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ChatChat - Claudia Cragg


Apr 23, 2020

Claudia Cragg @claudiacragg speaks here with David Rohde @RohdeD who is two-time recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, an executive editor of The New Yorker website, an MSNBC contributor, and a former New York Times, Reuters, and Christian Science Monitor reporter. 

He is the author of the just published 'IN DEEP: The FBI, the CIA, and the Truth about America’s “Deep State” 

Today, three-quarters of Americans polled believe that a group of unelected government and military officials are secretly manipulating national policy. Americans increasingly distrust the politicians, lobbyists and journalists who they believe unilaterally set the country’s political agenda. American democracy faces its biggest crisis of legitimacy in a half century.

Based on dozens of interviews with CIA operatives, FBI agents, current and former White House officials and members of Congress, IN DEEP chronicles forty years of FBI and CIA scandals and exposes the erosion of the post-Watergate system of checks and balances designed to prevent presidents, CIA operatives and FBI agents from abusing their powers. Investigating the claims and counterclaims of the Trump era, and the relentless spread of conspiracy theories online and on-air, Rohde concludes that there is no “deep state”— not in the conspiratorial way that Trump uses the term. Whether out of fear or calculation, however, Trump is creating a parallel, private government filled with like-minded loyalists, such as Rudy Giuliani and Sean Hannity, without transparency, democratic norms, or public processes — a “deep state” of his own.