Is the “deep state” a threat to Donald Trump — or to democracy?

President Trump started his February 16 press conference sounding almost subdued. Standing in front of a backdrop of flags and gold curtains in the White House East Room, he announced his new nominee for labor secretary — Alex Acosta — to a quiet and respectful audience.

But the calm did not hold. As the event went on, the president became combative, visibly angry with the press. “I’m not ranting and raving,” he said. “I’m just telling you, you're dishonest people.”

He was particularly incensed over leaks. Unnamed US officials had recently tipped off New York Times and Washington Post reporters to the contents of taped conversations between Trump confidants and Russian officials. The Post reported that Trump’s national adviser, Michael Flynn, had lied about calls to the Russian ambassador — forcing Flynn’s resignation just three days before the presser. The Times had just reported that Trump’s campaign staff had been in regular contact with Russian intelligence officers, raising questions about what, exactly, they talked about.

The president knew he was being undercut by his own spies. And he was not happy about it.

“This whole Russia scam that you guys are building so that you don't talk about the real subject, which is illegal leaks,” Trump said. “I've actually called the Justice Department to look into the leaks. Those are criminal leaks.”

The president had some strange bedfellows on this issue. Some Trump critics in the press, people you’d think would be celebrating the leakers, were worried about the precedent they set.

“Selectively disclosing details of private conversations monitored by the FBI or NSA gives the permanent state the power to destroy reputations from the cloak of anonymity. This is what police states do,” Eli Lake, a neoconservative columnist at Bloomberg View, wrote in a column that Trump praised on Twitter.

Glenn Greenwald, the editor of the left-wing publication the Intercept, wrote something making basically the same point as Lake’s column — an ideological convergence that I’m not sure has ever happened and probably never will again.

Lake and Greenwald’s complaints share a common thread. Both agree that there’s a “permanent state” or “deep state” inside the US government, made up of its intelligence and security establishment, and that this government-within-a-government’s volleys against the Trump administration are a threat to democracy. You may support their leaks when they hurt Trump, the thinking goes, but the precedent is extremely dangerous — one that threatens to undermine American democracy in the long run.

There’s another way to look at it, though: The leaks are a sign of American democracy’s health.

If the goal is to expose wrongdoing by government officials, then what’s happening is less like a cancer and more like antibodies. Comparisons to actual foreign intelligence networks that have threatened their country’s democracy, like Turkey’s infamous “deep state,” serve more to misinform than anything else.

The Turkish deep state is an example of a security establishment secretly pulling the puppet strings of politicians behind the scenes. What’s happening in the United States, by contrast, is more like whistleblowing: Spies aware of concerning information about officials at the top levels of US government are exposing it. That’s why, despite Greenwald’s general concern about the threat spies pose to democracy, he wrote a column calling the specific Flynn leaks “wholly justified.”

These spies are risking prosecution to bring oversight to the shadowiest part of the Trump administration: its relationship with Russia. They aren’t undermining democratic accountability; they are doing their best to get information to the public that it needs to know precisely so the normal mechanisms of democratic accountability can function.

“The level of anxiety in the [national security] community is at the highest level I’ve experienced in my professional life,” says Peter Feaver, a former Bush administration official and current Duke University professor who studies the national security bureaucracy. “Desperate times call for desperate measures.”

What is a deep state, and does America have one?

(Chris McGrath/Getty Images)

The key point of comparison when it comes to spies interfering with democracy — the country for which the term “deep state” was actually coined — is Turkey. And experts on the country are deeply skeptical of the comparison.

“I think I speak for every scholar of Turkey, when I say, please, please do not apply language of ‘deep state’ to [the] US,” Howard Eissenstat, a professor of Middle East history at St. Lawrence University, tweeted.

To understand why Eissenstat feels so strongly about this, you need to look at what actually happened in Ankara.

Early in the Cold War, the CIA funded a program called “Operation Gladio,” an effort to build up paramilitary groups around Europe that could serve as a resistance force in the event of a Soviet invasion. In Turkey, Gladio didn’t exactly go as planned: It ended up creating an armed network linked to, but not subordinate to, the government’s official security and intelligence forces. It was a security network inside the security state.

In the absence of an actual Soviet invasion, the Gladio network in Turkey turned to other pursuits. It built up links to organized crime, for revenue, and to a hypernationalist terrorist group called the Grey Wolves. This network’s influence was supercharged in the 1980s and ’90s as an outgrowth of Turkey’s bloody war against the PKK, a Kurdish separatist group that operated in the country’s southeast.

