Well folks, turns out the conspiracy board in the basement just got validated by an actual career CIA officer with a camera pointed at his face. James Erdman III, a former senior operations officer at the agency, sat down with journalist Catherine Herridge this week and basically said yeah, there are unelected bureaucrats who decided they know better than the president. As USA Journal reported, this lines up perfectly with what Trump revealed during his primetime address.
Erdman dropped this absolute gem of a quote: career officials genuinely believe they are "the adults in the room" who exist to "temper" the "worst tendencies" of elected leaders. Oh wonderful. So the people nobody voted for, whose names nobody knows, who collect paychecks from your tax dollars, just casually decided that presidential directives are more like friendly suggestions. Democracy is adorable, isn't it?
But wait, it gets spicier. Erdman pointed specifically to China as the big one, saying there was reluctance to confront Beijing while Trump occupied the Oval Office. He even referenced a specific email where officials apparently chose NOT to surface certain intelligence because it might end up in the President's Daily Brief. You know, that document specifically created so the president can make informed decisions. They were like, "Nah, he doesn't need to see this one."
This tracks perfectly with declassified documents from last week showing CIA analysts watering down their assessments about Chinese interference, NSA personnel editing presidential briefings to conceal findings that China was actively working against a sitting president, and FBI Foreign Interference Task Force lead Nikki Floris literally writing in an email that she was "basically running a shadow government across the FBI." Points for honesty, I guess? Most people at least TRY to hide their power grabs.
Erdman confirmed that email from Floris is legitimate. He also had kind words for Tulsi Gabbard, calling her the only person who genuinely attempted intelligence community reform at Trump's direction. According to him, Gabbard had boxes of documents ready for declassification that the CIA seized before she could release them. She eventually resigned citing health reasons before the full picture could emerge. Nothing suspicious about that timing at all.
So what happens now? Bill Pulte is currently executing a fourth round of layoffs at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, systematically identifying and removing the very people who staffed this parallel power structure. The folks who spent years deciding which presidential orders deserved their compliance are now discovering what it feels like when someone else makes decisions about THEIR careers.
The whole situation is genuinely bananas. A career intelligence professional went on camera, with documentation, and confirmed that elements within the spy agencies appointed themselves as America's real leadership. They put it in writing. They sent emails about it. They apparently never considered that those emails might eventually surface. For intelligence professionals, that is hilariously poor operational security.
Read more conservative news commentary at: USA Journal News
