According to some, the “Deep State” is just another conspiracy theory. It’s hard to prove claims about unelected and unaccountable officials in government and intelligence agencies. They operate in secret. In another sense, however, the Deep State is an obvious — and troubling — fact.

The president and those whom he appoints and we elect are but the tip of a deep iceberg. Below them sits a huge pyramid of bureaucracies and civil servants. The federal government is the largest employer in America.

But whom does this army of civil servants serve? They’re supposed to serve the American people. Too often, it seems, they put party loyalty above that.

Deep State Functionaries Give 90 Percent to Democrats

What party is that? Here’s a clue: federal employees working in 14 agencies donated $2 million to the recent presidential campaign. Of that 95 percent went to Hilary Clinton. No surprise that 99 percent of donations from State Department employees went to Clinton. But Department of Agriculture employee donations also went 99 percent to Clinton. So did gifts from Department of Education employees (99.7 percent) and Department of Labor employees (99.4 percent). Department of Justice workers contributed 97 percent. IRS employees gave 94 percent.

The State Department winked at Clinton’s use of her private server to handle classified information. You don’t need a conspiracy theory to see why. When the Justice Department exonerates Clinton, there’s no mystery there. The people who make these decisions, and the lower-level people who back them up, are all Clintonites. That is to say, left-leaning Democrats. They don’t take their cues from the American people or from the Constitution. They do what the Democratic Party wants.

Defense Department employees contributed 84 percent to Clinton. Homeland Security workers donated 90 percent.

By any reading of the statute, Clinton clearly violated the Espionage Act. Not once, but thousands of times. Her actions clearly compromised national security. Foreign powers surely could access her communications. Nevertheless, for the Deep State Democrats, party loyalty trumped national security. So she wasn’t prosecuted.

Obama Stuffed the Pentagon with His Followers

But how about the security agencies themselves? If you believe what you see in the movies, military top brass are all rock-ribbed conservatives. Yet Defense Department employees contributed 84 percent to Clinton. Homeland Security workers donated 90 percent. The figures suggest that the people in charge of our nation’s security are mostly rock-ribbed Democrats.

This partisan edge may explain why President Trump is having a tough time with some of his security appointments. General H.R. McMaster, his National Security Advisor, subscribes to the Obama-era fantasy that terror has nothing to do with Islam. General James Mattis, Trump’s choice for Secretary of Defense, seems to be picking his own appointees from Hillary’s discarded wishlist.

Mattis’ choice of Anne Patterson for undersecretary of defense for policy is particularly disturbing. This is the fourth most powerful position in the Pentagon. During Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State, Patterson was Ambassador to Egypt. She was also an ardent supporter of Mohammed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood.

Even after General El-Sisi turned the Brotherhood out of power, she lobbied to have them reinstated. According to Raymond Ibrahim, she was widely known in Egypt as the “Brotherhood stooge.” She “was arguably one of the most hated individuals by the millions of Egyptians who took to the streets against Morsi and the Brotherhood.” One senior Republican foreign policy advisor told the Washington Free Beacon:

Anne Patterson is the embodiment of the Obama administration’s failed approach to the Middle East … it’s beyond irresponsible to put her in charge of the Pentagon’s policy apparatus.

Mattis has since withdrawn Patterson’s name under pressure from the White House. But why did he pick her in the first place? Some say that the choice of McMaster and Mattis was just poor judgment. Maybe. Or maybe there aren’t that many good people to choose from. Trump needs candidates who are competent and can be confirmed swiftly by the Senate. Mattis’s quick confirmation suggests that the Democrats weren’t too worried about his policy views.

There’s a huge swamp of Obama appointees in every federal agency. Is Trump willing to drain it? If not, they will foil him at every turn, with the media’s help.

Could Mattis have been steeped too long in the culture of Obama’s Pentagon? Was he surrounded by people who couldn’t see a problem with the Muslim Brotherhood? During his eight year tenure, Obama replaced several hundred generals and admirals. He put in people who would go along with his anti-win policy. While Obama was gutting the Pentagon’s budget, he was also busy weeding out all those rock-ribbed patriotic types.

Are Iran’s Stooges Setting Our Foreign Policy?

Too many government agencies are top-heavy with liberals. That will make it extremely hard for the new administration to make a fresh start. The Deep State is stuffed with holdovers from the Obama administration who are committed to his failed policies.

A prime example is Sahar Nowrouzzadeh. She formerly worked for the National Iranian-American Council (NIAC). That’s a lobbying group for the Islamic Republic of Iran. She also served as the Iran Director for President Obama’s National Security Council. Experts call her one of the architects of the suicidal Iran nuclear deal. You’d think that the new administration would want to cut her out of the loop.

Yet Nowrouzzadeh is now in charge of Iran policy for the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff. She got this position in 2016. Recently, a high-ranking official of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps boasted about a “guerrilla movement” of Iranian agents who work and live in the United States. But with people like Nowrouzzadeh working at State, they need hardly have bothered.

The Travel Ban Was Nixed by an Obama Crony

And then there are the courts. Federal judges might be expected to keep the Deep State in check. But some of them act more like partisan functionaries. A case in point is Judge Derrick Kahala Watson. He was appointed as a U.S district court judge in Honolulu by fellow Hawaiian and Harvard Law classmate Barack Obama. Judge Watson issued a restraining order against President Trump’s temporary travel ban. He didn’t cite legal grounds. So what was his argument? During the campaign, Trump had used heated rhetoric when speaking of Muslims.

The purpose of the travel ban is to protect Americans from radical Islam. The judiciary, in contrast, seems determined to put Americans at risk. The law itself is solidly on the side of the president. The president is empowered by 8 U.S. Code 1182 to “suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants” whose entry “would be detrimental to the interests of the United States.”

Alas, the lawyer left is not interested in the law. As former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy writes, “There is no way of crafting an order restricting immigration from Muslim countries that will satisfy them.” So what then? If the judges will not follow the law? If the bureaucratic holdovers from the Obama administration are more loyal to him than to the Constitution?

We Are Headed for an Ugly Showdown That Trump Might Lose

Then we are headed for a dangerous confrontation. It will be hard to resolve through courts. Will we end up with one law enforcement body following orders from a court, against another following orders from the President?

And then there’s the question of just how much power the President has over the Deep State. Columnist Daniel Greenfield suggests that Obama controls more of the government through his network of embedded loyalists than Trump does. As Mark Steyn puts it, “You don’t need a presidency for life, if you’ve got a bureaucracy for life.”

But why would leftist actors in Deep State risk such a dangerous encounter? Perhaps because they’re fairly confident they would win it. They have plenty of allies in the government and in the courts.

Add to that the support of universities and all those grads whom they’ve trained to believe that they can flout any laws they don’t like. In addition, they can count on a network of leftist nonprofits such as Obama’s Organizing for Action (OFA) which has 33,000 volunteers and 250 offices across the country.

Most of all, the Deep State can count on the “fourth estate” — the media — to cover for it by slanting the news. If, as some contend, we are in the midst of a “quiet coup” by a shadow government, you can be sure that the media will do its best to keep it quiet. Or even to justify it.

Those who think that Trump’s electoral victory will surely result in a safer and more secure America haven’t come to grips with the Deep State’s capacity to stir up deep trouble.