Blockading the Strait of Hormuz is not worth the risk



As the United States Navy moves to blockade the Strait of Hormuz, the world is watching for a show of force. What they will find instead is a fleet hollowed out by a decade of social engineering and administrative sclerosis.

You cannot project American sovereignty abroad with a military that is busy managing its own decline at home. More importantly, this naval escalation risks suffocating the most promising diplomatic opening in decades.

The permanent class of experts would rather risk a catastrophic naval engagement than concede that a regional partner can resolve a crisis.

The current standoff in the Middle East has reached a critical juncture. The Pentagon has confirmed the commencement of a formal naval blockade of Iranian ports. This decision follows a dramatic surge in global oil prices, which have now breached the $104-per-barrel mark.

The current situation in the Strait of Hormuz is a diagnostic test of a failing American foreign policy establishment that seems intent on sabotaging the mediation efforts currently led by Pakistan.

For the past week, Islamabad has served as the epicenter of a historic diplomatic effort. These talks represented the first direct, high-level engagement between Washington and Tehran in nearly 50 years. By facilitating marathon negotiations between American officials and Iranian representatives, Pakistan demonstrated that regional stability is best managed by regional actors.

This diplomatic track offered an off-ramp from a conflict that would likely bankrupt the global economy and further overextend American resources. Even as peace efforts continue, however, the American deep state has pivoted back to a posture of maritime confrontation.

The defense establishment has become a microcosm of the broader bureaucracy plaguing the American government. Procurement cycles for new vessels span decades, and the internal culture has shifted toward ideological compliance rather than mission readiness. Put simply: Institutional rot has degraded the military's ability to do its job.

Reports indicate that the availability of operational carrier strike groups is significantly lower than projected. Attempting to enforce a blockade with a hollowed-out fleet is a dangerous venture and could undermine the leverage the American delegation sought to build in Islamabad.

From a regional perspective, the sudden shift toward a blockade looks less like a strategic necessity and more like an attempt by the Washington bureaucracy to reclaim control of the narrative.

Critics of the modern bureaucracy have long argued that a nation cannot remain a great power if its governing structures are no longer accountable to the reality of the world. By ignoring the diplomatic progress in Pakistan in favor of a naval show, the administrative state is prioritizing its own relevance over a sustainable peace.

RELATED: The Trump-Vance dynamic is the key to solving the Iran problem

Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

This bureaucratic reflex reveals a deeper pathology within the American capital. The permanent class of experts would rather risk a catastrophic naval engagement than concede that a regional partner can resolve a crisis. This is the definition of a paper tiger mentality: a desperate projection of power abroad to mask the total lack of accountability and efficiency at home.

The Trump administration has the opportunity to embrace a new model of burden sharing. Real leadership requires the courage to let regional partners take the lead in mediation, rather than allowing the interventionist bureaucracy to launch a new conflict.

Blockading the Strait of Hormuz risks an escalation that the Navy is ill-prepared to handle. Such an escalation would also risk alienating the regional partners who have worked toward peace talks and ceasefire agreements.

The blockade should be viewed as the American administrative state’s refusal to accept a world where it isn’t the sole arbiter of every crisis.

The path forward is clear. American leaders must recognize that the greatest threats to Washington are not just the regimes in Tehran or Beijing, but the internal decay of American institutions.

To secure peace, the United States must support the diplomatic process rather than drowning it in the Persian Gulf.

Sara Gonzales celebrates Trump firing Pam Bondi but warns acting AG Todd Blanche is ‘neck-deep in the deep state'



Yesterday, President Trump announced on Truth Social that the administration was parting ways with Attorney General Pam Bondi. He thanked the former Florida AG for her service and said that she would be transitioning to an unspecified new job in the private sector, while Deputy AG Todd Blanche steps in as acting attorney general.

BlazeTV host Sara Gonzales welcomed part of the news with enthusiasm.

“Finally happened. President Trump actually decided to fire some of the deadweight in his administration,” she says.

