Highly paid, highly powered, and highly networked, America's establishment mandarins are not happy.

They're not happy that Donald Trump rejects their fake wisdom. They're not happy that the American people are beginning to see behind the curtain. They're not happy that their carefully constructed influence operation — the legacy media they use to send down wisdom from on high for the rubes to read and heed — has crumbled. They're not happy that the president is not beholden to their clique, and that they cannot control him.

The tight connection between the establishment mandarins — politicians, lobbyists, former politicians, crony capitalists, Wall Street titans, legacy media scribblers and babblers — and the entrenched federal bureaucracy ensured that Trump's disruption of their power created consequences for his administration.

The intelligence community bureaucrats, basking in the last eight years of the John Brennan regime politicizing their operations, and creating powerful fiefdoms, became a tool of the politically correct Progressive presidential campaign. Never in American history had the intelligence community (IC) been used to generate campaign opposition research. Brennan latched on to the "Russians did it" theme, and worked the IC to crank out fake headlines. These government employees are unlike any other group in the government. They are protected by multiple layers of secrecy and an assumption, by most observers, that IC employees are somehow noble non-partisans.

The intelligence community's non-partisanship was more true in the past, but that assumption is now inoperative and dangerously naïve.

David Ignatius, tightly connected to high level CIA and other intel community leakers, revealed details of wiretapped phone calls by Flynn.

Ignatius's novels, based on CIA case officer's lives, read more like non-fiction. "Agents of Innocence" provides the most realistic "fictional" depiction of the life and operations of a CIA case officer. It is clear that Ignatius has one or more CIA operations officers providing him with exact details of their lives and operations.

Now Brennan is gone, but his cronies and wannabe's remain in the bureaucracy.

Hopelessly politicized and terrified of losing their power, these political shadow warriors turn to their buddies in the media. They're leaking the most highly classified types of intelligence to the establishment guardians at The Washington Post, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal. Protected by their classified identities, they are setting in motion the information warfare operations they believe will take down the president. The first battle in this war was the destruction Trump's National Security Advisor, General Mike Flynn.

The slow motion coup d'état is in full swing. The establishment and its pawns do not have the stomach to roll tanks up to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, but their actions are intended to have the same effect. Americans must be aware of the threat, and at some point we'll need to support the president's counter-attacks.

Kent Clizbe is a former CIA ops officer, and expert in counter-terrorism and Islamic extremism, credibility assessment, and fraud detection. He is an historian of anti-American espionage operations, and author of "Willing Accomplices: How KGB Covert Influence Ops Created Political Correctness." His website is KentClizbe.com. Read more of his reports — Go Here Now.