The network that began as small paramilitary pockets had, by the early 1990s, expanded into a massive corrupt network encompassing politicians, organized crime, intelligence officials, the military, and even some allies in the judicial system. It exercised a shadow, invisible veto on Turkish politics: Elected officials who crossed it risked their jobs and even their lives.

“These people carried out assassinations and acts of sabotage, and they staged events that were designed to instill fear. And they always got away,” Kerem Öktem, a professor at the Center of Southeast European Studies, told the New Yorker’s Dexter Filkins.

This is what an actual deep state looks like: an organized cabal inside the government capable of essentially nullifying the results of elections if it chooses to mobilize. There is no evidence of any such organized conspiracy inside the US government aimed at Trump or anyone else.

This is why using the terms “deep state” or even “permanent state” to describe what’s happening in the US government right now obscures more than it informs. If these terms are being used to refer to the fact that the United States has a permanent national security bureaucracy, that’s a banal observation that applies to nearly every country on Earth. If they’re being used to imply that there’s a vast, organized Turkey-style internal security conspiracy pulling the strings of the US government, that is false and misleading.

“Many countries have something that can be reasonably termed a deep state,” Michael Koplow, a Turkey expert at the Israel Policy Forum, tells me. “The question is whether one presumes that the deep state controls the organs of the state and acts as a puppet master above elected politicians, and I think in the US’s case, that is a wholly inappropriate characterization.”

This isn’t just a semantic issue.

If the US really does have an organized network like Turkey’s inside its government, then the leaks really should be concerning: It suggests the intelligence services are waging a concerted assault on American democracy. If, by contrast, the anti-Trump leaks are coming from a few members of the bureaucracy, acting essentially independently and for their own reasons, then it’s hard to see how they pose a fundamental threat to American democracy.

Labeling leaks the work of a “deep state” is a way of making what’s going on seem nefarious without actually having the evidence to back it up.

“Anything that would try to portray what the leakers, or what the government officials try to do as a ‘Deep State’ is an attempt to delegitimize whistleblowers or people who believe that what the government is doing right is against the Constitution,” Omer Taspinar, a professor at the National War College who studies Turkey, told the Atlantic’s David Graham. “Any kind of bureaucratic resistance is too innocuous to be labeled as the activities of the Deep State.”

The intel community is reacting to a uniquely threatening administration

(Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Though what we’re seeing in America is very far from a “deep state,” it definitely is not normal. The sheer volume of leaks from bureaucrats and career intelligence officers is beyond anything we’ve seen in recent history.

“The permanent government, as a rule, doesn’t do much leaking,” Stephen Hess, who served on White House staff during the Eisenhower and Nixon presidencies and as an adviser to Presidents Ford and Carter, tells me. “These are real professionals, they learned not to leak — and suddenly, this is an avalanche.”

Trump sees these leaks as a plot by Obama administration leftovers. “They’re put out by people either in agencies — I think you’ll see it stopping because now we have our people in,” he said in his presser. If you agree with him — or the more subtle Lake-Greenwald argument that this is an attempt by spies to suborn the legitimate government — then worrying about the leaks’ effect on democracy is understandable.

But another way to look at the situation, according to Hess, is that we have an administration that has an unprecedented number of scandals that only intelligence officials are qualified to shed light on.

“[The intelligence community] is very seriously worried — not about their own position, about this man,” Hess, who spent his post-government career studying leaks at the Brookings Institution, says. “And they have a right to be worried.”

Consider, for example, the New York Times story about the Trump campaign’s conversations with Russia. Clearly, this is a potentially huge revelation — one with major significance for how the public sees its leader. It’s also something that, absent intelligence leaks, reporters would have been hard-pressed to uncover.

It’s unlikely anyone other than a handful of high-level members of the Trump campaign knew about these calls, and the odds that they would talk — and implicate themselves in a potentially major scandal — are next to zero. Getting Russian sources to talk would have been equally difficult.

If the intelligence community failed to leak the intercepted calls, the public might well never have found out about them. What the leakers are doing, then, is more like whistleblowing than political campaigning: calling attention to a scandal that otherwise might have flown under the radar.

Ditto with the Flynn scandal. The fact that Flynn called Ambassador Sergey Kislyak in December, on the same day the Obama administration imposed sanctions on Russia, became public knowledge in January. The Trump administration admitted that the two men spoke but vigorously denied that they had discussed sanctions.

The administration trotted out Vice President Mike Pence to defend this line — but apparently, Pence was lied to. Flynn had told him, prior to his public appearances, that sanctions hadn’t come up. We only found out that this was untrue in early February, after the Washington Post published a report that the call between Flynn and Kislyak had been intercepted by US intelligence.

