It’s become a trope on the Right, as it’s been on the Left for decades, that Washington is home to a nefarious deep state. A secret state within a state that illegally manipulates events and serves its own secret needs, not those of the people. But what if the deep state is mostly just incompetent?
That’s the central theme of the Coen brothers’ hilarious 2008 film Burn After Reading. The movie depicts our spy agencies as nests of scheming bureaucrats who have conspiratorial intentions. Except that they’re just too inept to pull off their schemes. Based on my own experience, I can confirm that, on its bad days, our intelligence community resembles nothing so much as an enormously expensive and secretive Department of Motor Vehicles.
Certainly, President Joe Biden’s deep state has had a rough start to the new year.
First, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was finally released from the hospital after an extended stay due to complications from surgery last month. Austin went into intensive care on New Year’s Day under the cloak of secrecy. The White House and Austin’s staff weren’t informed of his condition for several days. It took over a week for the public to be informed that Austin was seriously ill or had had surgery. Austin’s unprecedented disappearing act met with bipartisan criticism in Congress, but the president insists the former U.S. Army general won’t be fired or even reprimanded. This bizarre incident also revealed that the commander in chief wasn’t in regular contact with his Pentagon boss, even as wars rage in Ukraine, the Red Sea, and Gaza while tensions rise with Iran, China, and North Korea.
Consider our conflict with the Yemen-based Houthi rebels. They have taken their jihad to the Red Sea in support of Palestinians fighting Israel. Most of their modern military gear, including anti-ship missiles, comes from Iran, and the group serves as a proxy for Tehran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Houthi attacks have caused major pain for global shipping, and the U.S. military has responded with its own strikes. This conflict seems unlikely to be resolved anytime soon.
Team Biden took its time to respond to Houthi attacks on civilian shipping. In its first month in office, it actually removed the Houthis from the State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations. This week, after much foot-dragging, the Biden administration relisted the Houthis as a specially designated global terrorist group, which brings sanctions but less than came with the FTO listing the White House revoked. Why does Team Biden have a soft spot for the Houthis in the first place? Is it because their Iran experts, who are the same as former President Barack Obama’s, can charitably be termed very Iran-friendly?
The bigger scandal is that the U.S. Navy is unable to quash the Houthis due to a lack of ships. Under Biden, our naval readiness has dwindled significantly, and our surface fleet’s requirement for 70 deployable ships at any time falls short by at least one-quarter. We simply can’t keep enough ships on station to meet global requirements. The Biden administration’s effort to entice partners to join us in the fight against the Houthis, termed Operation Prosperity Guardian by the Pentagon, has been met with more shrugs than raised hands, even from longtime allies.
Favoring talk over action is a Biden hallmark. In a standard move in 2022, Biden signed a congressional mandate for an independent Commission on the Future of the Navy, staffed by eight bipartisan experts. This was intended especially to break the intractable logjam of Navy shipbuilding and maintenance. By law, the commission had to be established no later than 90 days after signing. To this day, the commission has never met, and only five of its eight members have even been appointed. Its mandate will expire on July 1 of this year, and it seems likely the commission will never meet, much less make any report. Pentagon insiders tell me the White House simply wants this matter to die quietly before the election.
Disregarding congressional mandates on big matters is a trademark Biden deep state ploy. Last summer, after being ordered by Congress to tell the public what the intelligence community knows about the origins of COVID-19, our spies released a short, unclassified study that really came to no conclusions about what happened in Wuhan, although it went easy on Beijing by stating, “China’s officials probably did not have foreknowledge that SARS-CoV-2 existed before [Wuhan] researchers isolated it after public recognition of the virus in the general population.” Angry Republicans in Congress demanded full answers, not analytical obfuscation, from Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, another Obama retread. As usual, their request was simply ignored.
Although Haines and other spy bosses have insisted that hard intelligence is lacking here, evidence continues to mount that COVID-19 resulted from a Chinese lab leak. This week brings the stunning news that a Chinese scientist at the end of 2019 submitted the genetic sequencing for SARS-CoV-2 to a National Institutes of Health database two weeks before Beijing released it. At a minimum, this blows apart the Chinese timeline of how the pandemic spread while raising urgent questions about what really happened. Since this was an unclassified document, did our intelligence community somehow not know this — or did it cover it up?
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Speaking of cover-ups, this week also brought the revelation, courtesy of the Department of Justice, that Hunter Biden’s notorious waylaid laptop, with its evidence of shady foreign dealings and generic debauchery, was real and that the FBI knew this several years ago. Myriad excuses proffered by Democrats and their media and Big Tech allies to censor any discussion of the laptop before the 2020 election — It’s fake! It’s a plant! It’s Russian disinformation! — were all lies, and the deep state knew it then.
This raises uncomfortable questions about the motivations of the 51 intelligence community retired bigwigs who, shortly before the election, publicly denounced reporting on the laptop as dangerous since the matter “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation,” thereby providing cover for blatant media censorship. Ever since, many Republicans have viewed the deep state with suspicion and hostility. This week’s distressing events demonstrate why they should.
John R. Schindler served with the National Security Agency as a senior intelligence analyst and counterintelligence officer.