The Portland Press Herald recently covered former Maine Senator Eric Brakey’s campaign for Maine’s 2nd Congressional District.
Brakey caught the Press Herald’s attention when he declared on Twitter that “the ‘intelligence community’ interfered with the 2016 election far more than Russia” in order to destabilize Donald Trump’s campaign.
The political class obviously take issue with Brakey’s statement.
U.S. Senator Angus King of Maine, who Brakey challenged in the 2018 elections, claimed that Brakey does not know what he’s talking about.
King argues that although Russia had “a very sophisticated, wide-ranging and substantial” effort to undermine Democrat Hillary Clinton and help Trump, American intelligence agencies did not try to influence the outcome of the election.
In a 2017 report, the National Intelligence Council came to the conclusion that Russia made a significant effort in 2016 to rig the election in favor of Trump.
The liberty conservative candidate for Maine’s 2nd congressional district doesn’t buy it.
“There’s nothing to indicate Russian Facebook memes had any impact on the election itself,” he asserted.
Brakey believes that American intelligence agencies present a more serious threat to Americans.
To illustrate his case against the intelligence community, Brakey referenced text message evidence between Lisa Page and Peter Strzok, two FBI officials who were investigating Clinton’s email server, who had choice words for Trump when he was a candidate.
The comments didn’t go public until 2018.
Brakey also highlighted several events in 2017, which included criminal charges pressed against Trump’s national security adviser, the Mueller investigation, the disclosure of the Steele dossier and discussions among top officials about using the 25th amendment to remove Trump office.
In King’s view, Brakey’s argument has a “fatal flaw”— voters in 2016 were not aware about the intelligence community’s concerns about Trump.
“It’s hard to have a smoking gun if you don’t pull the trigger,” said King.
Brakey has made attacking America’s intelligence apparatus a fixture of his congressional run. He is one of three GOP contenders in the race to try to unseat Democratic congressman Jared Golden. The other Republicans are Adrienne Bennett, a former press secretary for Governor Paul LePage, and former state legislator Dale Crafts.
After announcing his run for higher office, Brakey has been focusing his sights on the CIA, FBI, and the “Deep Spate” apparatus in Washington D.C.
In a Facebook post on November 1, Brakey said that the “leaders of these unelected intelligence agencies (in other countries, we would call them ‘secret police’) aren’t even hiding their belief that they should be unaccountable to our elected officials.”
“If we don’t wake up and stop this,” he said, “Government of the People, by the People and for the People will perish from this Earth.”
Brakey pointed out the entrenched nature of these unelected bureaucracies.
He stated that “if we abolished the office of the presidency tomorrow, very little would change except for the abolishment of the illusion that We the People have direct say over the operations of the Executive Branch.”
“Nothing of substance changed under the last four presidents because they understood and accepted that they were figureheads – doing public relations for the Executive Branch, not leading it,” Brakey asserted.
He argued that Trump is “coming into so much conflict with executive branch agencies because he intends to lead, not do what he is told – and that is exactly WHY we elected him!”
“The CIA and FBI supposedly work for the President,” Brakey tweeted on October 7, “but they are actively at war with the President. It begs the question: If they don’t answer to the President, who are they accountable to?”
For liberty conservatives, Eric Brakey’s candidacy is probably the most important race at the congressional level that is actually winnable.
Brakey’s focus on exposing the Deep State’s wrongdoing sets him apart from the rest of the pack, which makes his race one of the most important contests for 2020 and beyond.
