First things first, it is not my intent to outline the entire history of how we got to this place where the intelligence community now acts as the superseding fourth branch of government.  Such an effort would be exhausting and only take our discussion away from understanding the current dynamic.

History has provided enough warnings from Dwight D Eisenhower (military aspect), to John F Kennedy (CIA aspect), to Richard Nixon (FBI aspect), to all modern versions of warnings and frustrations from HPSCI Devin Nunes and ODNI Ric Grenell.  None of those prior reference points are invalid and all prior documented outlines of historical reference are likely true and accurate.

A historic affirmation is not the point of these outlines, nor is it useful.

Here we pick up the intelligence issues as they manifest after 9/11/01, and highlight how the modern version of the total intelligence apparatus has now metastasized into a fourth branch of government.  If we take the modern construct we can highlight how and why the oversight or “check/balance” in the system has become functionally obsolescent.

Factually, the modern intelligence apparatus uses checks and balances in their favor.  The checks create silos of proprietary information that works around oversight issues. That’s part of the problem.

Ironically the Office of the Director of National Intelligence was created in the aftermath of 9/11/01 expressly to eliminate the silos of information which they felt led to a domestic terrorist attack that could have been prevented.  The ODNI was created specifically upon the recommendation of the 9/11 commission.

The intent was to create a central hub of intelligence information, inside the executive branch, where the CIA, NSA, DoD, DoS, and DIA could deposit their unique intelligence products and a repository would be created so that domestic intelligence operations, like the DOJ and FBI could access them when needed to analyze threats to the U.S.   This, they hoped, would ensure the obvious flags missed in the 9/11 attacks would not be missed again.

The DNI office created a problem for those who operate in the shadows of proprietary information.  You’ll see how it was critical to install a person uniquely skilled in being an idiot, James Clapper, into that willfully blind role while intelligence operatives worked around the office to assemble the Intelligence Branch of government.

♦ The last federal budget that flowed through the traditional budgetary process was signed into law in September of 2007 for fiscal year 2008 by George W Bush.  Every budget since then has been a fragmented process of continuing resolutions and individual spending bills.

Why does this matter?  Because many people think defunding the IC is a solution; it ain’t… not yet.  Worse yet, the corrupt divisions deep inside the U.S. intelligence system can now fund themselves from multinational private sector partnerships (banks, corporations and foreign entities).

♦ When Democrats took over the House of Representatives in January 2007, they took office with a plan.  Nancy Pelosi became Speaker and Democrats controlled the Senate where Harry Reid was Majority Leader.  Barack Obama was a junior senator from Illinois.

Pelosi and Reid intentionally did not advance a budget in 2008 (for fiscal year 2009) because their plan included installing Barack Obama (and all that came with him) with an open checkbook made even more lucrative by a worsening financial crisis and a process called baseline budgeting.  Baseline budgeting means the prior fiscal year budget is accepted as the starting point for the next year budget.  All previous expenditures are baked into the cake within baseline budgeting.

Massive bailouts preceded Obama’s installation due to U.S. economic collapse, and massive bailouts continued after his installation.  This is the ‘never let a crisis go to waste’ aspect.  TARP (Troubled Asset Recovery Program), auto-bailouts (GM), and the massive stimulus spending bill, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA, ie. those shovel ready jobs) were all part of the non budget spending.  The federal reserve assisted with Quantitative Easing (QE1 and QE2) as congress passed various Porkulous spending bills further spending and replacing the formal budget process.

Note: There has never been a budget passed in the normal/traditional process since September of 2007.

♦ While Obama’s radical ‘transformation‘ was triggered across a broad range of government institutions, simultaneously spending on the U.S. military was cut but spending on the intelligence apparatus expanded.   We were all distracted by Obamacare, and the Republican party wanted to keep us that way.  However, in the background there was a process of transformation taking place that included very specific action by Eric Holder and targeted effort toward the newest executive agency the ODNI.

The people behind Obama, those same people now behind Joe Biden, knew from years of strategic planning that ‘radical transformation’ would require control over specific elements inside the U.S. government.  Eric Holder played a key role in his position as U.S. Attorney General in the DOJ.

AG Holder recruited ideologically aligned political operatives who were aware of the larger institutional objectives.  One of those objectives was weaponizing the DOJ-National Security Division (DOJ-NSD) a division inside the DOJ that had no inspector general oversight.  For most people the DOJ-NSD weaponization surfaced with a hindsight awakening of the DOJ-NSD targeting candidate Donald Trump many years later.  However, by then the Holder crew had executed almost eight full years of background work.

♦ The second larger Obama/Holder objective was control over the FBI.  Why was that important?  Because the FBI does the domestic investigative work on anyone who needs or holds a security clearance.  The removal of security clearances could be used as a filter to further build the internal ideological army they were assembling.  Additionally, with new power in the ODNI created as a downstream consequence of the Patriot Act, new protocols for U.S. security clearances were easy to justify.

Carefully selecting fellow ideological travelers was facilitated by this filtration within the security clearance process.  How does that issue later manifest?… just look around at how politicized every intelligence agency has become, specifically including the FBI.

♦ At the exact same time this new background security clearance process was ongoing, again everyone distracted by the fight over Obamacare, inside the Department of State (Secretary Hillary Clinton) a political alignment making room for the next phase was being assembled.  Names like Samantha Power, Susan Rice and Hillary Clinton were familiar on television while Lisa Monaco worked as a legal liaison between the Obama White House and Clinton State Department.

Through the Dept of State (DoS) the intelligence apparatus began working on their first steps to align Big Tech with a larger domestic institutional objective.  Those of you who remember the “Arab Spring”, some say “Islamist Spring”, will remember it was triggered by Barack Obama’s speech in Cairo – his first foreign trip.  The State Department worked with grassroots organizers (mostly Muslim Brotherhood) in Egypt, Syria, Bahrain, Qatar and Libya.  Obama leaned heavily on the organizational network of Turkish President Recep Erdogan for contacts and support.

Why does this aspect matter to us?  Well, you might remember how much effort the Obama administration put into recruiting Facebook and Twitter as resources for the various mid-east rebellions the White House and DoS supported.  This was the point of modern merge between the U.S. intelligence community and Big Tech social media.

In many ways the coordinated political outcomes in Libya and Egypt were the beta test for the coordinated domestic political outcomes we saw in the 2020 U.S. presidential election.  The U.S. intelligence community working with social media platforms and political operatives.

Overlaying all of that background activity was also a new alignment of the Obama-era intelligence apparatus with ideological federal “contractors“.  Where does this contractor activity manifest?  In the FISA Court opinion of Rosemary Collyer who cited the “interagency memorandum of understanding”, or MOU.

Hopefully you can see a small part of how tentacled the system to organize/weaponize the intelligence apparatus was.  None of this was accidental, all of this was by design and the United States Senate was responsible for intentionally allowing most of this to take place.

That’s the 30,000/ft level backdrop history of what was happening as the modern IC was created.  Next we will go into how all these various intelligence networks began working in unison and how they currently control all of the other DC institutions under them; including how they can carve out the President from knowing their activity.

[SEE Also The Declassification Conundrum ONE and TWO.]