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Cambridge professor outed as FBI informant inside Trump campaign

By Mary Kay Linge May 19, 2018

A Cambridge professor with deep ties to American and British intelligence has been outed as an agent who snooped on the Trump presidential campaign for the FBI.

Multiple media outlets have named Stefan Halper, 73, as the secret informant who met with Trump campaign advisers Carter Page and George Papadopoulos starting in the summer of 2016. The American-born academic previously served in the Nixon, Ford and Reagan administrations.

The revelation, stemming from recent reports in which FBI sources admitted sending an agent to snoop on the Trump camp, heightens suspicions that the FBI was seeking to entrap Trump campaign aides. Papodopoulous has pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI, while Page was the subject of a federal surveillance warrant.
“If the FBI or DOJ was infiltrating a campaign for the benefit of another campaign, that is a really big deal,” President Trump tweeted Saturday, calling for the FBI to release additional documents to Congress.

The Halper revelation also shows the Obama administration’s FBI began prying into the opposing party’s presidential nominee earlier than it previously admitted.

Halper’s sit-downs with Page reportedly started in early July 2016, undermining fired FBI Director James Comey’s previous claim that the bureau’s investigation into the Trump campaign began at the end of that month.

Halper made his first overture when he met with Page at a British symposium. The two remained in regular contact for more than a year, meeting at Halper’s Virginia farm and in Washington, DC, as well as exchanging emails.

The professor met with Trump campaign co-chair Sam Clovis in late August, offering his services as a foreign-policy adviser, The Washington Post reported Friday, without naming the academic.

Clovis did not see the conversation as suspicious, his attorney told the paper — but is now “unsettled” that “the professor” never mentioned he’d struck up a relationship with Page.

Days later, Halper contacted Papadopoulos by e-mail. The professor offered the young and inexperienced campaign aide $3,000 and an all-expenses-paid trip to London, ostensibly to write a paper about energy in the eastern Mediterranean region.

“George, you know about hacking the e-mails from Russia, right?” the professor pressed Papadopoulos when they met, according to reports — a reference to Trump’s campaign-trail riffs about Hillary Clinton’s private e-mail server.

Sources close to Papadopoulos told NBC News that he now believes Halper was working for an intelligence agency.

Highly detailed descriptions of the FBI informant in Friday reports in The New York Times and Washington Post pegged Halper in all but name. Outlets including NBC and Fox News subsequently connected the dots. The revelation confirms a March report in the Daily Caller that outlined Halper’s repeated meetings with Papadopoulos and Page.

It is not clear if the professor was paid to speak with Trump campaign figures, but public records show that he has received large payments from the federal government in the last two years.

The Department of Defense’s Office of Net Assessment — a shadowy think tank that reports directly to the secretary of defense — paid Halper $282,000 in 2016 and $129,000 in 2017.

Halper has close personal and professional ties to the CIA reaching back decades. He is the son-in-law of a former deputy director of the agency and worked on the 1980 presidential campaign of George H.W. Bush, who had served as CIA director.

When Bush became Ronald Reagan’s running mate, Halper was implicated in a spying scandal in which CIA officials gave inside information on the Carter administration to the GOP campaign.

Meanwhile, reports emerged Saturday that Donald Trump Jr. met in August 2016 with a representative of Saudi crown princes, who offered pre-election help to his father’s campaign.

An Israeli political strategist who attended the meeting told the New York Times that their plan to carry out a pro-Trump social media campaign did not go forward.

https://nypost.com/2018/05/19/cambridge-professor-outed-as-fbi-informant-inside-trump-campaign/

F.B.I. Used Informant to Investigate Russia Ties to Campaign, Not to Spy, as Trump Claims

By Adam Goldman, Mark Mazzetti and Matthew Rosenberg

May 18, 2018
WASHINGTON — President Trump accused the F.B.I. on Friday, without evidence, of sending a spy to secretly infiltrate his 2016 campaign “for political purposes” even before the bureau had any inkling of the “phony Russia hoax.”

