A recent report revealed that current and former USAID and State Department officials are using their expertise in undermining authoritarian regimes abroad against President Donald Trump.
NOTUS reporter Jose Pagliery reported that “Some of the democracy-building experts President Donald Trump fired this year from the U.S. Agency for International Development and the State Department are now reapplying the skills and knowledge they built up over decades to undermine Trump’s power.”
One anonymous current federal official warned to NOTUS, “Take it from those of us who worked in authoritarian countries: We’ve become one.” He added, “They were so quick to disband AID, the group that supposedly instigates color revolutions. But they’ve done a very foolish thing. You just released a bunch of well-trained individuals into your population. If you kept our offices going and had us play solitaire in the office, it might have been safer to keep your regime.”
“Former officials” reportedly told the news outlet that they are “holding workshops on a tactic called ‘noncooperation.’ They’re building a network of government workers willing to engage in even minor acts of rebellion in the office. And they’re planting the seeds of what they hope could become a nationwide general strike.“
“Some in the informal network of Trump opponents are sharing an old CIA pamphlet with allies who still work in the government: It’s called ‘Simple Sabotage,’” the reporter added.
This community, NOTUS reported, “is composed of diplomats and human rights activists who were once on the U.S. government payroll encouraging Latin American dissidents to fight dictators and supporting African independence movements. They were involved to varying degrees with an ultimately successful uprising in the Middle East.”
One group that NOTUS cited was “DemocracyAID,” which has no formal website or legal entity so far, but is “already hosting invite-only workshops with federal employees who hear about them from friends, vetting each person before they’re allowed into a trusted circle and teaching them case studies, like the Danish underground insurgency against Nazi occupation.”
Deputy White House press secretary Anna Kelly condemned such efforts in a statement to NOTUS, saying, “It is inherently undemocratic for unelected bureaucrats to undermine the duly elected President of the United States and the agenda he was given a mandate to implement.”
A senior State Department official told Fox News Digital, “The State Department is not aware of these reports but always takes our national security seriously. We will continue to take every precaution to protect the State Department from internal and external threats.”
The NOTUS report comes on the heels of a separate alarming report from Axios that revealed a concerning swath of Democrat lawmakers’ constituents encouraging political violence.
Democrat lawmakers say their voters are enraged at the lack of ability to counter President Donald Trump‘s agenda, with some sounding the alarm that they could potentially resort to “violence,” Axios reported Monday.
The outlet says it spoke to over two dozen House Democrats to measure the temperature of the Democrat base and what it uncovered was red-hot anger and a desire to circumvent the rule of law.
“We’ve got people who are desperately wanting us to do something… no matter what we say, they want [more],” Rep. Brad Schneider (D-Ill.) told the outlet.
Axios noted that most of the lawmakers spoke on condition of anonymity.
“Our own base is telling us that what we’re doing is not good enough… [that] there needs to be blood to grab the attention of the press and the public,” one such lawmaker said.
Another said their constituents are convinced that “civility isn’t working” and that they should prepare for “violence… to fight to protect our democracy.”
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