However, Sara strongly pushes back on Trump’s description of Blanche as a “very talented and respected legal mind.”

“Todd Blanche is, like, neck-deep in deep state, OK? Todd Blanche is like a Harvard elitist. Todd Blanche is not to be trusted. All of my sources within the DOJ are saying Todd Blanche is a problem,” she says.

Some of her sources have even suggested that Blanche, not Bondi, bears much of the blame for the DOJ’s perceived failures.

“Some of my sources have said that Pam Bondi is so incompetent that she just farmed everything out to Todd Blanche. Like she just handed everything over to Todd Blanche. Todd Blanche has actually already been running things, and this is how it's going,” Sara says.

Even though Blanche is only a temporary acting AG while Trump searches for a permanent replacement, Sara warns that the damage he could do in the interim is significant.

“You could have an interim attorney general, an acting attorney general, for literal years. … If he's here longer than five minutes, it's going to be a problem,” she quips.

An attorney general, she argues, should be “should be competent … willing to fight … willing to go to the trenches.”

But neither Bondi nor Blanche, according to Sara, fits that bill.

Several names are now floating as potential replacements, with EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin emerging as the leading contender. To hear Sara’s full take on the possible candidates, watch the video above.

Want more from Sara Gonzales?

To enjoy more of Sara's no-holds-barred takes on news and culture, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

Robert Mueller deserves credit for one thing: He stopped short



The recently departed Robert Mueller, best known as the Russiagate special counsel, maintained his honor under circumstances far more fraught than the New York Times would like to admit.

To the Times, Mueller was a near-extinct liberal Republican, a straight-arrow institutionalist who resisted Donald Trump’s tawdry politics while avoiding the thuggish legacy of J. Edgar Hoover. That portrait distorts both men. It also misses the real point: Mueller’s conduct during Russiagate, whatever its flaws, looks more honorable when set against the corruption surrounding him.

With all the corruption swirling around him, Mueller himself held the line, even as age and decline had plainly weakened him.

The Times’ swipe at Hoover was as gratuitous as it was ignorant. Hoover had long passed his prime by the 1970s, but beginning in 1924, he transformed a bureau riddled with corruption into a professional law-enforcement agency that promoted rigorous investigative standards around the world. Of Hoover’s successors, only Mueller approached that level of competence while avoiding Hoover’s late-life degeneration.

What the Times missed about Mueller was his stubborn rectitude in finishing the Russiagate investigation without yielding to the partisan pressure for indictment.

Trump, in his usual blunt fashion, responded to Mueller’s death with satisfaction rather than acknowledging him as an honest prosecutor who refused to sign on to a ruinous partisan prosecution.

That refusal matters. The larger Russiagate story is not that Mueller pursued Trump too aggressively. It is that Russiagate itself was one of the most dishonest political dirty tricks in our country’s wild history.

What Russiagate was — and wasn’t

Only Mueller’s refusal to indict saved the country from the further disgrace of charging a president based on a fiction manufactured by Hillary Clinton’s campaign and abetted by corrupt actors in the FBI and CIA, including James Comey and John Brennan.

Properly understood, the special counsel investigation was the capstone of that long corruption. Had Mueller’s deputies, working with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, indicted Trump, as many of them plainly wished to do, the damage would have been irreparable.

For that reason, Mueller’s resistance to the demands of his own partisan aides deserves recognition, not contempt. As his legacy hardens into historical judgment, we should examine the Russiagate investigation for what it was and what it was not.

When Trump fired FBI Director James Comey in May 2017, Mueller was quickly named special counsel. But Comey’s Russiagate inquiry had begun as a counterintelligence investigation, which required no identified crime. Comey privately told Trump that he was not a subject of the investigation as a foreign agent. Publicly, however, Comey let suspicion fester while refusing to clarify that point. Trump’s dealings with Russia were already constrained by the posturing of both Comey and President Obama.

