Sanders is soft pedalling a benign concept of "deep state".  I also notice a lot of the never-Trumpers here, when confronted with deep state's obvious "meddling" since the 2016 elections, eventually adopt a "well good for them" attitude since it hinders disagreeable aspects of Trump's election platform.

The US Deep State is not a cabal of bureaucrats protecting their empires and turf, such as we have in Canada. US Deep State is a behind the scenes force consisting of the Council on Foreign Relations, AIPAC and other organizations that have an agenda that often counters the interests of the Ameican people. It protects the interests of multinationals, the MIC, the $USD as the world reserve currency, NYC as the centre of global finance and Israel.

If Deep State favoured Clinton, it was because she was already "housebroken", and could be trusted to show up and read the script from the teleprompter as Obama did. As another poster said, RussiaGate was just Donald's house training,