By Peter Roff, Contributing Editor for Opinion


In case anyone still doubts it, the deep state is real.
That doesn't mean people in public life still don't do dumb things. It also doesn't mean unqualified people don't, either by appointment or through election, get into positions of power and authority. But you don't have to be a raging paranoid to believe it exists, is active, and has more to say about what the government does than we do.
The federal government is unaccountably large. Whatever accountability people think exists is largely a fiction maintained not by the rule of law but by the actions of men. Friday's news that former White House national security adviser Mike Flynn has pleaded guilty to a single count from among the charges brought against him by former FBI Director Robert Mueller and his merry band of cutthroats should make that clear.
Perhaps Flynn did break the law. He's admitted as much – but why? Did he do it because he was guilty (and agreed to say anything) in order to avoid having his life ruined by crushing legal expenses and in order to see his son remain at liberty?
These are fair questions in light of what we know about how the federal system works and how some of the prosecutors working for Mueller operate. They squeeze and squeeze the little fish, offering deals and threatening to indict in order to get the big one on the hook. Mueller thinks he's getting closer and closer to President Donald Trump, but it's not a matter of justice.
There are lots of powerful people in both political parties and around the globe who didn't want Trump to win the election. They were afraid, and rightly so, that he meant it when he said he would pull the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Accords and the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal. Trump is the enemy of the plans they have made at places like Davos and other global gatherings where the left-liberal clique that has run the world since the 1960s gathers to plot out the future course of events.
Trump threatens their interests. It's a matter of simple economics. As so he must be removed, one way or another. Mueller is their tool for doing so, whether the president actually broke the law or not.
It's all right to be sanctimonious about it. There were lots of Republicans who took great pleasure trying to take down President Bill Clinton in a perjury trap, a trap he walked right into by the way. As most everyone now agrees in the post-Weinstein world, Clinton was guilty as charged and should have be punished more than he was. Perhaps now people will start referring to him on second reference as "only the second U.S. president to ever be impeached," just as Richard Nixon is never mentioned without the words impeachment, resignation or Watergate somewhere in the next clause or sentence.

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We're approaching a constitutional crisis that gets at the essence of self-government. Should "We, the people" be in charge of the U.S. government or should that role be ceded even further to the career bureaucrats, members of the Foreign Service, Capitol Hill staff, K Street lobbyists, media stars and others who make up the permanent government? The day of reckoning is coming, something the president could bring about sooner rather than later by – now that he has pleaded guilty to something - pardoning Flynn in order to destroy Mueller's ability to put pressure on him. It would be something to see, watching the special prosecutor and his minions try to move ahead in their effort to construct a semblance of proof the Trump campaign coordinated activities with the Russian government to the detriment of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign without being able to squeeze a key player in this fantastic fantasy. It's not a matter of Flynn not being able to talk as much as it is liberating him to talk about the pressure applied to him by the prosecutor – which, if past behavior is any indication, probably should itself constitute some kind of a crime.
The deep staters are dancing tonight because they believe they are one step closer to their objectives. Again, maybe so, but it would be wrong for the president to go down without fighting, bare knuckles, against the trends that could very well, in the long run, destroy our democratic institutions as designed by the founders and as we've come to know them.