OK, so Trump claimed "wiretap". It was actually infiltration.

NY Times: "F.B.I. used informant to investigate ties to Russia campaign, not to spy, as Trump claims."

That sounds like potahto/potahto (that's right, no potato) to me.


The FBI Informant Who Monitored the Trump Campaign, Stefan Halper, Oversaw a CIA Spying Operation in the 1980 Presidential Election

5/19/18

AN EXTREMELY STRANGE EPISODE that has engulfed official Washington over the last two weeks came to a truly bizarre conclusion on Friday night. And it revolves around a long-time, highly sketchy CIA operative, Stefan Halper.

Four decades ago, Halper was responsible for a long-forgotten spying scandal involving the 1980 election, in which the Reagan campaign – using CIA officials managed by Halper, reportedly under the direction of former CIA Director and then-Vice-Presidential candidate George H.W. Bush – got caught running a spying operation from inside the Carter administration. The plot involved CIA operatives passing classified information about Carter’s foreign policy to Reagan campaign officials in order to ensure the Reagan campaign knew of any foreign policy decisions that Carter was considering.

Over the past several weeks, House Republicans have been claiming that the FBI during the 2016 election used an operative to spy on the Trump campaign, and they triggered outrage within the FBI by trying to learn his identity. The controversy escalated when President Trump joined the fray on Friday morning. “Reports are there was indeed at least one FBI representative implanted, for political purposes, into my campaign for president,” Trump tweeted, adding: “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!”

In response, the DOJ and the FBI’s various media spokespeople did not deny the core accusation, but quibbled with the language (the FBI used an “informant,” not a “spy”), and then began using increasingly strident language to warn that exposing his name would jeopardize his life and those of others, and also put American national security at grave risk. On May 8, the Washington Post described the informant as “a top-secret intelligence source” and cited DOJ officials as arguing that disclosure of his name “could risk lives by potentially exposing the source, a U.S. citizen who has provided intelligence to the CIA and FBI.”

The top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mark Warner, who spent much of last week working to ensure confirmation of Trump’s choice to lead the CIA, Gina Haspel, actually threatened his own colleagues in Congress with criminal prosecution if they tried to obtain the identity of the informant. “Anyone who is entrusted with our nation’s highest secrets should act with the gravity and seriousness of purpose that knowledge deserves,” Warner said.

But now, as a result of some very odd choices by the nation’s largest media outlets, everyone knows the name of the FBI’s informant: Stefan Halper. And Halper’s history is quite troubling, particularly his central role in the scandal in the 1980 election. Equally troubling are the DOJ and FBI’s highly inflammatory and, at best, misleading claims that they made to try to prevent Halper’s identity from being reported.

To begin with, it’s obviously notable that the person the FBI used to monitor the Trump campaign is the same person who worked as a CIA operative running that 1980 Presidential election spying campaign.

It was not until several years after Reagan’s victory over Carter did this scandal emerge. It was leaked by right-wing officials inside the Reagan administration who wanted to undermine officials they regarded as too moderate, including then White House Chief of Staff James Baker, who was a Bush loyalist.
...
Though there was nothing illegal about ex-CIA officials uniting to put a former CIA Director in the Oval Office, the paper said “there are some rumblings of uneasiness in the intelligence network.” It specifically identified Cline as one of the most prominent CIA official working openly for Bush, noting that he “recommended his son-in-law, Stefan A. Halper, a former Nixon White House aide, be hired as Bush’s director of policy development and research.”

In 2016, top officials from the intelligence community similarly rallied around Hillary Clinton. As The Intercept has previously documented:

Former acting CIA Director Michael Morell not only endorsed Clinton in the New York Times but claimed that “Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.” George W. Bush’s CIA and NSA director, Gen. Michael Hayden, pronounced Trump a “clear and present danger” to U.S. national security and then, less than a week before the election, went to the Washington Post to warn that “Donald Trump really does sound a lot like Vladimir Putin” and said Trump is “the useful fool, some naif, manipulated by Moscow, secretly held in contempt, but whose blind support is happily accepted and exploited.”​

So as it turns out, the informant used by the FBI in 2016 to gather information on the Trump campaign was not some previously unknown, top-secret asset whose exposure as an operative could jeopardize lives. Quite the contrary: his decades of work for the CIA – including his role in an obviously unethical if not criminal spying operation during the 1980 presidential campaign – is quite publicly known.

