The United States Intelligence Community has been infiltrated with treasonous, criminals at the highest levels who have gotten away with their crimes for so long they believe they are untouchable. They call themselves the “Permanent Government,” the “Deep State,” or “Alt-Gov.” because they are not elected and are seldom replaced. After the recent criminal leaks of classified information to their lapdog Ctrl-Left news reporters, the NSA and the CIA have been placed on notice by President Trump that he will find and destroy the leakers and their network of treasonous enemy spies.

Keep this in mind, however: the NSA and the CIA are only two of 17 intelligence outfits in what is called the U.S. Intelligence Community.  Some of the others are as large and well funded.

President Trump vowed today to smoke out those responsible for leaking the “illegal classified” information that has fueled a string of false, exaggerated news reports on his administration, promising the criminal spies they “will be caught!”

“Leaking, and even illegal classified leaking, has been a big problem in Washington for years. Failing @nytimes (and others) must apologize!” Trump tweeted.

He added: “The spotlight has finally been put on the low-life leakers! They will be caught!” Which garnered the approval of over 80 thousand people in just a few hours.

The new focus on tracking down the enemies of the State who are attacking President Trumps’ core team, follows National Security Adviser Michael Flynn’s resignation after exaggerated reports from the criminals’ useful idiot reporters who play an integral part in the war against Donald Trump. Flynn’s alleged miscommunication was divulged by enemy spies in the US Intelligence Community.

While Trump apparently sought Flynn’s resignation for lying to Vice President Pence, the episode swiftly rekindled the president’s discord with the intelligence community, because their agents leaked the classified information to their lap-dog liberal reporters. The Wall Street Journal also reported that these same traitorous criminals in the intelligence community are holding back top secret information from Trump, because they don’t trust him.

Trump’s tweets Thursday repeated his comments a day earlier during his joint press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. When he was asked about Flynn’s resignation, Trump said the situation was “unfair” and emphasized that “documents and papers” were “illegally – I stress that –illegally leaked.”

“Intelligence, papers are being leaked,” Trump said. “It’s a criminal action and it’s been going on for a long time before me. But now it’s really going on.”

The flood of leaks from the intelligence community creating a wide array of fake news stories has given credibility to rumors of a “deep state coup,” in which members of the Deep State where John Kerry is the current president, are actively working to undermine the new US president and his top advisers.

We also need to remember, the intelligence community has a long history of doing this—of attempting to run the country. The Deep State spies leaked information damaging to former presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama when it served their interest, so Donald Trump is no different. The only difference being, the Deep State has lots of “dirt” on the other US presidents so they were easy to control for fear of being destroyed by the Deep State spies. They don’t have that control over Donald Trump, which is one reason why he’s not afraid to smoke them out like weasels in a wood pile and destroy them.

The Extent of the Deep State

The term “Deep State” refers to the complex of bureaucrats, technocrats, and plutocrats that likes things just the way they are and wants to keep them like that—elections be damned.

Some might say that “Deep State” is just a synonym for the “Establishment,” and yet “Deep State” refers to a larger grouping, not just to the stereotypical elite “chattering class.”   We can also observe that a Deep State can be found in just about every country in the world.

Here in America, the Deep State has its own political consciousness, and it aims to survive any change of government with its collective will—and self-interest—fully intact.

Normally, the Deep State is hidden, albeit, at the same time, hiding in plain sight.  That is, while nobody has “Deep State” on his or her business card, the reality of the Deep State is overwhelming: It’s not just the hulking office buildings of the Federal Triangle in downtown DC, it’s also the taxpayer-funded mini-metropolises that have sprouted up in Bethesda, Maryland, Crystal City, Virginia, and a dozen other hubs in and around the I-495 Beltway AKA the “Beltway Bandits.”

A careful taxonomy of the Deep State must begin, of course, with the governmental bureaucracy, which, because of civil-service protections, does not change when one political party or the other takes control of the White House or Congress.  Today, there are about 2.8 million civilian federal employees, as well 1.3 million in the uniformed military.

