"Make no mistake, we have just witnessed an operation by members of the CIA to take out a high official of our own government," Thomas Lifson writes at American Thinker. "An agency that is widely believed to have brought down democratically elected governments overseas is now practicing the same dark arts in domestic American politics."

Lifson says New York Democrat Sen. Chuck Shumer "laid out on January 2nd what was going to happen to the Trump administration if it dared take on the deep state -- the permanent bureaucracy that has contempt for the will of the voters and feels entitled to run the government for its own benefit":

New Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Tuesday that President-elect Donald Trump is "being really dumb" by taking on the intelligence community and its assessments on Russia's cyber activities.

"Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you," Schumer told MSNBC's Rachel Maddow.

“So even for a practical, supposedly hard-nosed businessman, he’s being really dumb to do this."

"Or, as the old rueful saying has it, 'You’ve got to go along to get along'," Lifson notes.

That "rueful saying" has a hard edge, Lifson warns, for it "means that we the people had better acknowledge that the bureaucrats have turned into our masters, and the old expression 'public servant' is as ironic as anything Orwell came up with. Schumer knows this and likes it, because the deep state wants a bigger more powerful government, just as he does."

Moreover, Lifson continues, "The law was broken by whoever leaked the transcripts to the media. Not only is the crime underlying the 'scandal' being ignored, the criminals are being hailed. On Morning Joe’s first hour today, the host, a former congressman (i.e., a lawmaker) himself, called the leakers 'heroes'."

The upshot? Lipson writes: "This interference in domestic politics by the CIA should be regarded as a major threat to our democracy, but of course our Trump-hating domestic media are reveling in a major point scored against the new president."