In fact, F.B.I. agents sent an informant to talk to two campaign advisers only after they received evidence that the pair had suspicious contacts linked to Russia during the campaign. The informant, an American academic who teaches in Britain, made contact late that summer with one campaign adviser, George Papadopoulos, according to people familiar with the matter. He also met repeatedly in the ensuing months with the other aide, Carter Page, who was also under F.B.I. scrutiny for his ties to Russia.

The role of the informant is at the heart of the newest battle between top law enforcement officials and Mr. Trump’s congressional allies over the F.B.I.’s most politically charged investigations in decades. The lawmakers, who say they are concerned that federal investigators are abusing their authority, have demanded documents from the Justice Department about the informant.

Law enforcement officials have refused, saying that handing over the documents would imperil both the source’s anonymity and safety. The New York Times has learned the source’s identity but typically does not name informants to preserve their safety.

Democrats say the Republicans’ real aim is to undermine the special counsel investigation. Senior law enforcement officials have also privately expressed concern that the Republicans are digging into F.B.I. files for information they can weaponize against the Russia inquiry.

Over the past two days, Mr. Trump has used speculative news reports about the informant, mostly from conservative media, to repeatedly assail the Russia investigation.

“Reports are there was indeed at least one FBI representative implanted, for political purposes, into my campaign for president,” he wrote on Twitter on Friday. “It took place very early on, and long before the phony Russia Hoax became a ‘hot’ Fake News story. If true — all time biggest political scandal!”

No evidence has emerged that the informant acted improperly when the F.B.I. asked for help in gathering information on the former campaign advisers, or that agents veered from the F.B.I.’s investigative guidelines and began a politically motivated inquiry, which would be illegal.

But agents were leery of disrupting the presidential campaign again after the F.B.I. had announced in a high-profile news conference that it had closed the case involving Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server, according to current and former law enforcement officials.

After opening the Russia inquiry about a month later, they took steps, those officials said, to ensure that details of the inquiry were more closely held than even in a typical national security investigation, including the use of the informant to suss out information from the unsuspecting targets. Sending F.B.I. agents to interview them could have created additional risk that the investigation’s existence would seep into view in the final weeks of a heated presidential race.

F.B.I. officials concluded they had the legal authority to open the investigation after receiving information that Mr. Papadopoulos was told that Moscow had compromising information on Mrs. Clinton in the form of “thousands of emails,” months before WikiLeaks released stolen messages from Democratic officials. As part of the operation, code-named Crossfire Hurricane, the F.B.I. also began investigating Mr. Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, and his future national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn.

Details about the informant’s relationship with the F.B.I. remain scant. It is not clear how long the relationship existed and whether the F.B.I. paid the source or assigned the person to other cases.

Informants take great risks when working for intelligence services, Christopher A. Wray, the F.B.I. director, testified before Congress on Wednesday. Their identities must not be exposed, he said, hinting at congressional efforts to obtain the name of the source. “The day that we can’t protect human sources is the day the American people start becoming less safe.”

One of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, Rudolph W. Giuliani, acknowledged on Friday that neither the president nor his legal team knew with certainty that the F.B.I. had implanted a spy in the Trump campaign, as he and the president had alleged.

“I don’t know for sure, nor does the president, if there really was one,” Mr. Giuliani said on CNN. “For a long time, we’ve been told there was some kind of infiltration.”

The informant is well known in Washington circles, having served in previous Republican administrations and as a source of information for the C.I.A. in past years, according to one person familiar with the source’s work.

F.B.I. agents were seeking more details about what Mr. Papadopoulos knew about the hacked Democratic emails, and one month after their Russia investigation began, Mr. Papadopoulos received a curious message. The academic inquired about his interest in writing a research paper on a disputed gas field in the eastern Mediterranean Sea, a subject of Mr. Papadopoulos’s expertise.

The informant offered a $3,000 honorarium for the paper and a paid trip to London, where the two could meet and discuss the research project.

“I understand that this is rather sudden but thought that given your expertise it might be of interest to you,” the informant wrote in a message to Mr. Papadopoulos, sent on Sept. 2, 2016.

