President Donald Trump has been plagued with deep state treachery since he assumed his role in the Oval Office, but that isn’t stopping him from doing their dirty work anyway. Trump is working to bury a scandalous Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) torture report that goes into serious detail about the agency’s record of illegal and immoral behavior.
Trump is moving at the behest of Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC), who stands at the helm of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), former intelligence committee chair, had previously ordered the report to be distributed to multiple agencies of the executive branch. She had hoped that the document would eventually be released to the public under the Freedom of Information Act, but Burr has other plans.
“I have directed my staff to retrieve copies of the Congressional study that remain with the Executive Branch agencies and, as the Committee does with all classified and compartmented information, will enact the necessary measures to protect the sensitive sources and methods contained within the report,” Burr said in a statement released to Reuters.
Trump is complying with Burr’s request, and moving quickly to return as many copies of the report as possible. The full report comes out to a stunning 6,700 pages and contains analysis believed to be extremely damning to CIA officials. It is unclear why Trump is so eager to do the bidding of his apparent deep state rivals. Prominent Democrats are not pleased by the news.
“No senator, chairman or not, has the authority to erase history. I believe that is the intent of the chairman in this case,” Feinstein said.
Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) was Feinstein’s successor as the highest ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee. He said he was “disappointed” with Burr’s decision in a Twitter post this afternoon and urged for the report to “be preserved so we can learn from past mistakes & ensure that abuses are never repeated.”
Although the public does not yet know the full contents of the report, a declassified executive summary was released to the public. The summary indicated that CIA’s enhanced interrogation program did not foil one single terror attack, and the agency had misrepresented the effectiveness of their interrogation policies to lawmakers. The American Civil Liberties Union is still working to get the report declassified in the courts, but recent actions by the Trump administration have made the transparency process substantially more difficult.
I appreciate your calling attention to this, which I had missed, but
“It is unclear why Trump is so eager to do the bidding of his apparent deep state rivals.”
I think it is because they aren’t rivals. President Trump IS the deep state. I and some others tried pointing this out during the campaign but nobody much cared because Clinton was worse.