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    More paywalls! So an excerpt:

    By “deep state,” Mr. Trump seems to mean any current or former federal employee who works to undermine him. I find that definition too broad, and it misses an important distinction. Officials like James Comey and John Brennan, respectively former directors of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency, were appointed by politicians and are subject to some public scrutiny and political accountability.

    The “deep state”—if we are to use the term—is better defined as consisting of career civil servants, who have growing power in the administrative state but work in the shadows. As government grows, so do the challenges of supervising a bureaucracy swelling in both size and power. Emboldened by employment rules that make it all but impossible to fire career employees, this internal civil “resistance” has proved willing to take ever more outrageous actions against the president and his policies, using the tools of both traditional and social media…

    This excuses James Comey and John Brennan far too easily. In what way are they not key Deep Staters? They’re just as much DC lifers and Deep State elements as the CIA Deputy Director for Operations or Lisa Page and Peter Strozk for that matter. I prefer VDH’s take, which is less exculpatory and more persuasive:

    much of what the country learned from 2017 to 2019 about the various machinations of Glenn Simpson and his Hillary Clinton contracted Fusion GPS skullduggery, the antics of FBI Director James Comey and Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, and the compromised roles of John Brennan and James Clapper was due to Nunes’s relentless digging, supported by a top-notch staff and likewise committed Republican colleagues.

    Still, this is about as good as it gets for the Wall Street Journal. We should not expect more. It is still something.