ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos claimed on Tuesday that the Deep State was actually “packed with patriots” who quietly went about their daily lives, doing their jobs to protect and serve the American people.

Stephanopoulos joined the cohosts on ABC’s midday talk show “The View” to talk about his book that hit shelves on Tuesday — titled: “The Situation Room: The Inside Story of Presidents in Crisis” — and he argued that the Deep State was not the conspiratorial network or shadow government that many on the right saw it as, but rather the backbone of functioning government agencies that worked for the good of the people.

WATCH:

The Deep State used to be a right wing conspiracy theory according to the media.

Now you have George Stephanopoulos happily proclaiming on the View that "The Deep State is packed with patriots.”
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— Greg Price (@greg_price11) May 14, 2024

“That was my favorite part about doing the book,” Stephanopoulos told the cohosts. “I interviewed about a hundred duty officers from the White House, and these are people that come — they’re relatively young — people who come from all over the government, the CIA, the DIA, the Defense Department, the military.”

“And you know, some people like to call those people the ‘Deep State,’ well the big thing I learned doing this book is that the Deep State is packed with patriots,” Stephanopoulos continued. “People who go to work every single day on the front lines of the most intense crises the country faces, and do it to serve their country and to serve the presidency — not the president, they don’t care about political parties, they’re there to serve the presidency and the institution.”

“And they’re doing it anonymously,” Sunny Hostin interjected.

“As one of them told me,” Stephanopoulos recalled, “We serve in silence.”

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Critics of the Deep State often point out that they are not talking about the rank-and-file officers on the ground who put in the hard hours serving their country and their fellow Americans — but rather, those in unelected bureaucratic positions who may choose to covertly work against a particular administration if they disagree with the direction in which it is going.

The obvious example of that would be the anonymous op-ed — published by the New York Times — that was eventually claimed by former DHS Chief of Staff Miles Taylor. “I am part of the resistance inside the Trump administration,” the headline blared — and the implication was that there were many more who shared his views and agenda: “I work for the president but like-minded colleagues and I have vowed to thwart parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.”