By Brian Cates
At his very first press conference as a newly inaugurated President, Trump boasted of having held a secret meeting with intelligence officials, then watching news of that secret briefing appears in the mainstream media. That initial press conference was where Trump first said the words “The leaks are real, the news is fake.”
Trump used that briefing with intelligence officials as an opportunity to prove top officials in the Swamp would eagerly leak details of classified briefings to the news media.
Trump doing this was stunning to Mollie Hemingway, who has several times commented on how quickly this event was memory-holed. It was so rapidly forgotten for this reason: President Trump effectively pulling off even a simple intelligence operation to expose leakers and rubbing the media’s faces in it simply did not fit their deeply ingrained view of the former reality television star as being an idiot.
President-elect Donald Trump speaks during a news conference in the lobby of Trump Tower in New York, Wednesday, Jan. 11, 2017. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
Here’s what Trump said at that press conference:
I’ll tell you what does happen. I have many meetings with intelligence. And every time I meet, people are reading about it. Somebody’s leaking it out. So, there’s — maybe it’s my office.
Maybe in my office, because I have a lot of people, a lot of great people. Maybe it’s them. And what I did is I said I won’t tell anybody. I’m going to have a meeting, and I won’t tell anybody about my meeting with intelligence.
And what happened is I had my meeting. Nobody knew, not even Rhona, my executive assistant for years; she didn’t know—I didn’t tell her. Nobody knew. The meeting was had, the meeting was over, they left. And immediately, the word got out that I had a meeting.
Look carefully at what Trump said there. The only people who knew that briefing took place were Trump and the particular intelligence officials in the room with him. Nobody else knew about it.
So, when the details of that briefing turned up in news media reports, who leaked it was not exactly a mystery to Trump.
For almost the entire first year of Trump’s occupancy of the Oval Office, the corporate news media was rife with stories about a White House trapped in chaos. There were even absurd stories about a disheveled and depressed Trump wandering around the premises in his bathrobe, sipping Diet Coke. The deluge of fake news stories continued nonstop because they confirmed the biases of anti-Trump people.
A parody story about Trump watching his favorite network, “The Gorilla Channel” even managed to go viral and was absurdly fact-checked by numerous media outlets. The media has never figured out who the real Donald J. Trump is because they are so busy chasing a mirage of their own imagining.
Trump the Information Warrior
One thing I believe about Trump from my study and observations of him for the past five years is that he is well versed in the art of information warfare. Not only the acquiring of key information but also the use of disinformation against his opponents.
It is no secret that Trump’s favorite book is “Art of War” by the ancient Chinese general Sun Tzu. Trump even based his best-selling book “Art of the Deal’ on “Art of War.”
In the ever-growing SpyGate scandal, which now includes a declared Special Counsel’s Office under John Durham that is probing the last Special Counsel’s Office led by Robert Mueller as part of its criminal investigation, the spying on the Trump campaign during the 2016 election is a key component.
The popular media narrative is that Trump, Jeff Sessions, Mike Pompeo, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, and the rest of the incoming Trump administration came into power after the inauguration of January 2017 completely oblivious to the fact they were already targets of at least one federal counterintelligence investigation.
Only after assuming their offices did they become aware of their campaign and then their transition team had been continuously spied upon. The press conference held by Rep. Devin Nunes [R-CA] in March of 2017 is often viewed as the start of the Trump administration’s beginning to become aware of the spying.
I do not believe this popular narrative is true.
On November 17, 2016, then-NSA Director Admiral Mike Rogers paid a very unusual visit to Donald Trump at his Trump Tower, which was serving as the headquarters for his newly installed transition team. Within just a few hours of his meeting with Admiral Rogers, President Trump called a press conference specifically for announcing that he was immediately moving his transition team from Trump Tower to his golf resort in Bedminster, New Jersey.
President-elect Donald Trump heads outside the clubhouse at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J., where work on his transition to the White House continued, Nov. 20, 2016. (Hilary Swift / The New York Times)
What made this abrupt exit from Trump Tower so unusual was that the transition team was still settling into its new offices when Trump suddenly shifted gears and moved everything to New Jersey.
It seems very evident based on the publicly available facts that whatever Admiral Rogers told Trump in that private meeting, it concerned Trump enough to go to the trouble of immediately responding to what he was told. So, there is good reason to believe that Trump had his entire transition team prepped and briefed about the fact they were being spied on weeks before the inauguration took place.
Because Trump often does not respond to events how media pundits with incomplete information think he should, a lot of news commentary involves even Trump-friendly commentators explaining why Trump is doing the wrong things.
How does Trump want his enemies to view him?
As Trump prepares to do what some suspect he’s going to do by January 6, the day the electoral college votes will be counted in a joint session of the US Congress, he would want his enemies to think his White House is engulfed in chaos; his top advisors were working against him, hiding things from him. He would want them to view him as having been essentially neutered by his own inner circle and staff.
Therefore, recent news of a White House meeting erupting into a shouting match between top Trump advisors with Trump looking befuddled and confused isn’t all that surprising, especially when you consider who it was that reported the details of that chaotic meeting to the world: controversial public figure Patrick Byrne.
Byrne, the former CEO of Overstock, has already admitted that in the past he agreed to be an intelligence asset for the FBI in helping them to entrap Maria Butina, who was an undeclared foreign agent for Russia.
Butina was convicted and recently finished an eighteen-month prison term before returning to Russia.
Looking beyond how unusual it was for someone like Byrne to be brought into the White House to attend a top briefing of a sitting President’s inner circle, what stands out is how useful his account of White House chaos is to Trump’s enemies.
Patrick Byrne is the perfect outsider to present this chaos narrative to Trump’s enemies who so desperately want to hear it, which could very well be why he was put right in the middle of a most sensitive Presidential meeting where he could see and report what he saw to the outside world.
A stable genius or a delusional fool?
While I’ve spent the past four years watching Trump pull off one brilliant information operation after another as he racked up a stunning array of major accomplishments, others have seen what they believe to be a clueless and hapless Trump bumbling and stumbling from one major disaster into another.
All those disasters now having culminated in Trump absolutely fumbling his response to the Democrats blatantly stealing a national election in several key swing states. Those political journalists and commentators fully expect to see a sullen Trump reluctantly stride out of the White House with poor grace on January 20.
Which version of Trump is correct, the stable genius or the delusional fool?
Recent events can help point to which it is. Trump's legal team has now pulled off not one but two amazing evidence drops during election fraud hearings in the state of Georgia.
Two stunning election fraud revelations
The first evidence drop was several weeks ago when Giuliani revealed a security camera video of election workers in State Farm Arena enthusiastically pulling containers of ballots out from under a table and counting them multiple times without any observers present.
The second evidence drop was even more dramatic. On Wednesday, December 30, as expert witness Jovan H. Pulitzer was making his presentation to the Georgia State Senate, he stressed that Dominion Voting Systems has been claiming for two months now their voting machines are secure, they are not connected to the internet, and they cannot be remotely hacked.
DOMINION MACHINES HACKED LIVE IN GEORGIA RUNOFF! Voter Fraud Senate Hearing 12/30/2020 - Fulton County voting machines breached by WiFi
As the state lawmakers looked on in amazement, Pulitzer informed them his “white hat” hacking team had gained access via WiFi to Dominion voting machines being used at that very moment in the early voting the Senate runoff races.
In one simple live demonstration in the State Senate chambers over two months of dishonest talking points about Dominion’s voting machines were utterly destroyed.
As a result of that stunning evidence drop, the Georgia State Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously passed a motion to audit Fulton County’s absentee ballots. The city of Atlanta is in Fulton County, and it was in Atlanta that one of the most suspicious late-night vote spikes for candidate Joe Biden occurred in the early morning hours the night of the November 3 election.
As this column is completed, just seven days remain until January 6, the key date of the Electoral College results being tabulated. How much more evidence is Team Trump going to drop in those seven days? We’ll have to wait and see.
Brian Cates entered the political arena in March 2012, following the death of Andrew Breitbart. He is currently a political columnist for The Epoch Times and UncoverDC. Brian is based in South Texas and is the author of: “Nobody Asked For My Opinion … But Here It Is Anyway!”
Twitter: @drawandstrike
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