The American people appear to be caught in a great political bait-and-switch covering the tracks of rogue actors within the intelligence community and holdover officials from the previous administration still working in the federal government.

While the mainstream media is furiously busy distracting the public with scare-stories about potentially illegal Russian meddling in American politics — the more scandalous story of American intelligence officials meddling in American politics is being largely ignored.

“The real crime is the criminal conspiracy inside the deep state to transcribe the private conversation of a U.S. citizen and leak it to press collaborators to destroy a political career.”

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“The real crime here, however, is not that the incoming national security adviser spoke with a Russian diplomat seeking guidance on the future president’s thinking,” wrote conservative commentator Pat Buchanan on Thursday. “The real crime is the criminal conspiracy inside the deep state to transcribe the private conversation of a U.S. citizen and leak it to press collaborators to destroy a political career,” he said.

On Tuesday, the Washington Free Beacon reported the existence of a “secret, months-long campaign by former Obama administration confidants to handicap President Donald Trump’s national security apparatus.”

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“Multiple sources in and out of the White House … described to the Washington Free Beacon a behind-the-scenes effort by these officials to plant a series of damaging stories about Flynn in the national media,” the Free Beacon reported.

“The drumbeat of leaks of sensitive material related to General Flynn has been building since he was named to his position,” an unnamed member of the White House’s National Security Council reportedly told the Beacon. Flynn’s resignation “was not the result of a series of random events,” he said.

The material leaked by Trump’s enemies, whether they are bitter Obama loyalists or deep state actors, is not just sensitive — it’s potentially highly classified material. “There does appear to be a well orchestrated effort to attack Flynn and others in the administration,” Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), Republican chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, told Bloomberg reporter Eli Lake.

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“From the leaking of phone calls between the president and foreign leaders to what appears to be high-level FISA Court information [emphasis added], to the leaking of American citizens being denied security clearances, it looks like a pattern,” Nunes said.

The significance of this cannot be overstated. “Normally intercepts of U.S. officials and citizens are some of the most tightly held government secrets. This is for good reason,” Lake explains in his article, “The Political Assassination of Michael Flynn.”

“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,” Lake writes.

As if all this weren’t bad enough, some have asserted the effort to sabotage Trump not only involved some of the highest levels of government but may even have been initiated by Obama himself before Trump even took office.

“I put this right at the feet of John Brennan, and Jim Clapper, and I would even go so far as to say the White House was directly involved before they left,” retired Lt. Colonel Tony Schaffer, a former CIA-trained intelligence officer, said while appearing on Fox Business on Wednesday.

Regardless of Obama’s personal involvement, that efforts to sabotage Trump’s foreign policy goals are being largely orchestrated by those who were at the highest levels of the intelligence services during his presidency, seems confirmed by the Washington Post’s first report on Flynn’s having discussed sanctions with the Russian ambassador.

“Nine current and former officials, who were in senior positions at multiple agencies at the time of the calls [emphasis added], spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters,” the Post reported on February 9.

While Flynn’s actions certainly deserve to be investigated, that the mainstream media is wantonly ignoring the unprecedented story of multiple senior intelligence officials leaking highly classified information in order to subvert a newly-installed president speaks volumes to their unbridled partisanship.

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“The story is both [Flynn’s actions and the leaks],” Robert Kaufman, a professor of public policy and political scientist at Pepperdine University, told LifeZette. “The Obama Administration’s behavior deserves intense scrutiny,” Kaufman said.

Although “Flynn’s behavior does raise legitimate questions,” noted Kaufman, “the loudest critics have the least credibility to raise them.”

Those with something to lose from a policy shift under the Trump administration would have Americans focused on the threat of dubious Russian infiltration of the White House and have us ignore nefarious attempts to interfere in the democratic process and the use of state secrets to target political enemies.