That story was sourced entirely to current and former US intelligence officials — that is, to leakers. There was no evidence that Flynn was ever going to come clean. In fact, there was no indication that Flynn was going to pay any consequences, period, for lying either to the public or to Pence. The leaking is a clear example of executive branch malfeasance, the leaks as pure an example of whistleblowing as one can think of.

Both of these scandals, as I’ve argued at length, are potentially monumental. The only way to get to the bottom of this is a public investigation, which never would have happened without the leaks.

“These stories are about repeated conversations between Flynn and perhaps others with the Russians — not one, but repeated,” Hess says. “You have to ask: Did Flynn or others tell Trump? ... If that ever comes out, and Flynn is ever pushed in a congressional hearing, that’s, wow — you’re moving into impeachable stuff.”

Now, some of the leakers are likely angry at Trump for his repeated public insults of the intelligence community — his public willingness to trust WikiLeaks’ view of the Russia hack over the US intelligence community’s, for example.

But Trump’s war on the intelligence services isn’t exactly innocuous. Trump has dubious ties to a foreign state and is unwilling to come clean about conflicts of interest concerning his vast business empire. His public feud with the intelligence services is meant to neuter one of the ways that the truth about his activities could emerge. Remember that his fight with the intelligence community only began after the CIA concluded that Russia had interfered in the US election — a conclusion that Trump found politically inconvenient.

Leaks can be a roundabout way of preserving an independent check on an unreliable executive. That’s especially true when the majority in Congress is the same party as the president, and is providing limited oversight at best. Rep. Jason Chaffetz, chair of the House Oversight Committee, is currently launching an investigation into the leaks, not Trump’s misconduct itself.

“Members of the civil service should not be at war with a new administration. Members of the civil service should not have to be at war with a new administration,” Daniel Nexon, a professor at Georgetown University who studies US foreign policy, writes at the Lawyers, Guns, and Money blog. “But it’s how dysfunction and civil-service blowback play out in a highly polarized environment.”

Of course, it’s possible that spies will go too far — leak information that serves only to embarrass the administration (say, details of a Cabinet official’s sexual practices) that don’t reveal important hidden information. If that starts to happen, we really ought to worry about spies controlling politicians

But right now, that’s not what we’re seeing. And it’s far from obvious that there’s a slippery slope.

“We’ve never had a president like this,” Hess says. “There’s rather a unique confluence between this man and the intelligence [services], which I don’t think is permanent by any means.”

There is a potential for abuse. That’s why we have laws.

(NY Daily News Archive/Getty Images)

The closest thing America has had to a Turkey-style deep state was probably the FBI under its first director, J. Edgar Hoover. During his nearly 40-year tenure, from 1935 to 1972, Hoover used his organization’s intelligence-gathering capabilities to turn himself into a political powerhouse, one most often wielded against legitimate political dissenters like communists and civil rights activists.

In 1963, Hoover led a campaign to take down Martin Luther King Jr., whom he saw as a dangerous subversive. FBI agents sent a letter to King threatening to expose proof of his marital infidelities unless he killed himself first.

After Richard Nixon took office in 1969, he considered firing Hoover, but he ultimately decided against it. A 1971 tape revealed his reasoning: The president was afraid Hoover would "bring down the temple" on him — that is, release secret information on the president of the United States.

Hoover’s legacy of misconduct points to an essential truth: Whenever you have a powerful intelligence community, there’s a real potential for abuse. US spies have tremendous powers available to them, by virtue of who they are and what they do. They had that power before they leaked information about Trump, and they’ll have it after.

This is why we have laws reining in the intelligence community — rules that delineate how the FBI, CIA, and NSA are allowed to gather information and what they’re allowed to do with it once they get it. It’s why you have oversight, in all three branches of government, designed to check the abuse of these powers.

These laws are what really check the abuse of power by intelligence services. There wasn’t some kind of taboo, or gentlemen’s agreement, preventing them from leaking damaging information about politicians prior to the Trump presidency.

Now, maybe you think current laws give the intelligence community too free a hand. After Hoover’s death in 1972, Congress passed a series of laws limiting the FBI’s powers, including imposing a term limit of 10 years on FBI directors. It could be the case that Congress needs to go further, and limit the powers of the intelligence community even more. Maybe you agree with the Obama administration’s decision to prosecute some leakers, though Hess (and other experts) thinks that created a worrying precedent.

But it’s legal authority, and not individual decisions to leak, that might (might!) present a threat to American democracy. Right now the leaks that we’re seeing aren’t undermining the public’s control over the government. They’re strengthening it.