Photo Source: AP Photo/Evan Vucci
It’s a word that Democrats don’t like to hear when it
comes to the 2016 Trump campaign. For starters, it could place a lot of their
allies in the legal crosshairs.
Second, it would be yet another time they would
have to eat crap for dismissing another claim by President Trump as
whacko-doodle talk.
Yeah, everyone has a plan until they get punched in the
mouth.
Trump says his tower was tapped. It was dismissed as psycho-talk…and
then we learned that Paul Manafort, who lived in Trump Tower, has his
phones tapped by the FBI.
Then, there’s this whole allegation about
spying. Spygate is what the president calls it—and once again these claims were
dismissed as a whackjob theory. That was until last year when it was revealed
that Stefan Halper was the person the FBI was trying to use
to infiltrate the Trump campaign.
This wasn’t hard to figure out; most of
the breadcrumbs leading to Halper were public knowledge. Oh, and these
attempts continued after the 2016 election as well. Sam Clovis, George
Papadopoulos, and Carter Page were the alleged targets.
The New York Times has
tried to spin this whole operation as something that was everything, but
spying.
Then again, Obama’s former Director of National Intelligence James
Clapper said it would
have been a good thing if intelligence operative had been “observing”
the campaign due to the threats the Russian allegations posed to the integrity
of our electoral system or something.
And that’s what a lot of liberals are
saying to excuse the Trump campaign spy operation. It was a national security
priority.
Friendly reminder, the Trump campaign, and the Russians did not
collude, nor was there any conspiracy to collude during the 2016 election per
the Mueller report.
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He wasn't a spy.... he
was hired by the FBI to secretly engage in conversations under false pretenses
and then report back whatever he learned in those conversations.
But he wasn't a spy.
But he wasn't a spy.
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This is the new pivot because it looks pretty clear that
some sort of secret surveillance took place.
Also, the American people aren’t
going to buy that this was a ‘non-spy’ operation given the objectives and
methods executed by the FBI in this case.
The New York Times’ story relating to this all but
confirmed what many of us had known for years (via NYT):
The
conversation at a London bar in September 2016 took a strange turn when the
woman sitting across from George Papadopoulos, a Trump campaign adviser, asked
a direct question: Was the Trump campaign working with Russia?
The woman
had set up the meeting to discuss foreign policy issues. But she was actually a
government investigator posing as a research assistant, according to people
familiar with the operation. The F.B.I. sent her to London as part of
the counterintelligence inquiry opened that summer to better
understand the Trump campaign’s links to Russia.
The
American government’s affiliation with the woman, who said her name was
Azra Turk, is one previously unreported detail of an operation that
has become a political flash point in the face of accusations by President
Trump and his allies that American law enforcement and intelligence officials
spied on his campaign to undermine his electoral chances. Last year, he called
it Spygate.
The
decision to use Ms. Turk in the operation aimed at a presidential campaign
official shows the level of alarm inside the F.B.I.during a frantic period when the bureau
was trying to determine the scope of Russia’s attempts to disrupt the 2016
election, but could also give ammunition to Mr. Trump and his allies for their
spying claims.
Ms.
Turk went to London to help oversee the politically sensitive operation, working alongside a longtime
informant, the Cambridge professor Stefan A. Halper. The move was a sign that
the bureau wanted in place a trained investigator for a layer of oversight, as
well as someone who could gather information for or serve as a credible witness
in any potential prosecution that emerged from the case.
So, it’s confirmed. The FBI was spying.
Papadopoulos says "Ms. Turk" was CIA.
Oh, and we haven’t even touched upon
the alleged FISA abuses that occurred under the Obama White House
concerning obtaining a warrant that placed former Trump foreign policy adviser
Carter Page under the microphone.
A DOJ IG report is about to drop on that and
reportedly the results are “scorching,” according to Dr. Sebastian Gorka.
Also, it's the reason why all of this is dropping now.
Air out as much as possible before the anvil falls.
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Unbelievable. Just how
many spies did the FBI run at the Trump campaign? (BTW, no coincidence things
like this are leaking now. Everyone trying to get out ahead of Barr's
investigation.)
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I agree with everything
in this superb article except “Azra Turk” clearly was not FBI. She was CIA and
affiliated with Turkish intel.
She could hardly speak English and was tasked to
meet me about my work in the energy sector offshore Israel/Cyprus which Turkey
was competing with Mark
Mazzetti@MarkMazzettiNYT
