3/23/2023 0 Comments Fbi informant trump campaign![]() ![]() The two men struck up an email correspondence. ![]() Less than a week later, Halper met Page at a conference on US foreign policy and the 2016 election held in Cambridge. Page had long been on the FBI’s radar due to his contacts with Russia in 2013, Russian intelligence reached out to him directly in a short-lived effort to recruit him as an intelligence asset. On July 7 of that year, Trump foreign policy adviser Carter Page traveled to Moscow to give a lecture. This deep familiarity with both Republican politics and the world of international spycraft may have been what made Halper an ideal informant for the FBI during the 2016 campaign. Interestingly, Halper stepped down from his role in the seminar in 2016, telling the Financial Times that there was “unacceptable Russian influence on the group.” There, he led something called the Cambridge Intelligence Seminar, an annual forum in which intelligence professionals from across the Western Hemisphere, both current and retired, meet to discuss the ins and outs of spying. Halper called the reports at the time “absolutely false” and has long denied the accusations.Īfter his career in American politics ended, Halper remade himself as an academic, teaching and writing about foreign affairs from his perch at Cambridge. Some Reagan White House officials later alleged that Halper had used former CIA agents to run an operation against Carter. As a profile in the Washington Post puts it:Īides to Reagan, including Halper, were accused of having spied on Carter’s campaign and obtaining private documents that Carter was using to prepare for a debate. Bush, work that got him in hot water for, interestingly, allegedly spying on President Jimmy Carter’s campaign. He also worked on presidential campaigns for Reagan and George H.W. He worked for Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford on domestic policy, and then served as a deputy assistant secretary of state in the Reagan administration, focusing on the intersection of military affairs and politics. Stefan Halper is an interesting man, someone who has long had one foot in Republican politics and the other in the intelligence community. Who is Stefan Halper, and what did he actually do? Stefan Halper. The scandal here isn’t that Trump was “spied on.” It’s that the FBI’s legitimate investigation into Russia is becoming a cudgel for the president to attack the Justice Department publicly and undermine its independence. Barbara McQuade, a former US district attorney, told Vox that the notion that the FBI was fishing for some kind of dirt on Trump is “baseless.” The president has dubbed this “ SPYGATE,” calling it a “scandal the likes of which this country may never have seen before!”īased on what has been publicly reported, legal experts say that Halper’s work was most likely part of a legitimate counterintelligence operation targeted at Russia’s election interference campaign and not any kind of political attack on Trump. Trump and Republicans say that Halper was a spy planted in the Trump campaign by the Obama administration “ for political purposes” - in other words, to hurt Trump’s electoral chances. The goal of these meetings was allegedly to assess whether there were any real links between the Trump campaign and Russia, enough to fuel a wider investigation. Halper, an American who taught for years at Cambridge University in the UK, has been outed in the press as a secret FBI “informant” who met with several Trump campaign advisers in mid-2016 at the bureau’s behest. His allegation centers on a retired university professor in Britain named Stefan Halper. In short, this entails identifying foreign intelligence officers and their network of agents uncovering their motives and methods and ultimately rendering their operations ineffective - either by clandestinely thwarting them (say, by feeding back misinformation or “flipping” their sources into double agents) or by exposing them.President Donald Trump claims to have uncovered one of the biggest spying scandals in American history - and that the FBI, not Russia, is the culprit. ![]() ![]() Rather than trying to find evidence of a crime, the FBI’s counterintelligence goal is to identify, monitor and neutralize foreign intelligence activity in the United States. And relying on a covert source rather than a more intrusive method of gathering information suggests that the FBI may have been acting cautiously - perhaps too cautiously - to protect the campaign, not undermine it.Īs a former FBI counterintelligence agent, I know what Trump apparently does not: Counterintelligence investigations have a different purpose than their criminal counterparts. The investigation started out as a counterintelligence probe, not a criminal one. But Trump and his backers are wrong about what it means that the FBI reportedly was using a confidential source to gather information early in its investigation of possible campaign ties to Russia. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |