Will Rahn writes:

It’s easy to get the basic gist of the Deep State conspiracy theory, which posits that the FBI and CIA ginned up a devious plot to help Hillary Clinton and hurt Donald Trump. But there’s an arch, coy, almost feline quality to the way these arguments are presented. The allegations are always cloaked for a later reveal.

And this is probably because the allegations are bonkers, and would sound that way to anyone not already primed to believe them.

The Deep State theory, when we get down to it, holds that the investigation into the Trump campaign was expressly political in origin. The Obama administration weaponized the security services, spied on the other party’s candidate, and essentially invented the collusion story in an effort to elect Hillary Clinton. When this failed, the plot continued under the auspices of various Trump appointees, eventually metastasizing into Robert Mueller’s probe.

This is sometimes said more-or-less outright by the conspiracy theorists themselves. But for that story to make a lick of sense – and this is why so many of its adherents always stop short of saying what they really mean – it would require a vast conspiracy stretching across two administrations. [Continue reading…]

It’s easy to understand why Trump wants to cast himself as the victim of a so-called witch hunt, but let’s not forget that the original use of the expression “Deep State” in reference to Trump’s predicament came from Glenn Greenwald and then got eagerly propagated by the likes of Rush Limbaugh. Greenwald may well be a True Believer in this particular conspiracy theory, or maybe it’s a narrative that serves his own interests by blurring perceivable ties to Russia.