I am going to start off with the bottom line up front by way of a quote from Glenn Reynolds, a Beauchamp Brogan Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Tennessee College of Law, known for his weblog, Instapundit, in reaction to an outstanding piece by former U.S. attorney Andrew McCarthy which shows how "FBI director Comey and the Obama Justice Department applied a double standard in their handling of the Clinton-email and Trump–Russia investigations."
They covered for Hillary. They spied on Trump, and then when he unexpectedly won they panicked. Now, you’ll notice, all the mad leaking to the NYT and the WaPo is defensive in nature: Smoke-blowing to try to cover their tracks. In fact a lot of people involved in this should be in jail, and I’m beginning to think some of them might actually wind up going to jail. - Glen Reynolds, May 19, 2018.
The DOJ's Office of Inspector General has completed his report after a year-plus investigation into the misconduct by multiple intelligence agencies, including the FBI and the DOJ, in their handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation. The report is expected to be released to the public soon.
According to former D.C. bureau chief for Investor's Business Daily, Hoover Institution media fellow and journalist, Paul Sperry, has heard "IG Horowitz has found "reasonable grounds" for believing there has been a violation of federal criminal law in the FBI/DOJ's handling of the Clinton investigation/s and has referred his findings of potential criminal misconduct to Huber for possible criminal prosecution." Sperry also asserts that some of those implicated in the report are quite "agitated."
Following the release of the upcoming reports, the IG has also been tasked with investigating the intelligence community misconduct in relation to the FISA court application to surveil Carter Page.
On top of the fear running through the intelligence community and Democratic politicians as they wait for the IG's hammer to fall, mainstream media's is now desperately attempting to preemptively spin, on behalf of the "deep state" members of the intelligence community, the confirmation that before the Russia investigations even began, the FBI was spying on the Trump presidential campaign.
The MSM, who has been spreading deep state propaganda over the course of the Trump presidency, using anonymous or unnamed sources, with many examples of those "stories" ending up being inaccurate, is now spinning madly, twisting themselves into pretzels to justify, not only their lies over the past two years, but to justify the Obama administration using the intelligence community to "set up" or "frame" an opposing party's candidate, and then a sitting president.
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.
Note that despite the claim in the NYT piece, that the FBI had "evidence" that those aides had suspicious contacts linked to Russia, Papadopoulos was indicted for lying to the FBI, not any collusion or misconduct associated with the Trump presidential campaign. No American to date, after a year into the special counsel investigation into possible collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign, has been charged with anything relating to collusion with Russia to affect the outcome of a presidential election..
One of the Washington Post headlines is even more embarrassing than the NYT, almost like they are trying to top each other in who can humiliate the MSM more, as they claim "The FBI didn’t use an informant to go after Trump. They used one to protect him." Yes, really, that is how they are spinning this news. They infiltrated his campaign, set up lower level employees, used an unverified, Kremlin sourced dossier, funded by Hillary Clinton and the DNC to obtain warrants to surveil Trump campaign workers, without telling the FISA court who funded it, all to create a Russian investigation, and they did it to protect Trump.
Just... wow.
The MSM, or the deep state intelligence members behind these desperate attempts to justify what the Obama administration's intelligence community did, as well as the part the MSM played in hiding the truth from the American people for so long, are trying so hard to get in front of this story. The NYT has the quoted article above and the Washington Post already has four different articles about this issue, all spinning and distracting from the fact that President Trump was correct and accurate in his long-time claims that the Obama administration was using the intelligence agencies to spy on a candidate from an opposing party.
In one of those Wapo stories, while refusing to name the FBI spy aka "informant," they did describe him as "A retired American professor," while the NYT describes him as "an American academic who teaches in Britain" and "well-known in Washington circles, having served in previous Republican administrations."
What neither of those outlets did, was credit the Daily Caller, who first broke this back in March 2018, while giving a much better description and naming the spy.
Two months before the 2016 election, George Papadopoulos received a strange request for a meeting in London, one of several the young Trump adviser would be offered — and he would accept — during the presidential campaign.
The meeting request, which has not been reported until now, came from Stefan Halper, a foreign policy expert and Cambridge professor with connections to the CIA and its British counterpart, MI6.
