Longtime Religious Right activist Gary Bauer declared on Wednesday, “The deep state resistance must be broken!” Writing in his daily afternoon newsletter, Bauer called on Republican congressional leaders to demand the firing of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who oversees Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Bauer said that Rosenstein has been “stonewalling legitimate congressional oversight requests,” echoing complaints from House Intelligence Committee Chairman Davin Nunes. Bauer wrote:
As I have written before, the Department of Justice and the FBI are not independent branches of government. They are part of the executive branch, and Congress has oversight responsibilities to ensure they are accountable to the people and functioning as intended.
The deep state resistance must be broken!
In my view, there is overwhelmingly evidence that Rosenstein is obstructing the oversight responsibilities of the very Congress that funds his department and his job. Congressional leaders should be demanding he be fired. Paul, Mitch??
Last month, Bauer’s group, American Values, distributed a “prayer alert” from his wife Carol Bauer warning that government insiders did not see themselves as “beholden to the president or the voters who elected him” and asking people to pray “that information will come to light that will illuminate abuses of power so that they can be corrected within our constitutional framework.”
The “deep state” is an obsession of Trump supporters across the Religious Right and conspiracy-theory crowd. Earlier this year, a group of self-proclaimed prophets met in Trump International hotel in Washington and called on God to send His angel armies to destroy enemies of Trump lurking in the FBI and Justice Department. Trump-boosting “prophet” Lance Wallnau recently declared that “the entire deep state intrigue” against Trump would be exposed and unraveled by June 6; when that didn’t come to pass, he claimed that the “damning evidence” has been uncovered but is being “suppressed.”
Also in Wednesday’s newsletter, Bauer celebrated taking part in his first meeting as a member of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, to which he and fellow Religious Right activists Tony Perkins and Johnnie Moore were recently appointed. This isn’t Bauer’s first government service; he worked in the Reagan White House, where he pushed hard to try to prevent a “known homosexual” from being appointed to the nation’s first AIDS Commission.
Like most Religious Right leaders, Bauer was an ardent supporter of Trump’s presidential campaign, warning conservative Christians that electing Trump might be their last chance to save America, and predicting—correctly, as it turns out—that “in a Trump administration it’s going to be people like you and me and people that have our values and end up having the key positions in the federal government.”