Mr. Papadopoulos accepted the offer and arrived in London two weeks later, where he met for several days with the academic and one of his assistants, a young woman.

Over drinks and dinner one evening at a high-end London hotel, the F.B.I. informant raised the subject of the hacked Democratic National Committee emails that had spilled into public view earlier that summer, according to a person familiar with the conversation. The source noted how helpful they had been to the Trump campaign, and asked Mr. Papadopoulos whether he knew anything about Russian attempts to influence the 2016 presidential election.

Mr. Papadopoulos replied that he had no insight into the Russian campaign — despite being told months earlier that the Russians had dirt on Mrs. Clinton in the form of thousands of her emails. His response clearly annoyed the informant, who tried to press Mr. Papadopoulos about what he might know about the Russian effort, according to the person.

The assistant also raised the subject of Russia and the Clinton emails during a separate conversation over drinks with Mr. Papadopoulos, and again he denied he knew anything about Russian attempts to disrupt the election.

After the trip to London, Mr. Papadopoulos wrote the 1,500-word research paper and was paid for his work. He did not hear again from the informant.

Mr. Page, a Navy veteran, served briefly as an adviser to Mr. Trump’s campaign until September 2016. He said that he first encountered the informant during a conference in mid-July of 2016 and that they stayed in touch. The two later met several times in the Washington area. Mr. Page said their interactions were benign.

The two last exchanged emails in September 2017, about a month before a secret warrant to surveil Mr. Page expired after being repeatedly renewed by a federal judge. Mr. Trump’s congressional allies have also assailed the surveillance, accusing law enforcement officials, with little evidence, of abusing their authority and spying on the Trump campaign.

The informant also had contacts with Mr. Flynn, the retired Army general who was Mr. Trump’s first national security adviser. The two met in February 2014, when Mr. Flynn was running the Defense Intelligence Agency and attended the Cambridge Intelligence Seminar, an academic forum for former spies and researchers that meets a few times a year.

According to people familiar with Mr. Flynn’s visit to the intelligence seminar, the source was alarmed by the general’s apparent closeness with a Russian woman who was also in attendance. The concern was strong enough that it prompted another person to pass on a warning to the American authorities that Mr. Flynn could be compromised by Russian intelligence, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Two years later, in late 2016, the seminar itself was embroiled in a scandal about Russian spying. A number of its organizers resigned over what they said was a Kremlin-backed attempt to take control of the group.

Reporting was contributed by Nicholas Fandos, Sharon LaFraniere, Katie Benner and Eileen Sullivan.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/18/us/politics/trump-fbi-informant-russia-investigation.html

I'm sure the GOPers will call this the "Deep State" conspiracy against Trump. Personally I call it the DOJ and FBI doing its job. That's what they do you know, investigate shady crap to look for criminals breaking laws. My guess is that they found some with the indictments and guilty pleas and all... just saying.

No, not at all, because there is nothing wrong with the Obama administration placing a mole inside the opposition party's campaign during a presidential election.

The Russians do it all the time in their elections.

What has America come to?

Trump and company are dirty, period. Nobody knew he was going to win when this started, but the signs of impropriety were there so they got a closer look.

I don't expect you or any GOPer for that matter to turn on Trump without a smoking gun, but there is a ton of suspicious activity around this campaign and colluding with not only Russians but now Israelis, Saudi Arabian Princes, and the UAE!

If these FACTS don't raise the hair on your neck just a little or at minimum raise and eyebrow or two, then you truly are just a sheep.

What Obama, the FBI, and the DOJ did was worse than Watergate. But, we should have known they cheated and stole the primaries from Bernie so why would they not attempt to cheat in the general? They felt they were above the law the whole time. Still do.

I see you read and absorb Trump's propaganda tweets. "Worse than Watergate"...

But I don't know, you could be right. Obama, HRC, and or Trump could be dirty here. But we shouldn't let politics get in the way of the truth in either case. We really need to know what happened in all of this. Somebody is definitely dirty. My bet is that it is Trump because he is a conman at heart, but either way I want to know the truth.

