George Stephanopolous Tells The View the ‘Deep State Is Packed with Patriots’

ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos declared that the “deep state” is “packed with patriots,” dismissing those using the term in a negative fashion.

The former Bill Clinton advisor joined The View on Tuesday to promote his new book The Situation Room: The Inside Story of Presidents in Crisis, which dives into crises in various administrations and how they were handled in the White House Situation Room.

After View co-host and former White House communications official Alyssa Farah Griffin noted she loved the direct interviews with Situation Room staff serving various administrations, Stephanopoulos revealed he spoke to approximately 100 “duty officers” from Situation Room staffs with various backgrounds from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to the Defense Intelligence Agency and much more.

“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, people who go to work every single day and are on the frontlines 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,” he said.

“And they’re doing it anonymously,” co-host Sunny Hostin added.

“Absolutely,” Stephanopoulos said. “As one of them told me… we serve in silence.”

Donald Trump said in the past he wasn’t fond of the word “deep state” because it sounded “conspiratorial” and was pushed too much by conservative pundits, though he’s also used the term himself when railing against the federal government. The term is most often used by conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones to describe a web of government and private bureaucracy too deeply ingrained in Washington D.C. to be defeated in an election.

Watch above via ABC.