Then came Rosenstein. Urged on by the unctuous Comey, Rosenstein violated the governing regulation by appointing Mueller without first identifying a predicate crime. Only later did Rosenstein and Mueller’s team realize they needed one. So Mueller’s deputies settled on a theory that Trump may have obstructed justice by firing Comey.

That theory never held up. Comey served at the pleasure of the president and could be fired for any reason or no reason at all. Even the crime eventually offered to justify the special counsel’s existence failed as a legal foundation.

So the Mueller inquiry rested on a faulty premise from the start. It was not the first dirty trick played on Trump. It was the last.

RELATED: The case against Clinton, Brennan, and Comey is stronger than ever

Alex Wong/Getty Images

Media malpractice

Have readers learned any of this from the New York Times, the Washington Post, or the self-justifying book later written by Mueller’s deputies? Hardly. Those institutions covered up the illegality while sermonizing about their virtue and Trump’s supposed criminality.

Step backward in time, and the prior outrage appears: the FISA surveillance of the Trump campaign, and later the presidency, approved in October 2016 on the phony strength of the Steele dossier. Andrew McCabe admitted under oath that the dossier formed the basis for the FISA application. That document rested on the cartoonish fable that Trump aide Carter Page had been offered billions tied to an oil interest by Russia’s Igor Sechin in exchange for influencing the Republican platform. The tale was fiction, filtered through suspected Russian operative Igor Danchenko.

That surveillance was not a good-faith mistake. It was a vicious political trick carried out by McCabe and Comey, who had no plausible reason to believe the Carter Page story was true.

Before that came the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, opened on July 31, 2016. Its predicate was equally rotten. Joseph Mifsud, a mysterious professor later treated as Russian-connected, told young Trump aide George Papadopoulos that Russia had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton in the form of emails. Then Alexander Downer, the former Australian ambassador, drew Papadopoulos into a conversation and extracted the statement needed to move the allegation into official channels.

But Mifsud was no Russian cutout. He was tied to Western intelligence circles, including Claire Smith, a British official involved in spy vetting. So Crossfire Hurricane itself appears to have been launched not by genuine Russian infiltration but by the oily maneuvering of intelligence allies tied to Comey and Brennan through the Five Eyes network.

And beneath all of it sat the mother of the dirty tricks: Hillary Clinton’s decision to blame Russia for the exposure of internal Democrat emails showing how the DNC had worked against Bernie Sanders. To sustain that narrative, Clinton’s campaign hired Christopher Steele to produce the false dossier alleging Trump-Russia collusion. That was the seed crystal of the entire hoax. It survived only because crooked Hillary had dirty birds running the FBI and CIA.

RELATED:The media’s ‘war on misinformation’ loses all credibility

Deagreez via iStock/Getty Images

Concealing the truth

Once you see that, the real scandal comes into focus. If the Steele dossier triggered Crossfire Hurricane, which led to the false FISA surveillance, which in turn helped justify Mueller’s appointment, then any honest special counsel investigation should have started with the dossier itself. An honest inquiry would have examined whether Clinton, Steele, Steele’s sources, Comey, and Brennan conspired to manufacture the false collusion narrative that became Russiagate.

Instead, Mueller’s deputies chose to ignore the dossier. Their excuse was almost comic: The dossier was too false and unreliable to investigate! But false collusion was the heart of the scandal. Investigating that fraud should have been central, not optional.

They concealed other truths as well. They continued to describe Mifsud as Russian-connected while omitting his far more troubling ties to Western intelligence circles. They kept from the public the extent to which the original predicates for the whole affair were contrived.

Then came the final abuse. Professional ethics require prosecutors to put up or shut up. If they decline to prosecute, they do not defame the subject by insinuating guilt they cannot prove. Mueller’s deputies ignored that rule. In the Mueller report and their later book, they dwelled at length on how Trump may have almost obstructed justice and why they could not “exonerate” him, even though exoneration is not a prosecutor’s task.