AND NOW, as a result of some baffling choices by the nation’s largest news organizations as well as their anonymous sources inside the U.S. Government, Stefan Halper’s work for the FBI during the 2016 is also publicly known

Last night, both the Washington Post and New York Times – whose reporters, like pretty much everyone in Washington, knew exactly who the FBI informant is – published articles that, while deferring to the FBI’s demands by not naming him, provided so many details about him that it made it extremely easy to know exactly who it is. The NYT described the FBI informant as “an American academic who teaches in Britain” and who “made contact late that summer with” George Papadopoulos and “also met repeatedly in the ensuing months with the other aide, Carter Page.” The Post similarly called him “a retired American professor” who met with Page “at a symposium about the White House race held at a British university.”

In contrast to the picture purposely painted by the DOJ and its allies that this informant was some of sort super-secret, high-level, covert intelligence asset, the NYT described him as what he actually is: “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.”

Despite how “well known” he is in Washington, and despite publishing so many details about him that anyone with Google would be able to instantly know his name, the Post and the NYT nonetheless bizarrely refused to identity him, with the Post justifying its decision that it “is not reporting his name following warnings from U.S. intelligence officials that exposing him could endanger him or his contacts.” The NYT was less melodramatic about it, citing a general policy: the NYT “has learned the source’s identity but typically does not name informants to preserve their safety,” it said.

In other words, both the NYT and the Post chose to provide so many details about the FBI informant that everyone would know exactly who it was, while coyly pretending that they were obeying FBI demands not to name him. How does that make sense? Either these newspapers believe the FBI’s grave warnings that national security and lives would be endangered if it were known who they used as their informant (in which case those papers should not publish any details that would make his exposure likely), or they believe that the FBI (as usual) was just invoking false national security justifications to hide information it unjustly wants to keep from the public (in which case the newspapers should name him).

In any event, publication of those articles by the NYT and Post last night made it completely obvious who the FBI informant was, because the Daily Caller’s investigative reporter Chuck Ross on Thursday had published an article reporting that a long-time CIA operative who is now a professor at Cambridge repeatedly met with Papadopoulos and Page. The article, in its opening paragraph, named the professor, Stefan Halper, and described him as “a University of Cambridge professor with CIA and MI6 contacts.”



Ross’ article, using public information, recounted at length Halper’s long-standing ties to the CIA, including the fact that his father-in-law, Ray Cline, was a top CIA official during the Cold War, and that Halper himself had long worked with both the CIA and its British counterpart, the MI6. As Ross wrote: “at Cambridge, Halper has worked closely with Dearlove, the former chief of MI6. In recent years they have directed the Cambridge Security Initiative, a non-profit intelligence consulting group that lists ‘UK and US government agencies’ among its clients.”

Both the NYT and Washington Post reporters boasted, with seeming pride, about the fact that they did not name the informant even as they published all the details which made it simple to identify him. But NBC News – citing Ross’ report and other public information – decided to name him, while stressing that it has not confirmed that he actually worked as an FBI informant:

The professor who met with both Page and Papadopoulos is Stefan Halper, a former official in the Nixon, Ford and Reagan administrations who has been a paid consultant to an internal Pentagon think tank known as the Office of Net Assessment, consulting on Russia and China issues, according to public records.​

Ross’ article, using public information, recounted at length Halper’s long-standing ties to the CIA, including the fact that his father-in-law, Ray Cline, was a top CIA official during the Cold War, and that Halper himself had long worked with both the CIA and its British counterpart, the MI6. As Ross wrote: “at Cambridge, Halper has worked closely with Dearlove, the former chief of MI6. In recent years they have directed the Cambridge Security Initiative, a non-profit intelligence consulting group that lists ‘UK and US government agencies’ among its clients.”

Both the NYT and Washington Post reporters boasted, with seeming pride, about the fact that they did not name the informant even as they published all the details which made it simple to identify him. But NBC News – citing Ross’ report and other public information – decided to name him, while stressing that it has not confirmed that he actually worked as an FBI informant:

The professor who met with both Page and Papadopoulos is Stefan Halper, a former official in the Nixon, Ford and Reagan administrations who has been a paid consultant to an internal Pentagon think tank known as the Office of Net Assessment, consulting on Russia and China issues, according to public records.

Earlier this week, records of payments were found that were made during 2016 to Halper by the Department of Defense’s Office of Net Assessment, though it not possible from these records to know the exact work for which these payments were made. The Pentagon office that paid Halper in 2016, according to a 2015 Washington Post story on its new duties, “reports directly to Secretary of Defense and focuses heavily on future threats, has a $10 million budget.”



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.

