The Memo

Twenty Years Inside the Deep State Fighting for America First

Rich Higgins

• Publisher: Calamo Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780999705940
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Memo is therivetingstory of how Rich Higgins' twenty year career inside the Deep State enabled him to discern - well before anyone else - the Deep State's efforts to stop and ultimately remove the Presidentfrom office. No one was more bold - or more frighteningly accurate - in anticipating the ferocity of the Deep State's assault on the Constitution and President Trump.

1

BUSTED

Just before I was perp-walked out of the Old Executive Office Building and onto the street in front of the White House, my executioners let me collect the personal stuff from my office. In fact, they were even generous enough to give me a bag I could use for my belongings. It was a sort of shopping bag made from something that I suppose you would call polyester. It was green. The shade of green usually seen in off-brand plastic soda bottles or pennants flying in front of used car lots.

It was ugly and synthetic; you'd think the White House and the National Security Council could have done better than that. But, then, it might have been intentional. A small way of adding to my sense of humiliation. Like dressing me up in a clown suit or something. But probably not—most likely the bag was just handy. Someone in the government had ordered those bags by the gross, not paying attention to the color. Now they had to be used for something.

Anyway, I didn't feel humiliated or disgraced or anything like that. I was angry, of course. But in a very real way, I felt vindicated. Also relieved. Like a soldier no longer at the front. I'd been fired from the National Security Council for the offense of...warning the President...and telling the truth.

I had written a memo about the power and the influence of the Deep State and its intent to remove the President. Little did I know as I walked out of the White House complex, green bag in hand, that the political war for the Trump presidency was only just beginning. I could not have guessed that I would have the opportunity to leverage my twenty years of experience in the National Security field to help President Trump survive the attempts to remove him from office, or that I would eventually return to brief him directly.

The irony was...I was a pure, pedigreed member of the Deep State and had been working in it, and on the front lines of its campaigns, for the past two decades. With a degree in mechanical engineering from Tufts University, I'd gone into the Army where I worked as an explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) specialist. This led to a tour in the White House. From there it had been on to the Beltway and one of those under-the-radar offices in the Department of Defense. I'd been to the rubble pile that had been the Trade Towers twenty-four hours after they had come down. I'd been to Baghdad, devising tactics for dealing with improvised explosive devices (IEDs), the terrorists' deadly weapon of choice, and had briefed people like General James Mattis and Senator John McCain on how those weapons were being used against us in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Many times over those years, seeing the Deep State up close and personal, learning its ways and duplicities, I had felt it might be hopeless. I'd been inside the government and I knew how it worked, and suspected there might just be too many powerful people with too much invested in the status quo for things to fundamentally change. Or that if change did come, it would almost certainly be too late and too little. That there were too many people with power who, if they did not want the United States of America to lose, certainly wanted it to change into something that my father and people like him would no longer recognize.

In short, over the years, working within the system, I had become something of an insurgent myself. I'd fought against policies that came down from the top. First, when I was trying to get us to focus on IEDs and counter-insurgency in Iraq. And then, when I was trying to move our understanding of the role of Islam in what we were calling the "war on terror." But I never tried to sabotage polices I was opposed to or plans that I thought wouldn't work. I tried to reform those policies and change those plans. I did my job as well as I could do it. And I'd never gone after someone and tried to get him railroaded out of the government and sent to prison.

Which is how the Deep State does things.

Although I had been on the National Security Council (NSC) just a few months when I was fired, I had been fully aware of the threat posed by the Deep State long before that. Yet, in my short time with the NSC, I had been eyewitness to a relentless campaign of subversion directed against the President and his agenda. And I was deeply alarmed.

The President had campaigned on an unambiguous agenda of change. The basics included staying out of Syria, defeating ISIS, pulling out of Afghanistan, confronting China, enforcing our borders, rebuilding our economy, and ... well, Making America Great Again. Reversing, in other words, the policies of the last twenty—and more—years that had brought the nation to its dangerous state and which the President had promised to reverse.

The President meant it and some of us were determined to help him make it happen. But ...

The President had failed to understand a fundamental truth. Namely that personnel is policy. And he had failed to purge the holdovers from the Bush and Obama administrations. They remained in place. I worked alongside some of them in the NSC and I knew that if the President did not take the necessary steps, his administration would be a disappointment to his supporters and take the nation further along the road to disaster.

The people in the government who'd opposed his election—and had actively and illegally conspired and worked to make sure it didn't happen—were not going to give up. They would continue to resist even more fiercely after he had been elected and sworn in. For them, it was not "live to fight another day," it was "fight to the death." It was survival. It wasn't opposition but resistance. And more.

Already, by the time of my dismissal, the Robert Mueller investigation was underway. "Impeachment" was already in the air; not as idle speculation, but as a goal. These people were serious, and they were active. They genuinely thought of themselves as heroic; "the Resistance." They were determined to destroy Donald Trump and his presidency no matter what it took.

And they were even doing it within the walls of the White House. I'd seen it and dealt with it every day, and I increasingly felt an obligation—a duty, actually—to make this truth clear to the people, including the President, who needed to know. Keeping my head down just to keep my job was not an option.

So in May of 2017, I put what I knew to be the truth into the form of a memo. I addressed it to those colleagues who had been close to the President during the campaign. I knew that I could not share it with NSC leadership based upon their decisions to date. I hoped that the memo would, ultimately, be read by the President, who would then take the necessary measures.

