Remember the television show, "Highlander," where a group of immortals was covertly observed by a group of mortals called "Watchers?" Steve Bannon has hired an estimated 400 people to be the "eyes and ears" of the White House. Their job is to observe Cabinet members and government agency appointees recently elevated to office by the Trump administration, according to the Washington Post report filed Sunday. Some of the people under scrutiny are not happy with the arrangement and Trump appointees and the people hired to watch them are already clashing. WaPo said this:
The political appointee charged with keeping watch over Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt and his aides has offered unsolicited advice so often that after just four weeks on the job, Pruitt has shut him out of many staff meetings, according to two senior administration officials.
At the Pentagon, they’re privately calling the former Marine officer and fighter pilot who’s supposed to keep his eye on Defense Secretary Jim Mattis “the commissar,” according to a high-ranking defense official with knowledge of the situation. It’s a reference to Soviet-era Communist Party officials who were assigned to military units to ensure their commanders remained loyal.
So who exactly are the White House appointees that mostly irritate and annoy the people that they are assigned to watch? ProPublica published a list of more than 400 hires, providing the most complete accounting so far of who Trump Bannon has brought into the federal government. The candidates reek of eccentricity and that’s putting it mildly:
A Trump campaign aide who argues that Democrats committed “ethnic cleansing” in a plot to “liquidate” the white working class. A former reality show contestant whose study of societal collapse inspired him to invent a bow-and-arrow-cum-survivalist multi-tool. A pair of healthcare industry lobbyists. A lobbyist for defense contractors. An “evangelist” and lobbyist for Palantir, the Silicon Valley company with close ties to intelligence agencies. And a New Hampshire Trump supporter who has only recently graduated from high school.
These are some of the people the Trump administration has hired for positions across the federal government, according to documents received by ProPublica through public-records requests.
The Washington Post isn't mincing any words. It said yesterday, "This shadow government of political appointees with the title of senior White House adviser is embedded at every Cabinet agency, with offices in or just outside the secretary’s suite. The White House has installed at least 16 of the advisers at departments including Energy and Health and Human Services and at some smaller agencies such as NASA, according to records first obtained by ProPublica through a Freedom of Information Act request."
The Department of Agriculture alone has 21 advisors assigned to it, bearing job titles from "Confidential Assistant" to "Deputy White House Liason,” all quietly installed during the transition and after. These political appointees do not have to withstand the scrutiny of Senate confirmation. Therefore, they operate largely in the shadows. Many of the appointees come out of “beachhead teams,” according to Politico, i.e. transition team members who originally were appointed to effect a smooth transition of power between administrations. However, not surprisingly, with Steve Bannon as Chief Strategist and intellectual force behind the throne, the appointees are basically unknown and not answerable to anybody except Steve Bannon. According to ProPublica the White House has declined to publicly reveal their identities, which prompted the website to seek redress through the Freedom of Information act.
The role of Steve Bannon in creating this "shadow government" and moving to consolidate his own power will become clear when you see who the players are and from whence they came. First a short background: Steve Bannon means to "tear it all down," as he stated back in 2014 when he revealed to the Daily Beast that he was a Leninist. Bannon restated his intention to upend world order at the annual meeting of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) February 23, 2017. WaPo reported:
Appearing at a gathering of conservative activists alongside Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, Bannon dismissed the idea that Trump might moderate his positions or seek consensus with political opponents. Rather, he said, the White House is digging in for a long period of conflict to transform Washington and upend the world order.
“If you think they’re going to give you your country back without a fight, you are sadly mistaken,” Bannon said in reference to the media and opposition forces. “Every day, it is going to be a fight.”
Nigel Farage, the British politician who led the successful Brexit movement in the United Kingdom to withdraw from the European Union, said in an interview at the conference that Bannon has the right vision to reorder world powers.
“I’ve never met anyone in my life who has such focus and is so clear in the direction that he intends to go in,” Farage said. “Steve is the person with an international perspective on all of this. He’s got a good feel for the direction that he wants to see across the West.”
So now you know where Steve Bannon is coming from, and where he's going, so the following won't surprise you. ProPublica:
The list [of appointees who watch] we obtained includes obscure campaign staffers, contributors to Breitbart and others who have embraced conspiracy theories, as well as dozens of Washington insiders who could be reasonably characterized as part of the “swamp” Trump pledged to drain.
The list is striking for how many former lobbyists it contains: We found at least 36, spanning industries from health insurance and pharmaceuticals to construction, energy and finance. Many of them lobbied in the same areas that are regulated by the agencies they have now joined.
The same echoes are heard over and over again from this administration. They complain of lobbyists, even of paid rabble rousers rioting; and then what do they do? They hire lobbyists themselves. They complain of the "dishonest media." And what do they do? They hire writers from the the most controversial, no-credibility media outlets.
This story chronicles Bannon's right-wing media hires and more. Here are two examples:
Curtis Ellis was a
columnist for WorldNetDaily, a website best known for its
enthusiastic embrace of the false notion that President Obama was born outside the United States. A column headlined the “The Radical Left’s Ethnic Cleansing of America” won Ellis an
admiring interview with Steve Bannon, now Trump’s top aide. He is a longtime
critic of trade deals such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Ellis was hired Jan. 20 as a special assistant to the secretary at the Labor Department.
Asked about his role in a brief phone interview Tuesday, he said: “Nothing I can tell you.”
Jon Perdue, a self-described guerrilla warfare expert and fellow at a little-known security think tank, wrote a book called “The War of All the People: The Nexus of Latin American Radicalism and Middle Eastern Terrorism.” He is also a onetime contributor to Breitbart.Perdue was featured on CNBC’s reality series “Make Me a Millionaire Inventor” for his invention, the Packbow, which Perdue came up with while
studying “collapsed societies, and what people who lived in those societies came up with to either defend themselves or to survive.” It’s a bow and arrow that
doubles as a compass, tent pole, walking stick, spearfishing rig, and water purification tablet receptacle.
Perdue was hired as a special assistant at the Treasury Department. The agency didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
No one at the Labor Department, Treasury Department, or most certainly the White House is available for comment on these hirings. And none of those hired are going to say exactly what they were hired to do, i.e., safeguard the implementation of Bannon’s agenda, under the guise of making sure that the Cabinet secretaries and agency appointees remain loyal to Trump — an odd proposition in and of itself.
Bear in mind that this team of Bannon's is all over the government now and little or nothing is known about them. This lack of accountability is alarming to say the least.
“If the public and Senate is in the dark about a team created without a Senate confirmation process, no one will be permitted to shed light on who is hopelessly conflicted or who is obviously unqualified — and who is both,” said Jeff Hauser, director of the Revolving Door Project at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
Yes. We, the people, are in the dark and we are living under a shadow government that Steve Bannon created and it's the first day of spring -- spring the renewal of hope, the celebration of life reviving after winter. One thing is certain about this spring; thanks to Steve Bannon the swamp is a lonely place; the denizens of the swamp have all crawled out and gone to work for him.