Equally strange are the semantic games which journalists are playing in order to claim that this revelation disproves, rather than proves, Trump’s allegation that the FBI “spied” on his campaign. This bizarre exchangebetween CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski and the New York Times’ Trip Gabriel vividly illustrates the strange machinations used by journalists to justify how all of this is being characterized:



Despite what Halper actually is, the FBI and its dutiful mouthpieces have spent weeks using the most desperate language to try to hide Halper’s identity and the work he performed as part of the 2016 election. Here was the deeply emotional reaction to last night’s story from Brookings’ Benjamin Wittes, who has become a social media star by parlaying his status as Jim Comey’s best friend and long-time loyalist to security state agencies into a leading role in pushing the Trump/Russia story:



Wittes’ claim that all of this resulted in the “outing” of some sort of sensitive “intelligence source” is preposterous given how publicly known Halper’s role as a CIA operative has been for decades. But this is the scam that the FBI and people like Mark Warner have been running for two weeks: deceiving people into believing that exposing Halper’s identity would create grave national security harm by revealing some previously unknown intelligence asset.

Wittes also implies that it was Trump and Devin Nunes who are responsible for Halper’s exposure but he almost certainly has no idea of who the sources are for the NYT or the Washington Post. And note that Wittes is too cowardly to blame the institutions that actually made it easy to identify Halper – the New York Times and Washington Post – preferring instead to exploit the opportunity to depict the enemies of his friend Jim Comey as traitors.

Whatever else is true, the CIA operative and FBI informant used to gather information on the Trump campaign in the 2016 campaign has, for weeks, been falsely depicted as a sensitive intelligence asset rather than what he actually is: a long-time CIA operative with extensive links to the Bush family who was responsible for a dirty and likely illegal spying operation in the 1980 presidential election. For that reason, it’s easy to understand why many people in Washington were so desperate to conceal his identity, but that desperation had nothing to do with the lofty and noble concerns for national security they claimed were motivating them.

 

You're doing a stumbler....

Can you cut it down to two sentences..

 

Sure.

 

I like Glenn Greenwald and respect his opinions greatly. He doesn't mention the Obama admin anywhere in his article. It looks to me like the infiltration was perpetrated by Republicans.

 

Yes, now I'm really laughing at the ass-clown spin the Trumpophiles are trying to put on this.

I don't know about the rest of you (well actually I do, it's obvious) but the ass-clown circus is in trouble, and they know it. Anyone care to wager on Donnie throwing even his own son under the bus on this one?

Hush....an alias

 

Cline was a CIA employee Helper was only related to him and was not a CIA asset.

 

Nope. FBI is under the President.

 

So, you're calling Glenn Greenwald a Trumpophile?

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_...trump_the_dnc_hack_and_a_new_mccarthyism.html

Keep chucklin', gurlfrannnd!

 

That would require JimmyCrackPorn to understand what he copied and pasted.

 

So let's see... a July 2016 article which is an interview with Greenwald who is with the "Intercept" which is anti-U.S. Intelligence and Law Enforcement, on par with wikileaks to disseminate classified information and to justify their actions inflates and twists what they discuss is a valid argument?

I think you need to try harder... Or is it beyond your ability to discuss this intelligently and honestly?

Hush....an alias

 

AWRIGHT!!
SIDDOWN!!

You people can't help but attack each other where Trump is mentioned.
Fine.

But, you're missing the point here.

The FBI spied on a presidential campaign.
For political reasons.
Both the FBI and DOJ have become so politicized that they are making basic policy decisions that impact presidential campaigns. They are acting on those policy decisions to impact the outcome of presidential elections.

Now, depending on your political agenda, you can shout that it wasn't spying at all, just sending an informant into the "enemy camp" or you can hop on your soapbox and froth how Trump was right all along.

Irrelevant.

The point is, our Federal law enforcement apparatus has devolved into a political agency and is taking steps to impact our election process.

And that should scare the living shit out of every American, whether a supporter or unsupporter. We are one step away from a police state. CAN YOU PEOPLE GET THAT??

Fuck the Russians, we got a bigger problem right here at home with the Department of Justice and the FBI.

*Shooter sits back to see if anyone, on either side of the debate, can put aside their politics long enough to really grasp just how serious this is.

 

Or... We can get the issue straight.

The FBI & CIA received information that a foreign power was attempting to influence our elections. SO, doing their jobs both internally and externally respectively to protect the United States, they investigated. Once it was realized that those foreign entities were in discussions with U.S. citizens, that was investigated. And, once it was determined that those foreign entities were in discussions DIRECTLY regarding their assistance to influence the elections, with U.S. citizens, therefor being a crime if true, they began deeper investigations.

The FBI and DOJ are attached to the executive branch because they deal with enforcement, not legislation or judicial activities. They serve the U.S. CITIZENRY and this NATION... NOT the President.

That's Trump's whole beef, that they will not do as he says. That they go about their business as they are SUPPOSED TO, and he's making a huge stink about that...

Because????????

Hush....an alias

 

I presume that gospel up top means there were spies somewhere.
OMG
who knew
spies , surely not
no one spies do they
only those that get caught or exposed of course

No one else ever spied.

