On Friday, CNN’s Chris Cillizza wrote an opinion piece called “Trump’s ‘Deep State’ conspiracy theory just took a big hit,” which came after the Department of Justice declined to pursue criminal charges against former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe, despite him leaking information to CBS news to damage President Trump.
Cillizza claims that Trump tweeting about the Deep State and the lack of prosecution for bad actors helps debunk the “Deep State” conspiracy theory. He backed up his argument by citing this tweet by the President in November of 2019:
“So they now convict Roger Stone of lying and want to jail him for many years to come. Well, what about Crooked Hillary, Comey, Strzok, Page, McCabe, Brennan, Clapper, Shifty Schiff, Ohr & Nellie, Steele & all of the others, including even Mueller himself? Didn’t they lie? A double standard like never seen before in the history of our Country?”
As we just saw with Trump ally Roger Stone’s 9-year conviction for “impeding investigators,” while other bad actors like Hillary Clinton, Lisa Page, Peter Strzok, and many others run free, there seems to be a double standard.
However, Cillizza still claims that “Because no one on Trump’s list has been criminally charged,” that means “the ‘Deep State’ house of cards Trump built to distract from his own problems is collapsing.”
But the very fact that McCabe and others have not been charged or referred for criminal prosecution for leaking classified documents or plotting to take down the President shows the existence of the Deep State. If the Deep State didn’t exist, as Cillizza attempts to assert, wouldn’t there be equal justice under the law, where the FBI and the Justice Department are not sparing their own swamp friends from prosecution?
Locking up people such as former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and now Roger Stone on technicalities just proves that the Washington, DC swamp is as swampy as ever. And yes, there indeed is a Deep State.