In short, Mueller’s deputies concealed the corrupted predicates of the earlier investigations while compounding the damage with their own slanted and misleading account.

Yet with all that corruption swirling around him, Mueller himself held the line, even as age and decline had plainly weakened him. He did not stop his deputies from smearing Trump, and that failure matters. But he remained the thin blue line that prevented one of the ugliest abuses of prosecutorial power in modern American history.

Robert Mueller should be remembered not as the anti-Trump hero or anti-conservative that the New York Times described, but as a conscientious man who kept his footing amid corrupt company.

Deep State Sleeper Cells & Never-Before-Told Hunter Biden Laptop Details Revealed | Miranda Devine
play icon

Deep State Sleeper Cells & Never-Before-Told Hunter Biden Laptop Details Revealed | Miranda Devine

China is at war with us. Start acting like it.



Communist China isn’t hiding its ambitions. Beijing wants to displace the United States as the world’s leading power. It flies spy balloons over our country, runs influence operations, steals technology, pressures neighbors, menaces Taiwan, and builds missiles and ships meant to drive America out of the Western Pacific.

The Pentagon’s newly released National Defense Strategy puts the People’s Republic of China at the center of the threat picture. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth frames the task in blunt terms: “peace through strength,” including a favorable balance of power in the Indo-Pacific so that China can’t “dominate us or our allies.”

China won’t ‘take over the world’ in some comic-book way. But it will keep testing the seams of American power — and it will keep exploiting our habits of denial and delay.

That doesn’t mean the United States and China are “destined for war.” China’s weaknesses cut against that. It lacks the kind of soft power that makes alliances easy and coercion unnecessary. Outside its borders, China inspires far more fear than admiration. Demographic collapse also looms. The one-child policy left China facing an aging population and a shrinking workforce.

None of that makes Beijing harmless. A declining regime can still lash out. It can still intimidate neighbors, manipulate markets, and exploit American openness. It can also run influence operations in plain sight — through front companies, academic partnerships, lobbying, investment vehicles, and the slow capture of key choke points in tech and infrastructure.

That calls for something Washington too often refuses to do: enforce rules like a serious country.

Start with basic counterintelligence hygiene. Aggressively investigate covert foreign influence. Enforce FARA. Protect sensitive research. Tighten screening around critical supply chains. Treat strategic industries like strategic industries. Strip Chinese “paper Americans” of their citizenship and deport them.

This is where internal discipline matters as much as external posture. A national strategy collapses when parts of the bureaucracy slow-walk it, freelance against it, or treat it like optional guidance.

Consider the recent ouster of Assistant Attorney General Gail Slater. She was in charge of the Department of Justice’s antitrust division until last month. But she butted heads repeatedly with Attorney General Pam Bondi. Their disagreements slid into insubordination. Slater allegedly lied to Bondi on national security matters that appeared to help China.

RELATED:Iran, China, and Trump’s ‘art of the squeal’

White House via X Account/Anadolu via Getty Images

For example, Slater opposed the Hewlett-Packard Enterprise acquisition of Juniper Networks, which national security experts say is essential to combat Chinese tech dominance. Blocking the deal would have hurt U.S. industry and helped Chinese telecom giant Huawei. Happily, the administration overruled her and approved the deal.

Washington can’t run a serious China policy with internal sabotage, bureaucratic drift, or officials acting like they answer to a different set of priorities.

The same standard applies to national security decisions in the tech arena. If competition with Huawei and China’s tech ecosystem matters — and it does — then Washington should evaluate mergers, procurement, and infrastructure policy through that lens, not just through abstract theories divorced from geopolitical reality. America needs to win the next generation of networks, not regulate itself into strategic dependence.

China won’t “take over the world” in some comic-book way. But it will keep testing the seams of American power — and it will keep exploiting our habits of denial and delay.

Peace through strength isn’t a slogan. It’s a posture: defend critical systems, enforce the law, remove vulnerabilities, and stop treating strategic competition like a seminar topic. The first step is simple and unglamorous: clean up our own house, then face Beijing with the seriousness the moment demands.

