This essay concerns two matters: Trump’s actions with respect to the FBI establishment and the Department of Justice, and the dire situation in Ukraine. Both matters concern the problem of the administrative and deep state apparatuses, which exist and operate beyond the Constitution and democratic norms, and have been heretofore unaccountable to the public interest.
But it’s a new day, and accountability has arrived in the figure of Donald Trump and an army of patriots at his back. Learning lessons from his first term as president, in which he and his allies failed to purge the Executive Branch of administrative and deep state actors determined to undermine the populist movement and its campaign to restore constitutional integrity and democratic-republic principle to the nation, Trump is this time around moving quickly and decisively to eliminate from government the globalists engaged in the managed decline of the American Republic.
For the first matter, the matter of the FBI, I base the following in part on a reporting by several major corporate news outlets (ABC, CBS, The New York Times, etc.). According to these sources, the Justice Department has instructed Edward Martin, the Acting US Attorney in Washington DC, to dismiss prosecutors involved in investigating the January 6 Capitol riot. The order is detailed in a memo from January 31, written by Acting Attorney General James McHenry. The memo has been confirmed by multiple sources.
Crucially, in a scheme to preserve the deep state project, some of the prosecutors who had initially been hired temporarily to work on the January 6 investigation were made permanent employees before the presidential transition. The memo stated that their continued employment was interfering with the ability to execute the agenda of President Trump’s administration.
In a separate directive, Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove has mandated a review of all FBI agents who were involved in the Capitol “insurrection” investigation. The memo states that these dismissals are to take effect immediately, listing specific individuals whose employment will be terminated.
Additionally, Bove has ordered the FBI’s acting director, scheduled to be replaced by Trump nominee Kash Patel, should he be confirmed by the Senate (which may call him back for further testimony considering these developments), to compile a list of current and former agents involved in the investigation to assess whether further personnel actions are needed. This includes a directive for the firing of eight high-ranking FBI executives. The action is expected by this Monday. The head of the Washington DC Field Office is also scheduled to be removed by February 10. In his memo, Bove argued that some of these FBI personnel could not be trusted to support the implementation of the President’s agenda and ordered further review of those involved in cases related to several sensitive issues.
This action follows a previous one in which more than a dozen federal prosecutors from the team that charged former President Trump in the documents case were also dismissed, with the Justice Department expressing doubts about their ability to carry out Trump’s agenda.
The purge of Justice Department and FBI employees is aimed at addressing politicization and weaponization of these agencies, and it extends beyond senior FBI officials; officials in charge of national security, cyber, and criminal investigations have also been targeted for forced resignations or retirements. The full scale of the personnel changes is still unfolding, but it promises to be deep and sweeping.
Predictably there has been pushback, for example, from the FBI Agents Association, which warns that such actions could weaken the bureau’s ability to protect national security. But this is cover for Establishment desire to preserve the deep state apparatus for purposes of shaping state action beyond democratic accountability and executive purview. If the public knew about the history of the FBI and its decades-long war on the American People, then Trump’s actions would not be seen as so controversial, at least not to their minds, and his speedy action in purging these elements from government will hopefully function to draw public attention to this history.
As for the second matter, this one involving the actions of deep state actors internationally, as many readers will already know, over the past fifteen years Ukraine has been marked by shifting alliances, protests, revolutions, and war. In 2010, pro-Russian Viktor Yanukovych won the presidency. His decision in 2013 to abandon the European Union (EU) trade deal in favor of closer ties with Russia sparked the Euromaidan protests. By early 2014, mass demonstrations led to Yanukovych fleeing the country, and a pro-Western government took power with oligarch Petro Poroshenko at its head. Poroshenko served as President of Ukraine from 2014 to 2019, his presidency marked by a strong pro-European and pro-NATO stance. Poroshenko’s tenure was marked by corruption and governance problems, which contributed to his defeat in the 2019 election, where Volodymyr Zelensky won in a landslide on promises of anti-corruption measures and reform.
It was during the Poroshenko regime that the Biden family entangled itself in the internal affairs of Ukraine running a global money laundering scheme. Knowledge of this scheme, and questions about a Democratic National Committee (DNC) server, is what led to President Trump telephoning Zelensky, a phone call that provided an opportunity for Democrats to impeach the president (which occurred on July 25, 2019), a charge of which he was acquitted in the Senate.
I want to share the relevant parts of the phone call because in hindsight those who are honest with themselves given everything they could now know should see Trump’s noble intent in getting to the bottom of schemes by the deep state to undermine his presidency and those enriching the Biden family, the head of which would likely be Trump’s opponent in the 2020 election. As it turned out, Biden was the establishment pick to assume the presidency, installed in the wake of the release of a weaponized coronavirus, manufacturing pandemic conditions used to rig the 2020 election, as well as a color revolution, which saw widespread rioting across American cities, violence driven by propaganda manufacturing false mass perception of systemic racial injustice.