Truth is they are all dirty. Both sides. The win is all that matters. Just like college football and basketball. There are no clean programs. If your not bending and nreaking rules you are not trying.

The Obama administration planted a mole in the camp of the Republican candidate for President. They "Wire Tapped" and got a FISA warrant based on false information provided by Russian sources as Obama's intelligence agencies went in for the kill.

This is only scratching the surface of the underhanded actions taken by the DNC, Hillary and the Obama administration as the Inspector Generals report will show.

The Hamma of Truth is about to fall.

Forget about your Russian Collusion as the Obama administration did more to interfere in our national elections than any Russians did.

I hear your rhetoric, I'm just not seeing your evidence. I am open to being wrong and eating crow, but we are light years away from that and Trump looks 1000 times more guilty than the FBI and Obama.

As for HRC, I wouldn't put any of it past her in trying to win. She was ruthless and dirty too.

You and I and the honest world know the only reason this Mole story is coming out ahead of the Inspector Generals report is because the Democrats and Obama Intel Agencies are desperately trying to get ahead of the story before it breaks.

I wouldn't call him a 'mole' though. He might have been but it looks like he acted as an informant, and he is a conservative republican so it's unlikely he would have topped the list for Obama or HRC to insert as a spy (mole). Now we do need to know if he was a paid informant though, and exactly what was reported and to whom and when. At this point we don't know who knew about this and who didn't. We also don't know if he was working for the FBI, was an intelligence agency asset, or took these actions for some other GOP interests. There were 16 GOP candidates at this time, remember? They are all possibly connected.

The truth needs to come out no matter where the chips fall, on that I think we can agree.

I night be going out on a limb here, but based on the above mentality and if there was this informant, and he was an academic as it is being reported, wouldn't he really stick out in the company of jr. and the like?

it's weird to root for the FBI knowing that neither Gideon or Derek Morgan are not on the team.

Not a fan of criminal minds, just never watched it.

Did the OP not realize the first post made the FBI and Obummer look way worse then Trump...entrapment and lying from the FBI....and we are supposed to “trust” The BM???

It's funny how since Trump has been elected people actually think the president controls the Justice Department. That's not how any of this works. lmao

Cast not thy pearls before swine, Pit.

They believe what they want; facts be damned.

of course the trump supporters are salty about this. they seem to forget that there's a reason why there needed to be an informant.

cause your God was out here doing shady crap.

U know Clem, and I don’t mean this to be snarky. Facts are a funny thing these days. They seem to change from one news outlet to the next. You can take the same event and watch CNN, MSNBC and Fox and wonder if there reporting on the same story.

Its really sad that depending on how the network u watch decides to report an “event” the facts that should be the same are different from network to network ...

The Justice Department is part of the Executive Branch and overseen by the United States Attorney General, who is nominated by the President.

The President is head of the Executive Branch.

Funny how that works.

Oh you poor little man. The Justice Department has always been an independent part of our system. A president appoints the attorney general but has no say in the actions of the Justice Department.

And everyone knew that until Trump started spreading the lies you guys are now repeating.

Just ask Comey, McCabe and the others who are now independently sitting at home watching FOX.

Bill Clinton was investigated years after he was elected. Guess who lead that? The Justice department. And Nixon. And now Trump. And all the people leading the investigation? Republicans.

Sure they're sitting at home. Yet the investigation continues.

I see it all the time in these threads. I know which posters are FOX followers, and which are MSNBC watchers.

BTW- between you & me- I don't get my news from the TV. Not network OR cable.

Don’t look at me, I’m just here to stir the pot and wreak havoc like a hurricane created by the gays.

Hurricane Bruth in da hoooouse....

Yeah, I'm sure getting paid over $400,000 couldn't convince an agent to do something against the republicans. That's a lot of cash to just investigate. It looks more like a payoff to me.

I hereby demand, and will do so officially tomorrow, that the Department of Justice look into whether or not the FBI/DOJ infiltrated or surveilled the Trump Campaign for Political Purposes - and if any such demands or requests were made by people within the Obama Administration!