Halper’s September 2016 outreach to Papadopoulos wasn’t his only contact with Trump campaign members. The 73-year-old professor, a veteran of three Republican administrations, met with two other campaign advisers, The Daily Caller News Foundation learned.
Papadopoulos now questions Halper’s motivation for contacting him, according to a source familiar with Papadopoulos’s thinking. That’s not just because of the randomness of the initial inquiry but because of questions Halper is said to have asked during their face-to-face meetings in London.
According to a source with knowledge of the meeting, Halper asked Papadopoulos: “George, you know about hacking the emails from Russia, right?”
Papadopoulos told Halper he didn’t know anything about emails or Russian hacking, said the source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the investigations into Russian meddling in the 2016 campaign. The professor did not follow up on the line of inquiry.
In that Daily Caller piece, they also highlight that Halper "also worked at the Department of State, Department of Defense, Department of Justice, and in three presidential administrations.' The DC followed up again on May 19, after the NYT and Wapo's rush to get in front of this story.
Glenn Greenwald over at The Intercept confirms the identity of the spy, while offering a detailed history of Halper, while taking both the NYT and Wapo to task for not naming the individual "despite publishing so many details about him that anyone with Google would be able to instantly know his name."
Greenwald also points out something that merits further inquiry as he puts it:
To begin with, the New York Times reported in December of last year that the FBI investigation into possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russia began when George Papadopoulos drunkenly boasted to an Australian diplomat about Russian dirt on Hillary Clinton. It was the disclosure of this episode by the Australians that “led the F.B.I. to open an investigation in July 2016 into Russia’s attempts to disrupt the election and whether any of President Trump’s associates conspired,” the NYT claimed.
But it now seems clear that Halper’s attempts to gather information for the FBI began before that. “The professor’s interactions with Trump advisers began a few weeks before the opening of the investigation, when Page met the professor at the British symposium,” the Post reported. While it’s not rare for the FBI to gather information before formally opening an investigation, Halper’s earlier snooping does call into question the accuracy of the NYT’s claim that it was the drunken Papadopoulos ramblings that first prompted the FBI’s interest in these possible connections. And it suggests that CIA operatives, apparently working with at least some factions within the FBI, were trying to gather information about the Trump campaign earlier than had been previously reported.
Then there are questions about what appear to be some fairly substantial government payments to Halper throughout 2016. Halper continues to be listed as a “vendor” by websites that track payments by the federal government to private contractors.
This is the same person Congressional Republicans had to threaten the DOJ/FBI to obtain his identity, something they continued to refuse to provide, yet the same entities, leaked enough information to both the NYT and Wapo, and most likely others to basically out him, then they have the audacity to claim, and this is a direct quote from one of the Wapo pieces "IN THEIR paranoid partisan war on the Justice Department's Russia probe, President Trump's allies have been pushing for the dangerous disclosure of national security information, including information about a top-secret FBI and CIA informant."
Back to Greenwald about that type of ridiculous assertion:
It is difficult to understand how identifying someone whose connections to the CIA is a matter of such public record, and who has a long and well-known history of working on spying programs involving presidential elections on behalf of the intelligence community, could possibly endanger lives or lead to grave national security harm. It isn’t as though Halper has been some sort of covert, stealth undercover asset for the CIA who just got exposed. Quite the contrary: that he’s a spy embedded in the U.S. intelligence community would be known to anyone with internet access.
The level of spin, the distractions, the sheer amount of coordinated articles surrounding this, as well as the attempts on the part of the intelligence community to hide this man's identity previously, then to turn around and simply out him, is indicative of them trying to cover up something much bigger and far more damaging to the MSM and their deep state controllers.
Former U.S. attorney Joe diGenova seems to think that whatever is getting ready to drop will prove there was indeed a clear conspiracy to frame Donald Trump and that it included not only the FBI and the CIA, but also the CIA. He also says criminal referrals have already been sent to prosecutors.
"Categorically and unequivocally, it has been proved that the FBI, in violation of all guidelines, all legislation — and I believe they committed crimes in doing so — purposely sent people into the Trump campaign to plant false information, then force that information to be forwarded back to CIA, and then funneled to the FBI, to be used as false information in FISA applications," he says.
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