Sex, Lies and the Deep State

A few months ago, I was asked to write about Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner’s extramarital affair — sex and lies. You can read what I wrote here. Normally, I would not make such moral failings into political issues — but Rauner is not normal (as the article explains). Sometimes, the issue of past behavior and current character cannot be ignored. Not everyone moves past their failures. Some people duplicate them in other ways.

In the article excerpted here, Front Page Mag’s Daniel Greenfield connects governance with a couple of the deep state extramarital affairs and recently in the news:

What the affairs of the deep state tell us about it.

At the heart of the effort to bring down President Trump were two affairs. Unlike the bizarre lies about Moscow hotel rooms and prostitutes in the Steele dossier that was used by the Clinton campaign and its allies to smear President Trump and generate an investigation against him, these affairs truly took place.

And they didn’t just expose the malfeasance of four people, but of a corrupt political culture.

The affairs between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page in the FBI, and between Senate Intelligence Committee security director James Wolfe and New York Times reporter Ali Watkins, did more than betray the spouses of Strzok, Page and Wolfe. They also betrayed the duties of the two men and two women.

The affairs were not private matters. The two illicit sexual relationships were also illicit political arrangements. As the Inspector General’s report noted, Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, a Clinton ally who has since been fired, used Page as his liaison with Strzok to circumvent the chain of command on the investigation. McCabe used Page as his conduit and Watkins’ media employers used the young reporter as a conduit to her older married lover and the leaked information he allegedly provided her.

BuzzFeed, Politico, the Huffington Post and the New York Times were aware of the Watkins affair. As the Times piece on Watkins coolly put it, “Their relationship played out in the insular world of Washington, where young, ambitious journalists compete for scoops while navigating relationships with powerful, often older, sources.” Usually it’s enemy governments that employ young women having an affair with older married government officials to extract information on Intelligence Committee proceedings.

Read more: Front Page Mag

Image credit: www.frontpagemag.com.