Former State Department official and investigative journalist Mike Benz is warning that the clock is ticking for the Trump administration to pull back the curtain on entrenched government corruption before Novembers midterm elections potentially shift Congress into Democratic hands.
Benz, who served in President Donald Trumps first administration and now leads the Foundation of Freedom Online, argued that the White House must urgently embrace a much heavier transparency drive if it expects the MAGA base to turn out in force for Republicans. According to the Daily Caller, he cautioned that conservative voters are not merely looking for partisan victory but for a reckoning with the permanent bureaucracy that has long evaded accountability.
I think that there have been a lot of amazing things this admin has done, certainly the first five months when Elon [Musk] was here, Benz told the Daily Caller News Foundation (DCNF) in a recent interview. Things were moving at lighting pace. I think theres been some frustration in the base when it comes to handling things like the Epstein files and the like.
I dont think that the base would even flirt with voting for Democrats. The question is, Is their disenchantment enough to sit home?' he continued. And thats the thing the admin really has to solve. And I think the only way forward is by doubling down on the energy it had in the first four months of the admin rather than the last four months.
Benz stressed that Trumps supporters are not satisfied with marginal policy tweaks or short-term economic gains, but are demanding a deeper confrontation with the administrative state. He said the base is looking for something transformative in these four years, rather than something thats pure economic.
Those would include everything from major transparency drives around USAID, the State Department, the CIA and the FBI, things like continued Russiagate disclosures things like Fast and Furious, things like the malfeasance of the John Brennan CIA, the Bill Burns CIA, he continued, pointing to the intelligence communitys leadership under former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden. In Benzs view, conservatives want to see the record laid bare on the scandals and abuses that establishment media and Democratic officials have long tried to bury.
He underscored the symbolic and substantive importance of the Epstein files, whose release under a bipartisan bill signed by Trump produced a series of disturbing revelations about elite networks. Yet he told the DCNF that the collective fixation on those documents exists largely because there are not other disclosures of considerable consequence.
We should be having five million CIA files. We should be having five million State Department files. We should be having five million USAID files, Benz emphasized. The fact that its only the Epstein files and even that at the barrel of a gun by congressional bill is not as much as we could do.
I think those things something that shows that its okay to trust these institutions again, he continued. I think right now, a lot of people feel theyre being asked to trust without the reforms and accountability that a lot of people expected to be the antecedent.
Benz listed the CIA, FBI, State Department, Justice Department, Department of Homeland Security and the now-effectively-dismantled USAID as agencies that must be subjected to rigorous scrutiny. For a conservative movement that has watched these organs of government weaponized against political opponents, he suggested, transparency is not optional but essential to restoring any semblance of public trust.
I think we need a full historiography complete for the record. The admin has these records to disclose, and I think being able to show that would make people chew on those files. In the absence of that, fixations on things like the Epstein files, which are important, though they dont change peoples day to day life as much as something like a major reveal of things that ended up in mass arrests, imprisonments, persecution of millions of people under the Biden admin, Benz said.
Pressed on what, specifically, he wants exposed, Benz cited former Special Counsel Jack Smiths Arctic Frost investigation, during which the FBI secretly obtained the phone records of Republican members of Congress. He also pointed to the censorship-industrial complex, issues around Russiagate, I would argue issues around Ukraine as well.
I think that issues around the attempt to overthrow governments like in Poland, Brazil, Hungary, what happened in Romania, what happened in France, whats happening right now in Spain, he added. I think all of this needs to be made public. You have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to do so.
And I think the time is now or else the mother will be lost, Benz concluded, framing the moment as a decisive test of whether a conservative administration will finally confront the unelected apparatus that has long undermined national sovereignty, democratic self-government and the rights of ordinary citizens.
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