The deep state is no longer deniable — thanks to Tulsi Gabbard



The term “deep state” has long been dismissed as the province of cranks and conspiracists. But the recent declassification of two critical documents — the Durham annex, released by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), and a report publicized by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard — has rendered further denial untenable.

These documents lay bare the structure and function of a bureaucratic, semi-autonomous network of agencies, contractors, nonprofits, and media entities that together constitute a parallel government operating alongside — and at times in opposition to — the duly elected one.

The ‘deep state’ is a self-reinforcing institutional machine — a decentralized, global bureaucracy whose members share ideological alignment.

The disclosures do not merely recount past abuses; they offer a schematic of how modern influence operations are conceived, coordinated, and deployed across domestic and international domains.

What they reveal is not a rogue element operating in secret, but a systematized apparatus capable of shaping elections, suppressing dissent, and laundering narratives through a transnational network of intelligence, academia, media, and philanthropic institutions.

Narrative engineering from the top

According to Gabbard’s report, a pivotal moment occurred on December 9, 2016, when the Obama White House convened its national security leadership in the Situation Room. Attendees included CIA Director John Brennan, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, National Security Agency Director Michael Rogers, FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, Secretary of State John Kerry, and others.

During this meeting, the consensus view up to that point — that Russia had not manipulated the election outcome — was subordinated to new instructions.

The record states plainly: The intelligence community was directed to prepare an assessment “per the President’s request” that would frame Russia as the aggressor and then-presidential candidate Donald Trump as its preferred candidate. Notably absent was any claim that new intelligence had emerged. The motivation was political, not evidentiary.

This maneuver became the foundation for the now-discredited 2017 intelligence community assessment on Russian election interference. From that point on, U.S. intelligence agencies became not neutral evaluators of fact but active participants in constructing a public narrative designed to delegitimize the incoming administration.

Institutional and media coordination

The ODNI report and the Durham annex jointly describe a feedback loop in which intelligence is laundered through think tanks and nongovernmental organizations, then cited by media outlets as “independent verification.” At the center of this loop are agencies like the CIA, FBI, and ODNI; law firms such as Perkins Coie; and NGOs such as the Open Society Foundations.

According to the Durham annex, think tanks including the Atlantic Council, the Carnegie Endowment, and the Center for a New American Security were allegedly informed of Clinton’s 2016 plan to link Trump to Russia. These institutions, operating under the veneer of academic independence, helped diffuse the narrative into public discourse.

Media coordination was not incidental. On the very day of the aforementioned White House meeting, the Washington Postpublished a front-page article headlined “Obama Orders Review of Russian Hacking During Presidential Campaign” — a story that mirrored the internal shift in official narrative. The article marked the beginning of a coordinated media campaign that would amplify the Trump-Russia collusion narrative throughout the transition period.

Surveillance and suppression

Surveillance, once limited to foreign intelligence operations, was turned inward through the abuse of FISA warrants. The Steele dossier — funded by the Clinton campaign via Perkins Coie and Fusion GPS — served as the basis for wiretaps on Trump affiliates, despite being unverified and partially discredited. The FBI even altered emails to facilitate the warrants.

RELATED: Durham annex proves Russiagate was a coordinated smear

Photo by ROBYN BECK/AFP via Getty Images

This capacity for internal subversion reappeared in 2020, when 51 former intelligence officials signed a letter labeling the Hunter Biden laptop story as “Russian disinformation.” According to polling, 79% of Americans believed truthful coverage of the laptop could have altered the election. The suppression of that story — now confirmed as authentic — was election interference, pure and simple.

A machine, not a ‘conspiracy theory’

The deep state is a self-reinforcing institutional machine — a decentralized, global bureaucracy whose members share ideological alignment and strategic goals.

Each node — law firms, think tanks, newsrooms, federal agencies — operates with plausible deniability. But taken together, they form a matrix of influence capable of undermining electoral legitimacy and redirecting national policy without democratic input.