EXCLUSIVE: Mike Benz Says Trump Admin Has ‘Once-In-Generation’ Chance To Put Deep State On Defense Post-Epstein Files

'we should be having five million CIA files'

Where in the Constitution is ‘the interagency’ anyway?



Americans have some sense of how close the world came to a large-scale nuclear conflict during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. But today’s lapdog press has failed to tell the public how close the deep state dragged us to the jagged edge of conflagration through its proxy war with Russia in Ukraine.

Only after Joe Biden — and the autopen — left the White House last year did the New York Times tell some of the story. That account, “The Partnership: The Secret History of the War in Ukraine,” drawn from hundreds of interviews with military and intelligence officials, revealed what the deep state tried to conceal: just how perilous the global American military empire’s proxy war with Russia became.

Attacking the deep state case by case, one official at a time, department by department, will never be enough to get ahead of its lawlessness.

The escalation of the empire’s provocations and Russia’s evolving nuclear doctrine turned into a deadly pas de deux. “The unthinkable had become real,” the Times reported. “The United States was now woven into the killing of Russian soldiers on sovereign Russian soil.”

Now the Times has provided another look — fresh evidence long withheld — of the deep state’s efforts to subvert the Nixon White House. The essay, “Seven Pages of a Sealed Watergate File Sat Undiscovered. Until Now,” by reporter James Rosen, details a 13-month Pentagon spying operation against Nixon’s National Security Council.

Bristling at “policies they abhorred” — including détente with the Soviet Union, Vietnamization, Nixon’s China opening, and a reduced military share of federal spending — the deep state went straight to work.

Under orders from Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Thomas Moorer and others, a Navy enlisted man spied on the National Security Council, rifling through Henry Kissinger’s and Alexander Haig’s briefcases and desks, copying and stealing classified documents. “Any documents he touched, he copied; he dived into NSC wastebaskets and burn bags; what he couldn’t copy, he memorized.”

In all, an estimated 5,000 documents were delivered to the top brass.

Nixon learned of the Joint Chiefs’ espionage. The newly revealed material is evidence that, as Rosen writes, “Watergate had not arisen in a vacuum.”

Many informed people know that the deep state panicked when John F. Kennedy tapped the brakes on the Cold War. Among some, it remains an article of faith that his peace initiatives led to his assassination. In the Nixon case, Rosen writes, the lead federal investigator said what he was uncovering felt like “Seven Days in May,” the novel and film about a coup to stop a president pursuing détente.

It’s a mistake to think the deep state belongs only to history — to figures like Allen Dulles, the CIA chief who helped lead the subversion of Kennedy, or the Pentagon brass in this new Nixon account, or, even more recently, to John Brennan at the CIA and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, both of whom lied to Congress about deep-state activities.

RELATED: Just hundreds of people control Earth’s future. What do they want?

Photo By Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call Inc. via Getty Images

Without number are the lesser officials and petty bureaucrats who serve the deep state. Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, a National Security Council staffer in Trump’s first term, is one such. Instrumental in the effort to impeach Trump, Vindman testified before Congress that he was alarmed that the president was “promoting a false and alternative narrative of Ukraine inconsistent with the consensus views of the interagency.”

The “views of the interagency”? What is an interagency? By what constitutional means and process of deliberation does it arrive at its consensus? Who are its members? Whom do they represent, and how are they selected? Is there a vote — secret or otherwise? By whom? Does it require a plurality or a majority? Who profits from its decisions? Where can citizens find the rules by which it must abide?

By any other name, Vindman was talking about the deep state — which I detail in my new book, “Empire of Lies: Fragments from the Memory Hole” — as the executive arm of the global American military empire. Operating without rules, it is, as Arthur Schlesinger described the CIA to Kennedy, “a state within a state.” Its only consensus is the growth of the empire.

