By Mary
Kay Linge | New York Post
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.
___________________
POWERLINE
Jazzing up the FBI spying-on-Trump scandal
The FBI and its friends in the
mainstream media want to make the Bureau’s spying on the Trump campaign seem as
dry, innocuous, and non-cloak-and-dagger as possible under the circumstances.
An elderly professor contacted three Trump advisers — Carter Page, George
Papadopoulos, and Sam Clovis.
He met with Page at least several
times and maintained an email correspondence with him. He met with Clovis once
for coffee. He met several times for dinner with Papadopoulos. He was looking
for indications of Russian influence in the campaign. Apparently, he found
none.
As dry as this story sounds, it
still constitutes the federal government spying on the campaign of the
candidate of the party out of power. It’s still a scandal.
It could a use a little spice,
though. This report by Chuck Ross at the Daily Caller
supplies it.
According to Ross:
Papadopoulos made the trip to
(London) and had dinner multiple times with [the spying professor] and a
Turkish woman described as his assistant. Sources familiar with Papadopoulos’s
version of their meetings said Halper randomly asked Papadopoulos whether he
knew about Democratic National Committee emails that had been hacked and leaked
by Russians.
Papadopoulos strongly denied the
allegation, sources familiar with his version of the exchange have told The
DCNF [Daily Caller News Foundation]. Halper grew agitated and pressed
Papadopoulos on the topic. Papadopoulos believes that Halper was recording him
during some of their interactions, sources said.
[The professor’s] assistant. .
.brought up Russians and emails over drinks with Papadopoulos. [She] also
flirted heavily with Papadopoulos and attempted to meet him in Chicago, where
he lives, a source told TheDCNF.
If true, the FBI didn’t just use an
elderly professor to spy. It also used a temptress.
This isn’t as juicy as parts of the
anti-Trump dossier, but it may have the virtue (so to speak) of being true.
