A Bureaucrat's Guide to the Durham Report - Part 2.02
That's not my job and in any case it's above my pay grade
Part 1 of the series is here
Part 2.01 of the series is here
Introduction
“[FBI CHS Handler] Helson further stated, in sum, that the fact Danchenko comes off as a Russian spy is describing half the population of Washington, D.C.” [134]
I apologize for the delay but I just got done using some of my 300 days of leave for a bureaucation. I’ll be returning to normal posting cadence and try to include some bonus articles.
During my time away, I decided the best way to return would be through an article on the forces that make bureaucrat or cog behavior predictable for the Machine behind the Trump Operation. As you might imagine, many of these forces can be reduced to the powerful bureauinstinct to CYA (perhaps we could call it the Will to Cover), but there are other important forces at work.
We saw in part 1 how the Machine used network effects and legitimacy to manufacture and spread defamatory information on Trump, which information was then used to predicate intrusive government surveillance of, and meddling with, Trump’s campaign.
In part 2.01, we saw how conspirators in the machine pulled strings and manipulated cog behavior to comply with the Operation through favoritism toward Clinton in the application of investigative policies, farming investigation predicates from confidential sources (including the likely intentional infiltration of Trump’s campaign by career confidential sources or CHSs), applying direct managerial pressure to cogs, withholding information from cogs, and denying cog access to critical witnesses.
In the previous posts I defined cogs as lower-level government and private sector individuals who consciously and unconsciously implement the conspiracy. I say consciously here because while cogs are almost never involved in the higher-level conspiratorial decision-making, they may intuit the existence of some kind of conspiracy and choose to go along with it for a variety of reasons.
Cogs are often quite intelligent and therefore skeptical when enlisted in a conspiracy, and we’ll cover such skepticism throughout this article. Conspirators use a variety of strategies to get cogs to disregard their better judgment and deviate from standard operating procedure in service to a conspiracy.
Perhaps the most important over-arching strategy for the conspirators is, once again, the exploitation of legitimacy. The legitimacy in this case takes multiple forms but stems from a core, over-arching two-pronged public perception of professional competency in the realm of civil service and omnipotence in the so-called Intelligence Community.
Popular media are largely responsible for sustaining the two-pronged source of legitimacy, in the first prong through entertainment media like The West Wing and sundry shows about law enforcement and attorney competency, and in the second through a miasma of intelligence community propaganda, one kind of which I surveyed in my reviews of Netflix astroturf about Black CIA Man. In that article, I wrote that a less sophisticated consumer of media about the deep state
might believe that they’re powerless to implement their will, that they inhabit a world governed by fate where at any moment they could be the subject of divine grace and get plucked from obscurity … and wake up with an implant in their ear, ready to be whisked along on an adventure as an agent of the CIA.
Political dissidents on the left and right share responsibility for sustaining the second prong of legitimacy with entertainment media, because they help maintain a political theology of an infallible Them or Intelligence Omnipotence, which, like the God of some ancient formal religion, always knows and intends what has transpired, especially when what has transpired conflicts with the values and principles laid down in previous written explanations of the God’s will. For example, Whitney Webb, a journalist focused upon exposing deep state conspiracies, has been adamant that the U.S.’s disastrous engagement with and withdrawal from Afghanistan is actually a big win for the CIA.
Journalistic and op-ed press coverage bolsters these conceptions through putatively neutral reporting and analysis that invariably promotes the impression of first prong competency and second prong omnipotence.
Collectively, these forces in the media and politics create a sort of Miasma of Legitimacy upon which cogs draw to find missing premises in justifications handed down to them by conspirators to encourage them to continue pursuing conspiratorial ends. What this means is that cogs often either assume that someone above them, sometimes operating in Hollywood-contrived shadows and antechambers of power, has the complete set of facts and knows what’s best and that the cog should therefore go through with the questionable operation. Less optimistic cogs can still be influenced into compliance in a similar manner. Such cogs are often afraid of a hidden power capable of going beyond legal and illegal at any moment, intervening in their world like a miracle-performing God and punishing or rewarding them.
In practice, this compels cogs to ignore their better judgment and instincts and adopt fallacious reasoning patterns. As Durham explains:
[t]hroughout the duration of Crossfire Hurricane, facts and circumstances that were inconsistent with the premise that Trump and/or persons associated with the Trump campaign were involved in a collusive or conspiratorial relationship with the Russian government were ignored or simply assessed away.
But the two-pronged legitimacy doesn’t work on all cogs, many of whom are seasoned, cynical operators themselves, and therefore understand bureaucratic and human nature. For these cogs, a variety of other incentives exist to comply with otherwise unusual or deranged instructions from conspirators. Many of these surround the Will to Cover, but other more positive incentives exist, like career advancement. The revolving door between cable news media and likely Operation conspirators like John Brennan is an obvious example.
As a salutary side-effect of the variety of incentives for compliance, investigations of conspiracies like the Durham Report often reveal myriad conflicting motives and rationales among core cogs within the Operation itself, creating reasonable doubt as to whether an intentional conspiracy was at work.
Now, assuming that a conspirator knows these things, how would they proceed in orchestrating an Operation? Below I’ll survey some examples from the Durham Report.