The mainstream media’s effort to cast doubt on the existence of the Deep State has been dealt a stunning body blow by an FBI report on rogue elements within the permanent federal bureaucracy.

After conducting 2,000 interviews, the FBI’s field offices in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Detroit, and New York compiled a 1,400-word report on the Deep State last summer for then-Director James Comey. The field report is being published for the first time in my new book All Out War: The Plot to Destroy Trump.

“The Bureau has gotten actionable intelligence that there is, within the federal government, a growing and organized movement to block or interfere with administration policy decisions,” the report states.

“There have been regular organized meetings of large numbers of government workers at a church in the Columbia Heights area of the District [of Columbia] where plans have been discussed to actively sabotage government programs they disagree with,” the report continues. “These would include immigration enforcement, crackdowns on welfare fraud and any weakening of environmental rules. Plus, there is concern that some dissenting government workers might be dislodged from their positions by the Trump Administration.

“There is evidence that, while there is a great deal of agitation within the government, there are non-government individuals associated with unions and immigration and environmental groups who are behind these meetings.

“Legal groups have been teaching some of these government employees what they can get away with doing in terms of delaying enforcement and what they cannot in terms of refusing to obey orders, which would constitute going on strike and get them dismissed under civil service rules.

“One management level government employee said, ‘Bureaucrats are going to delay, drag their feet and throw roadblocks in the way of unconscionable actions by the Trump White House. It is going to become impossible to get these actions done.’”

Anti-Trump leaks—all of them illegal and based on anonymous sources—have found their way with alarming regularity onto the front pages of the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times, and on the nightly newscasts of the major broadcast and cable networks.

This cascade of negative stories has led President Trump to charge that the leaks are part of a Deep State conspiracy to destroy his presidency. Trump even compared the defamatory leaks to the big lie tactics of the Nazis.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer virtually acknowledged the existence of the Deep State when he told MSNBC’s Rachel Madow that Trump would regret his attacks on the intelligence community.

“Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you,” said Schumer. “So even for a practical, supposedly hard-nosed businessman, [Trump’s] beig really dumb to do this.”

Newt Gingrich is a firm believer in the Deep State.

“Of course the Deep State exists,” he said. “There’s a permanent state of massive bureaucracies that do whatever they want and set up deliberate leaks to attack the president. This is what the Deep State does. They create a lie, spread a lie, fail to check the lie, and then deny they were behind the lie.”

Disruptions caused by members of the Deep State have been particularly conspicuous in the Interior Department, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Department of Justice.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions read his top staff the riot act when he learned that disloyal employees with access to secure government files were deleting computer files and destroying evidence in an effort to impede the Justice Department’s investigation of sanctuary cities and violent leftwing groups.

Edward Klein is the former editor in chief of the New York Times Magazine and the author of numerous bestsellers. His latest book is All Out War: The Plot to Destroy Trump.