Less than a week after Trump’s wiretapping charge, the new WikiLeaks exposure hit — which detailed the vast abilities and routine practice of the CIA to intercept phone calls and audio- and video-chats, as well as hijack laptops, tablets, smart TVs, smartphones and automobile computers — but almost no who had started out ridiculing Trump let up. Astounding.
Now, Dennis Kucinich brings not irrelevant testimony that should squash the ridicule. “I can vouch for the fact that extracurricular surveillance does occur, regardless of whether it is officially approved. I was wiretapped in 2011 after taking a phone call in my congressional office from a foreign leader.”
The former representative tales the tale, now, for the first time. He is pretty sure that, in contravention of the separation of powers, U.S. “intelligence” recorded a conversation he had with a Son of Qaddafi, and then leaked it to the Washington Post. His confidence seems reasonable. He is not talking out of school. His inference that it was an “American intelligence agency” seems more than sound. Besides, he writes, “which foreign intelligence service conceivably could have been interested in my phone call, had the technology to intercept it, and then wanted to leak it to the newspaper?”
Kucinich makes clear that he is no supporter of our current president. But he is obviously somewhat shocked by the ease with which his fellow leftists have embraced a pro-CIA/NSA/alphabet soup narrative:
I have never gone public with this story, but when I saw the derision with which President Trump’s claims were greeted—and notwithstanding our political differences—I felt I should share my experience.
When the president raised the question of wiretapping on his phones in Trump Tower, he was challenged to prove that such a thing could happen.
It happened to me.
For anyone to mock Trump about his belief in illegal wiretapping? Amazing.
Sure, Trump’s an ass. But he is a smart one, playing us. And on government surveillance, he has certainly stumbled into one of the horrible truths of our Age Of Snowden: the Deep State has gone rogue.
You are not safe from the State.
Not even the President is safe from it. If you think the President is “in charge” and therefore safe, you may want to update your model of “our living constitution.”
All this is the result of a hundred years of laxity, even perversity, allowing the administrative state to grow out of bounds of the written Constitution.
Well, more than a century. The Constitution broke long before Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson and World War I. But it has been made an outright mockery of its old self in our time, and both political parties are responsible. For the administrative state they created and fed — the bureaucracies — constitutes the permanent government.
And it is upon this permanent government that Constitutional government — the legislative, executive and judicial branches — appears as surface phenomenon. A particularly noticeable type of scum.
Constitutional government is well on its way to becoming the epiphenomenon of the real government.
That the President of these United States would unceremoniously blurt this truth out in public is, well, interesting for many reasons. I know that many of his supporters will take this occasion as “proof” that their Savior will clean the swamp that is The Deep State.
I remain skeptical.
twv
Wirkman Comment 