The ODNI report and the Durham annex mark the first crack in the firewall shielding this machine. They expose more than a political scandal buried in the past. They lay bare a living system of elite coordination — one that demands exposure, confrontation, and ultimately dismantling.

Gabbard CLEANS HOUSE after warning Brennan, Clapper 'have a lot of their own people' squirreled away



Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has positioned herself as a leader in exposing how American intelligence officials have long evaded accountability for misleading the nation — not just about Russiagate, but also into war.

Gabbard indicated in an August interview with New York Post columnist Miranda Devine that a reckoning is under way; however, there remain challenges — including some posed by antagonistic holdovers from previous administrations.

"When you talk about how do we change this, we have to recognize that both of them — [ex-CIA Director] John Brennan and [ex-DNI] James Clapper, as leaders in the intelligence community — they have their own disciples," said Gabbard. "They have a lot of their own people that they brought in with them or that they mentored in a mirroring of their own image, and many of those people still exist within the intelligence community now."

Gabbard made abundantly clear to the "bad actors" on Wednesday that she means business.

Hours after announcing that she had revoked the security clearances of 37 current and former officials over their involvement in the Russiagate scandal, Gabbard revealed that she plans to radically shake up her agency.

"Over the last 20 years, ODNI has become bloated and inefficient, and the intelligence community is rife with abuse of power, unauthorized leaks of classified intelligence, and politicized weaponization of intelligence," Gabbard said in a statement.

RELATED: Tulsi Gabbard hammers James Clapper, revealing Russia hoax wasn't his first major deception

Photographer: Aaron Schwartz/CNP/Bloomberg via Getty Images

"ODNI and the IC must make serious changes to fulfill its responsibility to the American people and the U.S. Constitution by focusing on our core mission: find the truth and provide objective, unbiased, timely intelligence to the president and policymakers," the DNI continued.

To this end, Gabbard indicated that she is working on "ODNI 2.0": "the start of a new era focused on serving our country, fulfilling our core national security mission with excellence, always grounded in the U.S. Constitution, and ensuring the safety, security, and freedom of the American people."

One of the key differences between ODNI 1.0 and ODNI 2.0 is that the new version will be a great deal lighter.

'Ending the weaponization of intelligence and holding bad actors accountable are essential to begin to earn the American people's trust.'

Gabbard plans to can over 40% of the workforce at her agency by the end of fiscal year 2025 — layoffs her office indicated will save taxpayers over $700 million annually and improve the ODNI's efficacy "as the central hub for intelligence integration, strategic guidance, and oversight over the Intelligence Community."

Since assuming the role of director of national intelligence, Gabbard has already reduced the ODNI by nearly 30%, canning over 500 staffers.

Blaze Media contributor and investigative reporter Steve Baker noted that the personnel at these intelligence agencies have "been overwhelmingly bad guys."

"We're talking about a massively large percentage of the intelligence services," Baker said. "The lying employees are there to subvert the America First and Trump agenda and are actively doing so."

Baker suggested that one of the reasons this has taken so long is that before cutting deeper, Gabbard, like other Trump agency heads, first had to deal with obstructionist holdovers in more senior positions.

While these layoffs may help maximize efficiency at the ODNI, Baker acknowledged that "there's a lot of casualties of war in this," particularly when it comes to newer employees on probationary status.

In addition to trimming the fat, the DNI is effectively closing a number of subagencies that have become "redundant."

A fact sheet from the ODNI indicates that the ODNI's Foreign Malign Influence Center now faces the same fate as its congressionally mandated partner organization at the State Department, the Global Engagement Center — the rebrand of which Secretary of State Marco Rubio closed in April.

The ODNI noted that the FMIC earned extinction when it was "used by the previous administration to justify the suppression of free speech and to censor political opposition."

RELATED: Tulsi Gabbard scores huge win for Americans' data privacy against foreign governments

Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

The National Counterproliferation and Biosecurity Center and the Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center have similarly been targeted in the restructuring and deemed redundant.

