worth asking whether the CIA is using CNN as a (rather willing) tool in this case.
Let’s take a closer look at this latest CNN piece by dissecting the following sentence: “The administration’s efforts to cut the workforce and audit spending at the CIA and elsewhere threaten to jeopardize some of the government’s most sensitive work, current and former US officials familiar with internal deliberations say.”
Everything up to the word “elsewhere” is true. The Trump administration is trimming the workforce and spending. Everything after that is anonymously sourced speculation, commonly known as propaganda.
The phrase “threaten to jeopardize some of the government’s most sensitive work,” is a fantasy — or a not-so-subtle threat from intelligence community personnel whose partisan loyalties outweigh their love of country. It has not happened yet, but it is packaged here as news. The source of this speculation? “Current and former US officials familiar with internal deliberations.” Four CNN reporters can barely find a quotable source. The four reporters attributed information in their propaganda piece to sources 18 times, only once offering a name. Here is a look at every source referenced in the story, in the order they appear:
“a source familiar with the matter told CNN”
“current and former US officials familiar with internal deliberations say”
“a senior career Treasury Department official”
“some officers”
“sources familiar with the matter said”
“former intelligence officials said”
“said one former CIA officer, speaking hypothetically”
“one of these people said”
“one US official said”
“this person said”
“former officials noted”
“current and former officials familiar with the episode said”
“the first official said”
“Another US official sympathetic to Trump’s efforts noted”
“some current and former officials said”
“one source familiar with the matter told CNN”
“former Treasury officials said”
“Joseph Gioeli, the Fiscal Service’s Deputy Commissioner for Transformation and Modernization”
If CNN has any desire to salvage what remains of its imploding credibility, it would do well to steer clear of stories built on anonymous sources and CIA threats that smack of treason. But at least in this report, one of CNN’s anonymous sources got it right: “The kind of person who might do such a thing [sell U.S. secrets to a foreign power] is precisely the type the agency should be removing from its ranks.”
Beth Brelje is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. She is an award-winning investigative journalist with decades of media experience.
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