There isn't a deep state, there's just a state. What's worth noting is how, by design, foreign policy establishment and apparatus of the US is fundamentally anti-democratic, in the small-d sense of democratic, structured always but especially since 1947 as largely an elite affair https://twitter.com/fordm/status/1295007309526163456

That the interests and perceptions of, broadly, clearance holders is generally at odds with how most people removed from the foreign policy & national security apparatus understand security is part professionalization, part elite socialization, & partly simply competing interests

"This defense establishment, faced with the threat of a nuclear-armed Soviet Union & staffed by elites convinced that democracy was a weak political form, allowed a logic of crisis that justified long-term emergency governance to become institutionalized." https://fellowtravelersblog.com/2018/08/14/down-with-the-demos-long-live-democracy/

We'll see this play out over the next week, with Snowden as the microcosm. People who see him primarily as someone who handed secrets over to another nation will view floating a pardon pretty differently than folk who understand him as primarily revealing abuse done in secret.

There are ways to make foreign policy more responsive to the actual policy preferences of people within a country. But they mostly do not start from a premise that revealing massive warrantless domestic surveillance is a forever unpardonable offense.