Yet in citing the number of government employees, we’ve only scratched the surface, because for every “public servant,” there seems to be one or more private-sector operator.  To illustrate this phenomenon, we can take a snapshot of just one federal agency, the Department of Homeland Security.  It’s been estimated that at least 100,000 private contractors work at DHS.

Indeed, the sheer unknowability of the federal contractor empire is a common theme in Beltway journalism.  Hence this headline from March 12, 2015, appearing in Government Executive magazine: “Even CBO Is Stumped on the Size of the Contractor Workforce.” The “CBO,” of course, is the Congressional Budget Office.  That’s right, even the budget agency of Congress can’t figure out the true number—although some would say that lawmakers have never really wanted to know.

These contractors, many of whom are former federal employees, are well compensated.  Here, for example, is a 2013 headline from The Washington Times: “Executive pay balloons for federal contractors.”  The Times identified at least 77 contractors whose revenue came from the federal government and paid their top five executives more than $3 million a year, for an average of $600,000 each.  And where do these big salaries come from?  From big markups, of course.  To cite just one of a  million possible examples, one company sold Apple MacBook Pro computers to Uncle Sam for markups of between $2000 and $4000 each.

So as we can see, the Deep State is much larger, and wealthier, than just the bureaucrats.  Funded by a federal government that will spend more than $4 trillion this year, the Deep State includes all the wheeler-dealers, plus the hired-gun experts, lawyers, think-tankers, foundation executives, and others that have sometimes been dubbed the “New Class.”

And the proof that this New Class is doing well can be found in the Census data, which show that four of the five richest counties in the US are in the DC metro area.

And it’s this luxe life, which has reached its apex under Barack Obama, that finds itself threatened by the drain-the-swamp pledge of Trump.  As The New York Times headlined its so-sad story on November 13, “A Newly Vibrant Washington Fears That Trump Will Drain Its Culture.”

Yet in fact, the Deep State extends well beyond Washington.  In 2011, Suzanne Mettler, a professor at Cornell University, published The Submerged State: How Invisible Government Policies Undermine American Democracy.  Mettler is no conspiracy-theorist; her argument is that federal policies, notably tax deductions and credits, have had the effect of encouraging the growth of government in ways that most people never notice.  Mettler’s work is controversial, insofar as she equates taxes that the government did not collect with actual government spending.  And yet the author has a point, because to the extent that the tax law encourages or discourages behavior, it is, in fact, a kind of government policy.  And the total annual value of these tax incentives has been estimated at nearly $1 trillion.   For better or worse, that’s a lot of money for a lot of people.

And then there’s the cost of regulation.  Annual federal regulatory compliance costs—that is, the expense of dealing with all that red tape—are estimated to total at least $2 trillion.  And yet we must add this important note: For all the millions of businesses and individuals who must pay the cost of regulation, there are plenty of others who benefit, at least in the short run, from that regulation.   And these perverse beneficiaries, we can further observe, are more likely be acutely aware of how their bread is buttered—here’s looking at you, solar-power industry!—and will thus be all more determined to defend the status quo.

And while we’re at it, in our Deep State examination, let’s not forget the whole huge cluster of federal loans and loan guarantees.  Once again, nobody really knows how much all that costs, but estimates range from  hundreds of billions (annually) to many trillions(cumulatively).

Not surprisingly, the beneficiaries of all this federal easy money tend to stay quiet about their winnings, but some are vocal. Here, for example, is a 2015 headline from The Los Angeles Times; “Elon Musk defends $4.9 billion in government money for his companies.”

Of course, in our survey of the dimensions of the Deep State, we haven’t even touched on state and local government; their expenditures, in 2012, were estimated to total $2.59 trillion.  Moreover, that dollar total doesn’t include the sort of the “submerged” expenditures that Mettler and others have described.