Democrats own the Deep State, that network of embedded bureaucrats, academics and media, judicial activists, and spooks operating to stymie, discredit, and ultimately remove from office a president who is a threat to their mutual agenda.  They are agreed that government should control more of life's essential functions and that benign rule of the enlightened can reshape society to match their visions.

The Deep State's horror at the Trump victory has led it to act rashly and thereby expose itself to view.  Understanding that this cadre of activists covertly manipulates events ruthlessly, it is now time to collect case studies.

John Hinderaker of Powerline, working off of the reporting of Michael Patrick Leahy of Breitbart, laid out the anatomy of a Deep State operation, in this case the stymieing of President Trump's exercise of his power to regulate who gets into the country.  The media labeled this a "Muslim ban," very helpful in creating the framework for discussion.  But the real action was not a biased media, but a leak utilizing covert action by Deep State embed.  It is the tacit cooperation among the embeds variously situated in the key institutions that defines a Deep State action.

In this instance, a strategic leak reported in the media was the predicate for two radical judges to issue stays against President Trump's executive order.  

The two judges who issued orders blocking implementation of the president's travel ban relied explicitly on the AP story and the leaked DHS document. Judge Chuang, the federal district court judge in Maryland, wrote:

Among other points, they note that the Second Executive Order does not identify examples of foreign nationals from Iran, Libya, Sudan, Syria, or Yemen who engaged in terrorist activity in the United States. They also note that a report from the Department of Homeland Security, Office of Intelligence and Analysis, concluded that "country of citizenship is unlikely to be a reliable indicator of potential terrorist activity" and that "few of the impacted countries have terrorist groups that threaten the West." l.R. 158.

That report, cited by two judges, was meaningless, plucked from the files in order to make a point that could be seized upon by a judge so inclined.  Hinderaker continues:

Leahy skillfully unpacks what happened here. The draft report came from DHS's Office of Intelligence and Analysis, which was headed by David Grannis, an Obama holdover bureaucrat. Grannis is a partisan Democrat who previously worked as a staffer for Democrats Dianne Feinstein and Jane Harman. A DHS spokesman "would neither confirm nor deny that Grannis was the author of, or had reviewed, the leaked document…."

How about the reporters? It pretty much goes without saying that AP reporters are Democrats. But Leahy also points out that Vivian Salama formerly worked for Rolling Stone, where she wrote that Yemen–one of the countries covered by the travel order–"holds a special place in my heart." She has bitterly denounced U.S. drone strikes in Yemen.

So it appears that what happened here is that Democratic Party activists in the Department of Homeland Security either created a bogus document or dug up a poorly-researched draft document that had never been issued, and fed it to Democratic Party activists at the Associated Press. The Democratic Party activists at the AP published a story based on the anonymous document, which two Democratic Party activists on the bench used as a pretext for orders enjoining the president's travel order.

I suspect that we will see many more examples of the Deep State in action because we are getting more aware of them, as they are getting more desperate, careless, and self-contradictory.  Naming it, defining it, and documenting it are important aspects of the fight against it.  The Deep State does not like the light for good reasons.