Like the mythical Augean stable, the deep state is a foul mess of illegality, waste, and corruption that has lingered for decades. Tasked with cleaning it as one of his 12 labors, Hercules knew better than to try to clean it bit by bit, shovelful by shovelful. Instead, he diverted rivers to wash away the overwhelming mess in a day.

Attacking the deep state case by case, one official at a time, department by department, will never be enough to get ahead of its lawlessness. The renewal of our free and prosperous republic awaits a diversion from our imperial trajectory. It awaits America coming home — and ending its global military empire of lies.

Newly revealed documents back Tucker Carlson, Roger Stone's take that Nixon was undone by a 'coup'



Seven recently uncovered pages from Richard Nixon's 1975 grand jury testimony indicate that the former president was undone by a coup d'état contrived by the deep state, a theory previously argued by Tucker Carlson and Roger Stone.

In June 1975, Nixon testified before the Watergate Special Prosecution Force and a couple of members of a federal grand jury. A portion of Nixon's 297-page transcribed testimony was previously sealed, considered too incendiary to share with the rest of the grand jury. While most of the transcript was released by the National Archives in 2011, a seven-page segment remained withheld.

'The answer fills an important gap in the record of the Nixon era — and carries significance for our own.'

Last week, the New York Times published a guest op-ed from reporter James Rosen detailing the contents of those seven pages for the first time.

The newly uncovered portions of Nixon's testimony revealed that he became aware in December 1971 that Navy Yeoman Charles Radford had secretly copied roughly 5,000 classified National Security Council documents, including documents nabbed from the briefcase of Henry Kissinger, who was then national security adviser. Radford then shared those documents with the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon.

Kissinger went on to become Nixon's secretary of state in 1973.

"Yoeman Radford was Kissinger's top notetaker. He had been with Kissinger on his secret trip to Paris when we were trying to end the war. He had been on all of those trips and had been the notetaker and knew what Kissinger had said and what the other side had said," Nixon testified.

He stated that Radford "broke down" when he was given a polygraph.

"He cried ... and virtually admitted his guilt," Nixon said.

"The reason that we couldn't prosecute and wouldn't was that if we did, he then would expose and could expose these highly confidential exchanges we were having to bring the war in Vietnam to a conclusion," Nixon explained.

RELATED: Biden FBI's Arctic Frost surveillance of lawmakers could cost the government, thanks to 'real teeth' measure in funding bill

Photo by the White House Photo Office/PhotoQuest/Getty Images

Nixon believed that the Joint Chiefs of Staff opposed his foreign policy, including his goal of ending the Vietnam War, and Radford's spying might undermine and sabotage these policies.

Nixon's testimony revealed that he had initially wanted to pursue charges against those involved in the spying efforts, but ultimately chose not to publicize the incident to protect sensitive operations and the military's reputation.

He called it a "can of worms" that was not worth opening, urging prosecutors not to probe the affair deeply. Prosecutors agreed.

"The Joint Chiefs' spying formed only one prong of the campaign against Nixon, the most spied-on president in modern times," Rosen wrote. "The answer fills an important gap in the record of the Nixon era — and carries significance for our own. The classified portion of the grand jury transcript, obtained by Times Opinion, bears directly on allegations by President Trump and his supporters about the existence of what was once called the permanent bureaucracy, better known today as the 'deep state.'"

The pages unearthed by Rosen support previous claims from Carlson and Stone that Nixon was the target of a successful coup attempt from deep-state actors.

RELATED: Watergate was amateur hour compared to Arctic Frost

Photo by Bettmann / Contributor /Getty Images

"He was the most popular president, by votes, which is the only way we can measure, in his re-election campaign. And two years later, he's gone, undone by a naval intel officer, the number two guy at the FBI, and a bunch of CIA employees," Carlson stated during an April 2024 appearance on Joe Rogan's podcast.

During an August 2024 episode of "The Tucker Carlson Show," he said, "In retrospect, it looks very much like a kind of coup against a sitting and enormously popular president."