According to the ODNI, "descoping" or "refocusing" these three subagencies alone will save taxpayers $46 million a year.

After a determination that that the "unique intelligence-related capability at [the National Intelligence University] is narrow in scope and does not require a stand-alone university," the school's intelligence-related programs are being transferred to the National Defense University for an estimated savings of $40 million annually.

Gabbard is also closing the ODNI's Reston, Virginia, campus and moving the National Intelligence Council to the main ODNI campus in nearby McClean.

The ODNI noted further that Gabbard already removed the partisan holdovers on the External Research Council for leaking classified information to reporters.

When asked to comment on whether suspected "disciples" or bad actors were among those now facing termination, a spokesperson for the ODNI told Blaze News that 'offices were refocused for a number of reasons including because they 'may have been used to weaponize intelligence against Americans' and were used 'by the deep state to push a partisan agenda.'"

"Ending the weaponization of intelligence and holding bad actors accountable are essential to begin to earn the American people's trust, which as long been eroded," Gabbard explained.

Blaze News has reached out to the ODNI for additional comment.

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Tulsi Gabbard Revokes Nearly 40 More Security Clearances In Wake Of Russiagate Fallout

'Being entrusted with a security clearance is a privilege'

Tulsi Gabbard hammers James Clapper, revealing Russia hoax wasn't his first major deception



Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was asked in a recent interview about joining the military in the wake of 9/11 and her 2004 deployment to Iraq.

After reflecting on her friend's slaying by an IED and on the terrible prices paid by some of her other fellow service members, Gabbard told Miranda Devine, host of "Pod Force One," that their "memories, their service, their sacrifice, the sacrifices of their families motivates the work that we do every day to make sure that the president has the best, most objective, relevant intelligence so that he can make the best-informed decisions."

The DNI noted that she knows firsthand from the Iraq War "what the implications are when you have intelligence weaponized and in that case manufactured ... to start a regime-change war that I served in and that so many of my friends served in and too many of my friends and too many Americans lost their lives in."

'James Clapper was on the team that created that manufactured intelligence assessment that led to the Iraq War — about the WMDs.'

Gabbard identified one of the individuals responsible for the deceit that greased America's way into Iraq: former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.

Before Clapper settled into former President Barack Obama's inner circle, he served as former President George W. Bush's director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon unit responsible for analyzing spy-satellite photos as well as other technically gathered intelligence, including soil samples.

Bush established the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction in 2004 to investigate the intelligence concerning weapons of mass destruction prior to the 2003 American invasion of Iraq.

The commission's March 2005 report to the former president stated:

On the brink of war, and in front of the whole world, the United States government asserted that Saddam Hussein had reconstituted his nuclear weapons program, had biological weapons and mobile biological weapon production facilities, and had stockpiled and was producing chemical weapons. All of this was based on the assessments of the U.S. Intelligence Community. And not one bit of it could be confirmed when the war was over.

When assigning blame, the report noted that it was partly a "failure on the part of those who collect intelligence — CIA's and the Defense Intelligence Agency's spies, the National Security Agency's eavesdroppers, and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency's imagery experts."

Clapper readily admitted in 2018, "My fingerprints are on the infamous national intelligence assessment of October 2002" that set the stage for the American invasion.

He told CNN's Dana Bash in 2018 that the intelligence community "built a case in our own minds, a house of cards, it turned out, that led us to the conclusion with pretty high confidence that they were there, and it turns out they weren’t."

RELATED: If no one goes to jail, the coup was a success

Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images

The commission's report noted that much of the intelligence that these agencies collected was "either worthless or misleading."

That misleading data set the stage for a 20-year conflict that claimed the lives of 4,599 American service members, over 3,650 American contractors, 15 Pentagon civilian personnel, 52,337 Iraqi national military and police, 324 allied troops, roughly 210,038 civilians, 282 journalists, and 64 humanitarian workers, according to the Watson School of International and Public Affairs.

