Deep state cadres pose a clear and present danger to democracy in America.

America must “tend to this garden of democracy or else things could fall apart quickly. That’s what happened in Germany in the 1930s which, despite the democracy of the Weimar Republic and centuries of high-level cultural and scientific achievements, Hitler rose to dominate.”

It was the sort of thing one would expect from a UC Berkeley sophomore but the speaker was the 44th President of the United States in a December 5 address to the Economic Club of Chicago. This was the president who thought “Austrian” was a language, so his reductio ad Hitlerum was entirely predictable and completely without significance. On the other hand, there are parallels to National Socialist Germany in America.

The FBI’s current stonewalling bears more than a passing resemblance to the Geheime Staatspolizei, the National Socialists’ secret state police. The people’s representatives have been seeking answers on the probe of Russian influence in the 2016 election. Former FBI boss Robert Mueller has failed to turn up any evidence of “collusion” in more than a year, but other matters have come to light.

FBI man Peter Strzok has been Hillary Clinton’s Odd Job, changing gross negligence to extremely careless, failing to keep records of the interview with the former First Lady, and allowing her aides Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills to tell more than 300 lies about the unsecured server Clinton used to send classified material.

Representatives such as Trey Gowdy and Jim Jordan want to know if Strzok played a role in the compiling the fake dossier with Russian content. They also seek to know whether Strzok was the one who deployed the dossier to gain a FISA warrant to enable spying on the Trump campaign and unmask U.S. citizens.

“I’m not prepared to discuss what happened in the court,” FBI boss Christopher Wray told the representatives. Wray would keep that secret, but he did say that negligent and careless were practically synonymous. That begged the question of why Strzok made the change.

Wray talked up the brave men and women of the FBI but left out the way the Russian intelligence had gained influence by corrupting FBI agents. The FBI’s Robert Hanssen, for example, gave thousands of pages of classified material, including U.S. nuclear secrets, to the KGB and its Russian successor agency the SVR. Hanssen pulled this off from 1979 to 2001 and caused enormous damage to the United States.

The FBI’s Richard Miller, a counterintelligence man like Strzok, also sold classified documents to Russian agents. The FBI’s Earl Pitts gave U.S. secrets to the Russians from 1987 until 1992. So when it comes to Russian influence, the FBI is not squeaky clean. On the other hand, when Russia warned the FBI the Tsarnaev brothers were dangerous, the FBI’s investigation found no links to terrorism and failed to prevent the Tsarnaev’s attack on the Boston Marathon in 2013.

Former FBI boss James Comey was a Clinton cadre going back to his days as a U.S. Attorney. When the Clintons’ national security advisor Sandy Berger ripped off classified material from the National Archives, deputy attorney general James Comey let Berger off with a fine and allowed him keep secret the full extent of what he stole.

That favor surely played a role in POTUS 44’s selection of Comey as FBI director. In that role, shortly before the Democrat’s 2016 convention, Comey recommended no criminal charges against the former First Lady. It was, as David Horowitz said, “the most breathtaking fix in American history.”

During his wife’s run for the Virginia state senate in 2015, deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe received more than $500,000 from a PAC run by governor Terry McCauliffe, another Clinton capo. McCabe had oversight of the Clinton email investigation, which turned up no criminal charges.

McCabe also turned up in the texts from Peter Strzok to his main squeeze Lisa Page, an FBI lawyer. “I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy’s office,” Strzok texted on August 15, 2016, “that there’s no way [Trump] gets elected — but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk. It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40.”

McCabe was slated to testify before the House Intelligence Committee last Tuesday but the FBI held him back, claiming a last-minute “scheduling error.” A congressional source told Fox News that McCabe has an “Ohr problem,” a reference to Justice Department official Bruce Ohr and his Russophile wife Nellie, both with connections to Fusion GPS. Andy McCabe is now slated to testify to the House Intelligence Committee on December 19.

Mueller’s ongoing investigation also calls to mind an historical parallel POTUS 44 failed to mention. As Stalin’s security boss Lavrentiy Beria said, “Show me the man and I’ll find you the crime.” To Alan Dershowitz, that sounds a lot like the investigation Mueller is dragging on.

Like J. Edgar Hoover, Christopher Wray appears to believe the FBI is a government unto itself and not subject to oversight by the people’s representatives. So if Congress and President Trump don’t tend to the garden of democracy, things could fall apart quickly.

Meanwhile, POTUS 44’s comparison of Trump with Hitler sounds like North Korea’s charge that Donald Trump represents “Nazism in the 21st century.” So in a standoff between an elected American president and a genocidal Stalinist dictatorship, leading Democrats have picked their team.