Stone previously wrote two books discussing the coup against Nixon, "Nixon's Secrets" in 2014 and "Tricky Dick" in 2017.

"Basically, [what] you have here is the deep state, which Nixon's testimony now proves exists, spying on Richard Nixon for the same reasons that they spied on Donald Trump. For the same reasons they invented the Russian collusion hoax as their rationale for the FISA warrants to spy on Trump and his aides," Stone stated during a Sunday episode of his podcast, "The Roger Stone Show."

Stone referred to the takedown of Nixon as a "government-engineered coup d’état."

Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

Nixon was the original deep-state victim: 7 newly unsealed pages change EVERYTHING



The “deep state” — the hidden network of unelected bureaucrats, intelligence officials, military leaders, and other insiders who secretly control government policy regardless of who is elected — has long been written off as a conspiracy theory.

But BlazeTV host Liz Wheeler says seven recently declassified documents from Richard Nixon's 1975 grand jury testimony are evidence that the deep state doesn’t just exist — it’s been forcefully active for decades.

On this episode of “The Liz Wheeler Show,” Liz interviews Newsmax chief Washington correspondent James Rosen about the bombshell he helped bring to light.

Rosen, author of the 2008 book “The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate,” has been digging into this story for over 30 years. He explains that the seven newly unsealed pages from Nixon’s secret 1975 grand jury testimony finally confirm one of the most explosive (and deliberately buried) scandals of the Nixon era: the Moorer-Radford espionage affair.

Back in 1971, top military leaders felt ignored by President Nixon and his adviser Henry Kissinger. They were upset that big foreign-policy decisions were being made without them.

In response, the Joint Chiefs of Staff launched a secret spying operation inside the White House. They used a young Navy yeoman named Charles Radford to steal thousands of top-secret documents.

“He took a copy of every document that came across his vision. What he couldn't copy, he memorized. He dove through waste baskets and burn bags. He literally rifled the briefcases of Henry Kissinger while he slept on overnight flights,” says Rosen.

“It’s estimated that this yeoman stole 5,000 classified documents from the National Security Council over a year's time, 1970 to '71, in wartime, and delivered those documents to the Joint Chiefs of Staff through the admirals,” he adds.

When these ultra-sensitive documents Radford had stolen started appearing in newspaper columns just days after high-level meetings, Nixon’s “plumbers” — which Rosen describes as a White House “special investigative unit” — quickly traced the leaks back to Radford and the Pentagon spy ring.

The White House was stunned to discover that the U.S. military had been running an espionage operation against its own commander in chief during wartime.

“[The Senate Armed Services Committee] held classified closed-door hearings, but everybody involved had good reason to want to let the matter drop, and ultimately nothing was done,” says Rosen.

For starters, Nixon didn't want to publicly "vilify" the military during the Vietnam era, when returning veterans were already facing widespread scorn and being labeled “baby killers," Rosen explains. Further, Attorney General John Mitchell reminded Nixon of his own administration's secret operations, making a full-blown scandal risky for everyone.

So the affair was hushed up. Radford and the involved admirals were quietly reassigned to remote posts; the Pentagon liaison office was dissolved; and no charges were filed. Brief classified Senate hearings in 1974 fizzled out amid the Watergate storm.

Rosen, who first detailed this from Nixon's 1971 White House tapes in his 2002 Atlantic article “Nixon and the Chiefs,” says these seven newly declassified pages from Nixon’s 1975 grand jury testimony add the former president's own sworn account of the betrayal.

It shows unelected military leaders actively undermining an elected president over policy disagreements — proof, he argues, that the deep state isn't a modern myth but a decades-old “beast.”

Check out the full eye-opening interview above.

Want more from Liz Wheeler?

To enjoy more of Liz’s based commentary, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

The Nixon Library Is Wrong About Nixon And The Deep State

The new revelation about Nixon 'bears directly on allegations by President Trump and his supporters about the existence of what was once called the permanent bureaucracy, better known today as the "deep state."'