'You see someone who has no problem whatsoever politicizing, and manufacturing, and weaponizing intelligence for a political outcome.'

"James Clapper was on the team that created that manufactured intelligence assessment that led to the Iraq War — about the WMDs," Gabbard told Devine. "He writes about it in his book, saying that he and his team of intelligence analysts created something that was not there."

"When you look at his actions then and you look at his actions in 2016 as Obama's director of national intelligence, you see someone who has no problem whatsoever politicizing, and manufacturing, and weaponizing intelligence for a political outcome," added Gabbard.

CIA Director John Ratcliffe recently declassified the appendix from the 2023 Durham report, which Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) promptly released to the public.

The appendix revealed that Clapper was one of a handful of top Obama officials briefed at the White House on Aug. 3, 2016, regarding credible intelligence that the Clinton campaign planned to smear Trump, falsely link him to Russia, then have law enforcement and the intelligence community carry the ball down the field.

RELATED: Ratcliffe releases damning Durham annex. Here's what it reveals about Obama-Clinton Russia collusion hoax.

Chip Somodevilla/Bloomberg/Alex Wong/Anadolu/Getty Images

Ratcliffe both named Clapper as one of the intelligence officials who "pushed the known fake Steele dossier into intelligence community assessments and as the basis for Crossfire Hurricane and all that," and accused the former DNI of manipulating intelligence "to get Trump."

Although cognizant of a possible Clinton plot to push the Russia hoax, Clapper published the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment, which served to legitimize the false narrative.

According to the House Intelligence Committee majority staff report recently published by Gabbard, the ICA was a work of fiction comprising misquotes, unreliable reports, lies of omission, and straight-out falsehoods.

Clapper's fingerprints aren't just on the false pretext for a 20-year war and the Russia collusion hoax. He was one of the 51 signatories of the infamous Oct. 19, 2020, "intel" letter that suggested the news concerning the Hunter Biden laptop had "all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation."

After it became clear in recent weeks that the Trump administration is serious about bringing those involved in what Gabbard characterized as an alleged "treasonous conspiracy" to account, Clapper indicated that he would "lawyer up."

Blaze News was unable to reach Clapper for comment

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Durham annex proves Russiagate was a coordinated smear



Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) last week declassified a 29-page document known as the Durham annex. Its publication has received remarkably little attention from major media outlets, despite containing one of the most significant intelligence disclosures since the origins of the Russiagate investigation.

The Durham annex is not conjecture, analysis, or political spin. It is a collection of sensitive intelligence reports, internal memos, and declassified emails compiled by the intelligence community and withheld from public view for years under the pretext of “source protection.”

The Durham annex reveals that the FBI ignored evidence in 2015 and 2016 suggesting that foreign governments were attempting to collude not with Trump, but with Clinton.

The declassified document offers a clearer view of what many Americans have long suspected: that the narrative surrounding Trump-Russia collusion was not only politically motivated but deliberately constructed by the Clinton campaign, facilitated by sympathetic actors within U.S. intelligence agencies, and ultimately endorsed by senior members of the Obama administration.

This trove of documents does not merely reinforce existing criticisms of the FBI’s conduct during the 2016 election. It provides evidence that the Clinton campaign approved a strategy to discredit Donald Trump by promoting a false association with Vladimir Putin. And it does so using intelligence collected from foreign surveillance of American political actors — surveillance that the CIA deemed credible enough to brief President Barack Obama directly.

The cover-up unraveled

Central to the Durham annex is a source codenamed “T1” — a foreign intelligence asset who intercepted Russian cyber-espionage activity targeting American entities, including George Soros’ Open Society Foundation, the Clinton campaign, and U.S. think tanks. The reports T1 relayed to U.S. intelligence included detailed assessments of internal American political strategy. In effect, T1 was watching Russian spies watch us — and reporting back.

