Mark S. Zaid, the attorney representing the so-called “whistleblower” in the impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump, tweeted in 2017 that the “coup has started,” adding that “impeachment will follow ultimately.”

Zaid was referring to the firing of Acting Attorney General Sally Yates, who refused to defend President Trump’s executive order barring travel to the U.S. from terror-prone countries that had been identified as such under the Obama administration. Yates later claimed that there was no constitutional basis for defending the order in court, but the order (later amended twice) was upheld in the U.S. Supreme Court due to the president’s wide prerogatives over immigration.

Fox News reported Zaid’s tweet Wednesday, which drew attention to his long, extreme anti-Trump Twitter history.

Yates was at the center of a network of “Deep State” operatives committed to bringing down President Trump — what Breitbart News called, the same day as Zaid posted his tweet, the “coup of the bureaucrats.”

The so-called “whistleblower” is a CIA operative, identified by RealClearInvestigations as Eric Ciaramella, who not only worked with former Vice President Joe Biden but also interacted with one of the key Democratic operatives responsible for bringing Ukraine into the 2016 election and crafting the false “Russia collusion” conspiracy theory.

As Breitbart News’ Aaron Klein has reported:

Zaid is representing the so-called whistleblower as an attorney for the small Compass Rose Legal Group. The firm’s founder, Andrew Bakaj, confirmed that his law firm is also representing “multiple whistleblowers in connection to the underlying August 12, 2019, disclosure to the Intelligence Community Inspector General.” Breitbart News reported that a search of Bakaj’s Twitter account finds rabid anti-Trump posts such as repeated advocacy for Trump cabinet members to invoke the 25th Amendment of the Constitution to remove Trump as president over claimed competency issues. Zaid’s New York Times oped was written with John N. Tye. The two in 2017 co-foundedWhistleblower Aid, a small nonprofit that blasted advertisements around D.C. actively seeking whistleblowers during the Trump administration.

In addition, Klein has reported, Zaid’s firm offered discounted rates for whistleblowers seeking legal representation — in return for providing dirt on the Trump administration.

President Trump has taken to calling the impeachment effort a “coup” attempt — using rhetoric that left-wing critics have called “extremely dangerous.”

It turns out that Trump’s opponents have used that language themselves — as a rallying cry.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He earned an A.B. in Social Studies and Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard College, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.