THE MEMO BEGAN The Trump administration is suffering under withering information campaigns designed to first undermine, then delegitimize and ultimately remove the President....

2

THE WHITE HOUSE: MY FIRST TOUR

In a way, my entire professional background was preparation for the alarm I knew had to be sounded against the Deep State.

My two tours of duty in the White House were separated by almost 20 years. Not enough time, it now seems, for the world—and me—to have changed as much as we both did.

In the summer of 1998, I was a 23-year-old Army sergeant trained in explosive ordnance disposal—EOD, in the Army's nomenclature—and my responsibilities were what you might expect. Namely, on-site emergency response to any suspicious packages or possible terrorist incidents along with the checking and screening of packages, parcels, and even people, to make sure that the President or anyone else in the White House did not get blown up by a bomb someone had smuggled in.

In the world of violent politics, bombs were coming into their own. In South America, the mid-East, Africa. Even in the United States.

The U.S. was technically at peace. After a fashion. But there was plenty going on out beyond 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The world is always a dangerous place and there were days back then when it seemed especially so to those of us in my line of work.

On August 7, 1998, terrorists in Africa bombed two American embassies, killing 224 people. The group that was responsible called itself al Qaeda, a name that meant nothing, at that time, to most Americans. The nation was still confident in the existence of what President George H.W. Bush had called a "new world order," in which the United States, the world's only superpower, could be counted on to keep the peace and guarantee stability. Most Americans and the media were primarily concerned with what might, or might not, have been going on between Bill Clinton and a White House intern named Monica Lewinsky. She had begun testifying to a grand jury about her alleged affair with the President the day before the bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.

Those bombings were almost certainly more interesting to me than they were to the average American. I was well trained and had a lot of experience on the range. I thought I knew a lot about bombs but, in the next few years, I would learn a lot more. Especially about what we called Improvised Explosive Devices, the enemy's weapon of choice.

But that was later. In 1998, my work amounted mostly to checking packages and reviewing systems and procedures for screening against explosives. If there was no war between major players going on in the world, that did not mean that terrorists weren't busy and that they weren't detonating bombs with depressing frequency. And not just in the usual places like Ireland, the mid-East and, now, Africa. They were striking the United States as well.

In 1993, there had been a bombing at the World Trade Center in New York. The bomb had weighed more than half a ton and, while it did not quite bring one of the towers down, it came close enough that the building had to be closed down for several months to repair the structural damage. Six people were killed and more than a thousand injured.

The mastermind of the group that carried out the attack, Ramzi Yousef, was eventually arrested and sentenced to life in a supermax prison. Yousef is a jihadi Muslim, as were the other members of his group. This included Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman who came to be known as "the blind Sheik." He was a Muslim holy man who preached at a mosque in New Jersey. Investigations after his arrest uncovered plots to destroy a lot more than just the Trade Towers. He was planning a war (a jihad) against America. Still ... these were the nineties and most people in the United States did not know, or did not really care, what that word meant. They were unaware of the reality that we were already at war. This fact was, however, uppermost in the mind of Ramzi Yousef's uncle, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who planned the 9/11 terrorist action that finished the work of that first attack and brought down the Twin Towers.

But ... that came later, much later. And, as I say, while there were bombings and they did make the news, in the summer of 1998, Americans were living the dot-com boom and following the Clinton scandals. When President Clinton, after the hotel bombings in Africa, ordered retaliatory strikes with cruise missiles against someone named bin Laden, many suspected that he was doing it to divert attention from his own problems, which were domestic in both senses of that word. The cruise missile strikes did not kill bin Laden or even inconvenience him much and probably served to convince him that he was dealing with a weak and ineffectual enemy—a paper tiger.

I wasn't among the cynics who believed the worst about Clinton—that the counter-strikes were done for reasons that had to do with domestic politics and not national security. I was young, but I was also a military man with all that implies about respect for the chain of command and the civilian leadership. To my young mind, the White House had to pay attention to the attacks and take the necessary counter measures.

For my part, it was strictly a matter of "stay alert" and do your job. Our team checked packages, and I specifically recall examining gifts sent to Hillary Clinton from her friends in the Middle East and responding to the occasional package tossed onto the White House grounds. While my memories of those days have grown hazy with time, I'm sure that there were always important people arriving for high level meetings and trailing a retinue behind them and that I was, almost literally, rubbing shoulders with them. These would be the important players from the Pentagon, the State Department, and the CIA and I would recognize their faces. They were the people responsible for our nation's security and I predictably treated them with respect, but not awe.

I was basically a street kid who had recently graduated from college and joined the Army. Now, here I was, in the White House, in the company of people who were responsible for the safety and security of the United States of America. I was from Boston, and grew up with the statue of a Minuteman in the neighborhood park. My family's house was located on the route of Paul Revere's ride. Yeah. I was patriotic, but in a subtle, earnest way.

My trust in the country's leadership was uncomplicated and pretty simple. They were smart and experienced, I thought, and they would at least try to do the right thing. Still, they put their pants on one leg at a time. Just like me. Harvard, where a lot of them had gone to school, wasn't too far from where I'd grown up. I knew, from stories I heard people tell when I was a kid, how badly people from Harvard had bungled things in Vietnam.

Still, the people I saw in the White House corridors had important and powerful jobs in and out of government. I suppose they might have been part of what we now call the "Deep State." A phrase that, incidentally, I never heard during my first White House tour.

THE MEMO CONTINUED the White House response to the internal threat within the Trump presidency is dangerously inad...