T1’s identity remains classified, but strong circumstantial evidence points to a Dutch intelligence source. The Netherlands reportedly gained access to Russian cyber operations as early as 2014. Regardless of who provided it, U.S. agencies treated the intelligence from T1 as credible.

Then-CIA Director John Brennan quickly briefed President Obama, Vice President Biden, FBI Director James Comey, and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. Those briefings included memos indicating Hillary Clinton had personally approved a plan to tie Donald Trump to Russian election interference.

One memo, dated 2016 and reportedly obtained through Russian surveillance of George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, outlined a Clinton campaign strategy: “Smear Donald Trump by magnifying the scandal” over Russia’s preference for Trump. That memo laid the groundwork for the Trump-Russia collusion hoax now known as Russiagate.

Intelligence running Clinton’s interference

The CIA labeled the intelligence “sensitive” and credible. The FBI rejected it. Agents claimed it relied on hearsay, appeared exaggerated, and might have suffered from translation errors.

That kind of skepticism might seem reasonable — if the FBI had applied the same scrutiny to the Steele dossier. Instead, they accepted that now-debunked document without verification and used it to justify surveillance warrants.

The inconsistency runs deeper than analysis. The Durham annex reveals that the FBI ignored evidence from 2015 and 2016 showing that foreign governments weren’t courting Trump — they were cozying up to Clinton.

One memo, written before Trump even announced his candidacy, described a foreign intelligence operative preparing to meet with a Clinton associate to discuss a “plan.” The operative was acting on direct orders from a foreign head of state.

RELATED: The Russia hoax and COVID lies share the same deep-state fingerprints

Photo by Gilbert Carrasquillo/FilmMagic

The precise content of the plan is redacted, but the FBI’s field office viewed it as serious enough to request a FISA warrant. That request, however, was left to “languish in limbo” by senior FBI officials, who subsequently warned Clinton in a defensive briefing.

Frayed trust, no accountability

The documents suggest a coordinated operation — one in which political, bureaucratic, and media institutions aligned to discredit a political opponent using information they had strong reasons to believe was false. The CIA deemed the intelligence worth a presidential briefing. The FBI discarded it. The media ignored it. And Clinton operatives implemented it.

This is not merely a scandal of partisan excess. Nearly 10 years after the first Hillary Clinton email leaks, and eight years after Trump’s unexpected victory, we are only now beginning to see the scope of institutional complicity in the Russiagate deception. The political cost may never be fully calculated, but the institutional damage — to the FBI, to the intelligence community, and to the trust of the American people — is already done.

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The Russia hoax and COVID lies share the same deep-state fingerprints



“Conspiracy theory” is the go-to smear against those of us who questioned any aspect of the government’s authoritarian response to the COVID-19 pandemic. But as the great Austrian economist Murray Rothbard once observed, the smear serves one purpose: to divert the public’s attention away from the truth.

“An attack on ‘conspiracy theories,’” Rothbard writes in “The Anatomy of the State,” means that the subjects of a regime “will become more gullible in believing the ‘general welfare’ reasons that are always put forth by the State for engaging in any of its despotic actions.”

The democratization of information means that censorship just doesn’t work as well as it used to.

“A ‘conspiracy theory,’” he continues, “can unsettle the system by causing the public to doubt the state’s ideological propaganda.”

The more I dig into the origins of the COVID pandemic, the more “despotic” our state seems to become — and the more “conspiratorial” I get.

Unsettling the system

I am trying to put together the final pieces of the puzzle of what I consider among the greatest public policy scandals of my lifetime — not only who did it, but more importantly, why would they do it?

A few months ago, I spent a day with Matt Taibbi, the iconoclastic muckraker and “Twitter Files” reporter, for the latest episode of my BlazeTV investigative series, “The Coverup.”