“I would like you to do us a favor,” Trump began early into the phone call with Zelensky, “because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it.” It was clear that this would be the intent of his phone call (and not to congratulate Zelensky on his recent victory). Trump continued: “I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say CrowdStrike [a cybersecurity company]… I guess you have one of your wealthy people… The server, they say Ukraine has it. There are a lot of things that went on, the whole situation. I think you’re surrounding yourself with some of the same people. I would like to have the Attorney General call you or your people and I would like you to get to the bottom of it. As you saw yesterday that whole nonsense ended with a very poor performance by a man named Robert Mueller, an incompetent performance, but they say a lot of it started with Ukraine. Whatever you can do, it’s very important that you do it if that’s possible.” After Zelensky said, in part, “I will personally tell you that one of my assistants spoke with Mr. Giuliani just recently and we are hoping very much that Mr. Giuliani will be able to travel to Ukraine and we will meet once he comes to Ukraine,” Trump responded, “Good because I heard you had a prosecutor who was very good and he was shut down and that’s really unfair.”
Before continuing with the transcript, some context is necessary. Rudolph Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City, and a close Trump ally, was a central figure in the Hunter Biden laptop scandal. Giuliani had copies of a hard drive belonging to Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s youngest son.
Hunter Biden dropped off a liquid-damaged laptop at a Delaware computer repair shop in April 2019 and never returned to retrieve the device, which then became the property of the shop. With a subpoena in hand issued by a Wilmington grand jury (the US attorney’s office in Wilmington had been investigating Hunter Biden about lobbying and financial matters since at least 2018), the FBI took possession of it from the shop in December of 2019. The FBI verified that the laptop was authentic before the year was out.
A year later, in October 2020, Biden and then-Secretary of State Anthony Blinken arranged for an open letter to be composed by several dozen former high-ranking intelligence officers to misdirect the public by claiming that there was a high probability that it was Russian disinformation aimed at interfering with the 2020 election. In other words, evidence that would have likely harmed Establishment aspiration to install Biden as president was used in a scheme to undermine Trump’s reelection bid. Among many other things, this is precisely why Trump is moving so aggressively to purge the government of deep state actors—and why the Establishment was so desperate to prevent Trump from regaining the White House in 2024.
As the phone call suggests, Giuliani may have already been in possession of the laptop’s contents. With all this in mind, let’s continue with the transcript of the Trump-Zelensky phone call. Trump says, “I will ask him to call you along with the Attorney General. Rudy very much knows what’s happening and he is a very capable guy. If you could speak to him that would be great.” Trump then pivots to the Biden family: “There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution, and a lot of people want to find out about that, so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it… It sounds horrible to me.”
Trump is referring here to video of the Joe Biden admitting before a group at the Council on Foreign Relations that, as then-Vice-President (under Obama), he threatened to withhold military aid to Ukraine unless they fired a prosecutor that was looking into the Ukrainian natural gas company Burisma Holdings—a company on which his son Hunter had accepted a board seat. Biden bragged, “I said, you’re not getting the billion. I’m going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money. Well, son of a bitch. He got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time.” This is why Biden gave his son Hunter a full and unconditional pardon (and soon after pardoned several close family members) for any federal crimes he may have committed during the period the pardon covered. Without this context one might wonder why the pardon so specifically covers the period from January 1, 2014, through December 1, 2024. No need to wonder now: that’s the period in which Hunter operated as bagman for the Biden crime family.
Apparently aware of all this, Zelensky responded, “I wanted to tell you about the prosecutor. First of all, I understand and I’m knowledgeable about the situation. Since we have won the absolute majority in our Parliament, the next prosecutor general will be 100% my person, my candidate, who will be approved, by the parliament and will start as a new prosecutor in September. He or she will look into the situation, specifically to the company that you mentioned in this issue.” (Was Zelensky talking about CrowdStrike or Burisma?) (For more on this, see my December 2019 essay The Conspiracy to Overthrow an American President and the follow up I Told You Joe Biden is Corrupt and Compromised.)
With this knowledge in hand, let’s return to the Ukraine-Russia conflict and recall that Russia annexed Crimea in March 2014 following Ukraine’s Euromaidan Revolution and the ousting of pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych. On March 16, 2014, a referendum was held in which over 90 percent of Crimean voters, most of the population ethnically Russian with cultural and linguistic ties to Russia, supported joining Russia. On March 18, 2014, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a treaty formally incorporating Crimea into Russia. Predictably, the annexation of Crimea was widely condemned by Ukraine and the West, with Western countries imposing sanctions on Russia.
At the same time Russia annexed Crimea, it backed separatists in Eastern Ukraine, also ethnically Russian, with extended and immediate families on both sides of the borders. The pro-Russian separatists were primarily active in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, collectively known as the Donbas. In April 2014, following Russia’s annexation of Crimea, armed separatists seized government buildings and declared the formation of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) and Luhansk People’s Republic (LPR). This led to a prolonged conflict with Ukrainian forces. Despite the 2019 election of Zelensky, who promised peace and reform, tensions escalated into a full-scale Russian invasion in 2022. In February 2022, just before launching its full-scale invasion, Russia officially recognized the DPR and LPR as independent states. Later that year, Moscow annexed Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson.