President of the United States of America
Donald Trump

Yeah, I saw that.



Dude's a daily joke... with a flat punch line.

Sounds like you're ok with the undermining of our political system using gestapo tactics.

Light travels faster than sound, Donald. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.

Yeah... that MUST be it.

That is exactly it Erik.

Laugh away but we will see who has the final laugh...

The Justice Department asked its watchdog to look into any alleged "impropriety or political motivation" in the FBI's investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election, the DOJ said Sunday night -- hours after President Trump ordered a review looking into whether federal agents infiltrated or surveilled his campaign for political purposes.

"The Department has asked the Inspector General to expand the ongoing review of the (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) application process to include determining whether there was any impropriety or political motivation in how the FBI conducted its counterintelligence investigation of persons suspected of involvement with the Russian agents who interfered in the 2016 presidential election. As always, the Inspector General will consult with the appropriate U.S. Attorney if there is any evidence of potential criminal conduct."


Sick em Watch Dawg!

Glad you won this little victory 40! Rosenstein took the air out of Trump's sails on this one by quickly requesting the IG to review it. Now Trump can't pound that particular drum for the coming weeks and months and will have to live with whatever the IG says.

Meanwhile Trump and Company will have to go to the next evil plan to end the Mueller investigation. Expect more crazy uncle Rudy this week.

Donald Trump said 11 false things in just 5 tweets Sunday morning

On Sunday morning, President Donald Trump tweeted. And tweeted. And tweeted.

Between 9:04 am and 9:37 am, Trump sent 5 tweets -- all around the same basic theme: He is being unfairly persecuted by special counsel Robert Mueller even as Mueller and the broader FBI overlook crimes by Democrats.

The tweets are riddled with misinformation and, in some cases, outright falsehoods. Taken together, Trump said 11 things that aren't true. Here's the breakdown -- tweet by tweet.

1. "Things are really getting ridiculous. The Failing and Crooked (but not as Crooked as Hillary Clinton) @nytimes has done a long & boring story indicating that the World's most expensive Witch Hunt has found nothing on Russia & me so now they are looking at the rest of the World!" (9:04 am)

Trump is referring here to an article in the Times published Saturday detailing a 2016 meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and a liaison for two Arab princes in which the emissary made clear that his clients wanted to assist Trump's campaign.

He is also making a tangential reference to a detailed piece published in the Times earlier this week that detailed the origins of the FBI investigation into Russia interference in the 2016 election and possible collusion between his campaign and the Russians.

Trump is hanging his conclusion on this one sentence: "A year and a half later, no public evidence has surfaced connecting Mr. Trump's advisers to the hacking or linking Mr. Trump himself to the Russian government's disruptive efforts."

What that sentences makes clear is a) no public evidence yet exists and b) the investigation is ongoing.

Untruth/Exaggeration Count: 1

2. "....At what point does this soon to be $20,000,000 Witch Hunt, composed of 13 Angry and Heavily Conflicted Democrats and two people who have worked for Obama for 8 years, STOP! They have found no Collussion with Russia, No Obstruction, but they aren't looking at the corruption..."

There's zero factual basis -- at least that I can find -- for Trump putting a $20 million price tag on the Mueller probe. The closest we have come to a fact-based cost for the Mueller probe is back in December, when the investigation's total cost was $6.7 million.

Trump's claim that there are 13 Democrats on Mueller's team is also false. According to The Washington Post's Fact Checker, five of the 16 known members of Mueller's team donated to Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign. The New York Times says that nine of the 17 known lawyers on Mueller's team have donated to Democratic campaigns in the past. Then there's this from the Post's Philip Bump: "Of the 18 attorneys we identified on Mueller's team, half gave no money to anyone, according to our analysis. Another five gave $1,000 or less. The one who gave the most also gave to two Republicans."

It's not entirely clear who Trump is referring to with the line "two people who have worked for Obama for 8 years" but, presumably, one of them is Mueller himself. The problem with that is that Mueller was appointed FBI director by President George W. Bush, a Republican. President Obama simply kept Mueller on for the length of his 10-year term.