As he dug through the trove of emails and texts, Taibbi discovered the conspiracy to blacklist and silence Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, the subject of the first episode of “The Coverup” and now the head of the National Institutes of Health. Taibbi soon learned that the same tactics and tools — and even many of the very same deep-state actors — have their fingerprints all over both the Russia collusion hoax and the COVID cover-up.

A precedent for censorship

Recently released documents from Director of National Security Tulsi Gabbard reveal that the so-called Russia collusion hoax wasn’t just wrong — it was deliberate. The Obama administration orchestrated the fabrication, pushing U.S. intelligence agencies to leak a report suggesting Vladimir Putin had helped Donald Trump steal the 2016 election.

That leak, repeated endlessly by the press, fueled a national narrative branding Trump’s presidency as illegitimate — despite those same agencies having already dismissed the claim.

This kind of manipulation would be outrageous if it weren’t so familiar.

Five years after the COVID lockdowns stripped millions of Americans of basic liberties, we’re still uncovering how the deep state used propaganda to silence dissent. Throughout the pandemic, scientists and doctors raised alarms about the damage lockdowns would cause — and did cause. Some of the world’s most respected experts signed the Great Barrington Declaration to oppose the government’s heavy-handed response.

But the public never heard from them. Bureaucrats and media allies moved swiftly to smear, suppress, and sideline these voices using one of the oldest authoritarian tactics: control of information.

In fairness, public health agencies didn’t have to twist many arms. The legacy media followed their lead willingly — even when the guidance contradicted itself or defied basic logic.

But unlike the days of Project Mockingbird, when the CIA could shape coverage by nudging the New York Times or CBS, controlling the old guard wasn’t enough. The rise of social media — decentralized, fast-moving, and open to anyone with a computer or phone — posed a new challenge. The administration needed a more aggressive strategy to dominate the narrative.

Strong-arming social media

In episode 5 of “The Coverup,” I ask Taibbi how they pulled it off. As one of the first journalists to dig into the Twitter Files, Taibbi exposed the machinery behind the censorship regime. Americans suspected that platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube were suppressing dissent during COVID. But the Twitter Files confirmed what many feared: They weren’t acting alone. They took orders from the FBI directly.

And these weren’t polite requests, either. When the government “suggested” something, tech companies treated it as a command.

It all traces back to — surprise, surprise — the Russia hoax.

In 2017, Congress hauled tech executives into hearings and accused them of letting Russian disinformation run wild. Essentially, they were given an offer they couldn’t refuse: Allow the government to play a role in content moderation or prepare to be regulated into submission.

RELATED: On the 9th anniversary of Russiagate, the hoax is finally crumbling

Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images

Their surrender gave U.S. intelligence agencies de facto control over what Americans could say online. The feds told platforms which posts to delete, which users to silence, and how to suppress the rest. You could post your opinion — as long as no one could see it. “Shadow bans” became the preferred method of censorship: clean, quiet, and deniable.

The silver lining

Thanks to Taibbi — and a handful of journalists who still value truth over access — we now see how the government sold Americans on fiction. Russia hacked the election. COVID came from a bowl of bat soup. Question either and you’d vanish from the digital public square.

Millions believed these lies. And under their influence, they did real damage — locking down schools, closing businesses, and sowing doubt about fair elections.

But truth has a way of leaking out.

It’s taken time, but the lies are unraveling. And that’s the silver lining. In a world where information moves faster than censors can keep up, suppression doesn’t work like it used to. So long as we have truth-tellers willing to dig and defy — like Taibbi — the regime won’t have the last word.

We won’t get fooled again.

Episode 5 of “The Coverup” premieres Thursday, July 31.

Hang ’em high? Gabbard’s docs could rock DC to the core



Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard — one of the few people in Washington who still seems to believe public service means serving the public — has ignited a political firestorm with her latest move. In a stunning act of transparency and defiance, Gabbard declassified over 100 pages of intelligence documents she claims expose a “treasonous conspiracy” orchestrated by senior Obama-era officials to fabricate the false appearance that Russia helped elect Donald Trump in 2016.