The Euromaidan protests are often described as a color revolution. Color revolutions refer to a series of purportedly mostly nonviolent, pro-democracy uprisings in post-Soviet states (for examples, Georgia’s Rose Revolution in 2003 and Ukraine’s own Orange Revolution in 2004). Euromaidan shared characteristics with these movements—mass protests, demands for democratic reforms, and opposition to a pro-Russian government. However, Euromaidan was distinct due to its violent escalation, as well as the direct role of external actors. Russia and pro-Russian voices dismiss it as a Western-backed coup. The evidence supports the Russian narrative.
As I discuss in my essay penned at the outbreak of the conflict (History and Sides-Taking in the Russo-Ukrainian War), the CIA played a large a role in the Ukraine conflict. The US intelligence agency provided covert support to Ukrainian forces and opposition groups even before the annexation of Crimea. In that essay, I provide evidence and analysis that the CIA’s involvement in training Ukrainian security forces, particularly after Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and the outbreak of the conflict in the Donbas region. This support included not just advising on strategies to counter Russian-backed separatists and intelligence sharing, but military aid, and in some instances active involvement in aggression, often in association with neo-Nazis and other far-right elements.
To be sure, the agency’s role in this and other matters around the world are veiled in secrecy, and while apologists will argue that there is little concrete evidence to fully confirm or deny the extent of the CIA’s actions in Ukraine, the history of the CIA and the ongoing resistance to transparency, as well as the stated goals of the neoconservative establishment, speak volumes about the design. It reveals remarkable naiveté—and major-league dissembling for those in the know—to believe that the US was not playing a behind-the-scenes role in stoking tensions with Russia to support broader geopolitical goals. Indeed, this is a typical play by the intelligence service. All this is under the cover that US involvement is not a design to wage a proxy war against Russia, but a response to Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea and its ongoing destabilization of Ukraine. The official stance of both the US government and intelligence agencies is reluctance to confirm direct involvement beyond what is publicly disclosed, which is downplayed. Again, one would have to be naïve, ideologically blinkered, or lying to deny the plot.
There are discussions about a UN peacekeeping force in Ukraine, which would likely put US forces on the ground in the crossfire. To be sure, such a mission is at present unlikely, as Russia remains a UN Security Council member. Meanwhile, however, Ukraine’s NATO membership bid has gained strong support from Western allies, especially after Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, an invasion provoked by NATO expansion. Why do I say provoked? During the negotiations over German reunification in 1990–1991, Western officials, including US Secretary of State James Baker, promised Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would move “not one inch eastward” (my view then was that NATO should be dismantled, its function negated by the fall of the Soviet Union). Citing these negotiations, Russia has long held that NATO’s expansion into former Soviet-aligned states (Poland, the Baltic states, and later Ukraine and Georgia’s aspirations) broke that promise and posed a security threat to Russia and its allies—which obviously it has. (See The US is Not Provoking Russia—And Other Tall Tales. See also The US and NATO in the Balkans.)
Western leaders maintain that NATO’s open-door policy allows countries to freely choose their alliances, and that Russia was never given a formal guarantee limiting NATO’s growth. Convenient, no? NATO has stopped short of immediate membership, at least for now. However, Ukraine’s EU accession is progressing more tangibly, with candidate status granted in 2022 and ongoing reforms aimed at meeting EU standards. Ukraine’s alignment with the West continues to deepen, fueling geopolitical tensions with Russia. Trump could save a lot of lives by withdrawing US and NATO assistance to Ukraine and forcing the Zelensky government to the table for peace negotiations and territorial reappraisal. But then the military-industrial complex (MIC) would lose a lot of money.
Indeed, one of the barriers to accomplishing these ends are the neoconservatives, whom I have been writing about for two decades at this point (see War Hawks and the Ugly American: The Origins of Bush’s Middle East Policy). Neoconservatism is a political movement advocating a strong US foreign policy promoting “democracy,” a euphemism for transnational corporate power, and expanding the scope of military power (feeding trillions of dollars to the MIC) to achieve those ends. The neoconservatives are largely in favor of Ukraine’s EU and NATO membership and increased Western military support against Russia. They frame the Russia-Ukraine conflict as a frontline struggle between authoritarianism and democratic values, advocating for robust US and allied military aid to ensure Russia’s defeat. The warmongers argue that admitting Ukraine to NATO would deter future Russian aggression, while downplaying the obvious: NATO enlargement risks further and direct escalation with Moscow. One is not overreacting to worry that escalation could lead to World War Three.
The Establishment pitch is that a decisive Ukrainian military victory backed by Western support is essential for long-term European security and the New World Order. This is why war with Russia is a risk worth assuming. Yet they are in fact waging war with Russia via their proxy Ukraine—and the Ukrainian people are suffering terribly as a result. It is not enough to purge the Justice Department and the FBI of those who seek ends detrimental to the interests of the American People; Trump needs to purge the Executive Branch of warmongering neoconservatives and all others who represent a clear and present danger to the American Republic and the world. And he has to act fast; he only has one term in office, and there are actors who are seeking ways to remove him from power before that term expires. I like JD Vance, and I suspect he will be President one day, but I unsure of whether he is as purpose-driven a man as Donald Trump.
freedom and reason 