Trump says that Mueller's team has found no collusion (he misspelled that word in the original tweet), but that too is not accurate. The investigation is ongoing and all of Mueller's findings have yet to go public.

Untruth/Exaggeration Count: 4

3. "...In the Hillary Clinton Campaign where she deleted 33,000 Emails, got $145,000,000 while Secretary of State, paid McCabes wife $700,000 (and got off the FBI hook along with Terry M) and so much more. Republicans and real Americans should start getting tough on this Scam."

First, a truth: Clinton did delete 33,000 emails after she and her attorneys determined they were entirely private and personal communications with no ties to her work as Secretary of State.

Now, to the untruths.

The $145 million figure Trump is referring to is the total donations to the Clinton Foundation by nine individuals who also at one time or another had investments in a Russian company that Clinton's State Department allowed to buy a majority stake in Uranium One, a Canada-based company with US mining interests. The problems with Trump's claim, as detailed here by PolitiFact, are considerable and include the fact that the donations to the Clinton Foundation were made prior to the idea of Clinton serving as secretary of State and that State was one of nine agencies who okayed the deal.

Trump's insistence that someone in the Clinton campaign paid then-FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe's wife $700,000 as a payoff to drop any investigations into them is a jumble of falsehoods. McCabe's wife ran for the state Senate in Virginia in 2015. A super PAC affiliated with Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a longtime Clinton ally, donated $500,000 to her campaign. She lost. There is zero evidence that Hillary Clinton was involved in the donation in any way, shape or form, or that McAuliffe made the donation to dissuade Andrew McCabe from looking into alleged wrongdoing by the Clintons.

Untruth/Exaggeration Count: 2

4. "Now that the Witch Hunt has given up on Russia and is looking at the rest of the World, they should easily be able to take it into the Mid-Term Elections where they can put some hurt on the Republican Party. Don't worry about Dems FISA Abuse, missing Emails or Fraudulent Dossier!"

The Mueller probe has not "given up" on Russia. It's worth noting that five people in the Trump campaign orbit have already pleaded guilty to crimes unearthed by Mueller and several -- including former national security adviser Michael Flynn and former deputy campaign chairman Rick Gates -- are cooperating with the Mueller probe.

It's less clear what Trump is referring to with the phrase "Dems FISA abuse" although he has repeatedly suggested that Obama ordered a wiretap on him at Trump Tower during the campaign (not true) and that the FBI placed an informant in his campaign as spy (knowledgeable sources deny that claim).

As for the missing emails, it is not clear what crime Trump is alleging, although there is little doubt Clinton would have been better served to have a neutral third party go through her emails to determine which were personal and could be deleted and which were not.

Trump's claim that the so-called "Steele dossier" is "fraudulent" is also not accurate. The more salacious elements of the dossier, gathered by former British spy Christopher Steele, are unconfirmed by the FBI. But the intelligence community has made clear that portions of the dossier are borne out by their own investigation.

Untruth/Exaggeration Count: 3 (at least)

5. "What ever happened to the Server, at the center of so much Corruption, that the Democratic National Committee REFUSED to hand over to the hard charging (except in the case of Democrats) FBI? They broke into homes & offices early in the morning, but were afraid to take the Server?"

This one is, mostly, accurate! The FBI confirmed that the DNC repeatedly rejected their requests to turn over the email server that had been penetrated by someone allegedly affiliated with the Russians.

Trump's reference to the raids conducted by the FBI on the homes and offices of people like former campaign chairman Paul Manafort and Trump personal attorney Michael Cohen misses the mark, however. Federal law enforcement did not break into these homes. They conducted raids based on search warrants -- and entirely legal process based on, among other things, probable cause.

Untruth/Exaggeration Count: 1

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/factcheck...ocid=spartanntp

So what was the reason to cheat Bernie? I would have to say that at the same time this was happening.

I just don't understand the Trump position on this.

There were allegations of misconduct by the Trump campaign.. Therefore, it would be incumbent upon the FBI to investigate.

Trump is trying to make something else out of it to distract from the walls that are closing in on him and his family and associates..