Not only did she release these documents publicly, but she also referred the matter to the FBI and Department of Justice for possible criminal prosecution. Her list of alleged conspirators includes former President Barack Obama, former CIA Director John Brennan, former FBI Director James Comey, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and former National Security Adviser Susan Rice.

If the Justice Department doesn’t act, the deep state will be confirmed — not as a 'conspiracy theory,' but as a fact.

Gabbard says the documents prove what many Americans have suspected for years: The entire Russia collusion narrative was not only false but knowingly manufactured and politically weaponized. She claims the declassified assessments directly contradict the official narrative, showing analysts concluded Russia had neither intent nor capability to sway the election.

Instead, Gabbard says Obama and his top advisers cherry-picked and distorted intelligence to craft a narrative that could undermine Trump’s presidency before it began. That narrative, of course, fueled the Mueller probe, impeachments, FISA warrants, and years of media hysteria.

The significance of Gabbard’s referral can’t be overstated. It’s not just a political gesture — she’s handing real evidence to prosecutors and demanding real consequences. While most of D.C. hides behind process and posturing, Gabbard is doing what Congress refused to do: treat treason like treason.

She’s one of the only officials in Washington doing her job, regardless of party or personality. In Gabbard’s eyes, the rule of law applies to everyone.

Whether the Justice Department takes up the referral remains to be seen. The agency has confirmed receipt and reportedly assembled an internal strike force to assess the claims. That’s a notable development. But considering the department’s track record, expectations remain low. Many believe the department prioritizes preserving the status quo over seeking justice. If past trends hold, the smart money says they’ll delay, deflect, and ultimately decline to prosecute — and that outcome, by itself, would be a great shame.

‘People want hangings’

I stopped by the Morning Glory Café in Indian Harbour Beach, Florida, on Thursday morning and struck up a conversation with the breakfast-counter regulars. Their reactions tell you everything you need to know about where the American people stand.

Betty K., retired schoolteacher: “Tulsi’s actually standing up to the swamp — for once. Americans deserve real justice, not cover-ups.”

Bob H., small-business owner: “If Hillary, Obama, Brennan really did conspire, then yes — charge them. No one can be above the law.”

Cindy M., nurse: “This is gut-wrenching. ... Our intelligence agencies turned on us. Gabbard is the first one who seems to want justice.”

A woman eating beside her husband, who asked to remain unnamed: “People want hangings.”

She didn’t flinch — and neither did anyone else.

RELATED: If no one goes to jail, the coup was a success

SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images

If this referral results in prosecutions, the consequences would be seismic: potential prison time, disgrace, and the end of political legacies. More importantly, it would send a chilling message to every bureaucrat and agency head: Abuse of state power and election interference will not be tolerated. It could begin to restore the fractured trust between the American people and their government — with one critical truth: No one, not even a president, is above the law.

If the Justice Department does nothing, then the opposite truth becomes undeniable: that intelligence agencies have become untouchable; that the deep state protects its own; that the law applies only to the powerless.

Our government would be confirmed as a hollow shell, run by unelected bureaucrats and political fixers. We wouldn’t just be losing faith in the republic. We’d be living in a managed illusion, where facts are fungible and truth belongs to whoever controls the narrative.

Justice, not theater

Americans are fed up. They don’t want another committee. They don’t want another special counsel. They don’t want another round of political theater. They want justice — and they’re not wrong.

The Constitution guarantees equal protection under the law. It does not say, “unless your name is Obama.” And yet, here we are, watching the slow-motion erosion of our legal system while those entrusted to defend it look the other way.

Tulsi Gabbard just threw down the gauntlet. Now, we get to see who in this government still has a spine. If the Department of Justice acts, it’s the beginning of a reckoning. If it doesn’t, the deep state will be confirmed — not as a “conspiracy theory,” but as a fact.

And the people? They’ll take that truth with them — to the ballot box, to the streets, and to every café counter in America.

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