Just like no one commits any crimes ,

except those that get caught.

I would say judging by the leaks of information , from everywhere , on everything ,
there are "informants" everywhere.

Of course , if they collect information you don't think they should , they will be spies.

But then who in this day n age thinks information will not be collected ,
anywhere.

ps. don't take this post to seriously.
I just don't think spies are surprising anywhere.
I also don't think it requires a gospel to tell us , or that many read gospels.

 

Pay attention.
First, understand that this all started long before the 2016 campaign. Long before Trump, or Clinton, or Bush.

President Reagan had spies in the Carter campaign. His buddy Bush ran it. Don't believe Shooter? Google it.

In the 1948 presidential campaign, Hoover's FBI leaked to Gov. Thomas E. Dewey, the Republican challenger, compromising information about President Harry Truman. Again, Google it.

After Hoover died, the FBI made attempts to clean out it's closets (pun intended) and, until this decade, they actually did a pretty good job of it. But, the whole Clinton e Mail thing, the Russian interference thing, and the weird political campaign(s) we saw in 2016 torpedoed that.

Remember that Comey and McCabe have admitted that much of what they did relative to the Clinton e Mail investigations were politically motivated or took into account the potential political implications.
And the Department of Justice under Lynch made clear to Comey early on that prosecuting Clinton for the e Mail thingy was a non starter. Not based on the facts or the evidence, but based on political considerations.

Fine. In Washington DC it's hard not to consider politics when making decisions. Shooter gets that. Everyone has an agenda.

But when the FBI and/or DOJ put spies (not informants, that term is just politispeak) into political campaigns, not to investigate potential law breaking, but to entrap and/or plant damaging evidence, that goes beyond any semblance of justice, equality, or right.

It is little more than a police state.

And that should scare the shit out of any American.

 

Yes, I am afraid it is.

 

Discuss intelligently?


OK, here goes.

Hey you stupid ass-clown bitch! You can go on pretending that your precious Blowbama woiuld never do anything like trying to influence an election himself (just like he didn't when his trouble makers went to Israel a couple of years ago, and just like he claimed to have no knowledge of the IRS targeting, etc). Even with the media pulling heavy for Blowbama & Clinton, the shit is still being found. Hill da Beast will just whine bout the "vaaaaaaast right-wing conspiracy", and I'm sure President Schultz will inform everyone that "I just found out about it the same time you guys did."

http://www.cc.com/video-clips/8wan3v/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart-me-talk-reluctantly-one-day

-------------------------


How'd I do? I figured I'd model your fine example of "discussing intelligently".

 

Was Obama WH behind FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation? New Strzok-Page messages provide clues


5/21/18

Was the Obama White House behind the Department of Justice initiating a counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign in 2016? Recently unearthed text messages between senior FBI agent Peter Strzok and former FBI lawyer Lisa Page suggest it was.

The messages were first reported by the National Review’s Andrew McCarthy last week, but were brought to some attention by Ari Fleischer, the White House press secretary for George W. Bush, over the weekend.

What are the details?
As McCarthy explained, many questions surrounding the origins of the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation, which morphed into what is now special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, can be found in the Strzok-Page text messages. The couple was at the heart of the investigation before Strzok was re-assigned and Page left last year.

Thanks to the hard work of Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, hundreds of pages of Strzok-Page text messages have been released. However, there’s just one problem: they are heavily redacted, including much of the messages’ contexts.

“Here, the Obama administration took extraordinary measures to withhold information from Congress about its Trump-Russia probe — such as not briefing the bipartisan leaders of the both chambers and their intelligence committees,” McCarthy alleged.

But down at the bottom of McCarthy’s article is a gem easily glossed over: a text message implying Obama’s White House was behind the opening of the FBI’s investigation.


What do the messages show?
On the afternoon of Aug. 5, 2016 — after Strzok returned from a trip to London where he met with intelligence sources for secret meetings regarding the FBI’s new investigation — the two discussed a major meeting between top DOJ and CIA officials.

After that meeting, Strzok and Page had the following exchange:

Strzok: And hi. Went well, best we could have expected. Other than [REDACTED] quote: “the White House is running this.” My answer, “well, maybe for you they are.” And of course, I was planning on telling this guy, thanks for coming, we’ve got an hour, but with Bill [Priestap] there, I’ve got no control….

Page: Yeah, whatever (re the WH comment). We’ve got the emails that say otherwise.​

It’s not exactly clear what emails Page was referring to, but McCarthy suggested they might “clarify how the Obama administration divided responsibility for running the Trump-Russia investigation.”

Anything else?
To conclude his article, McCarthy made an excellent point: If the government is not trying to hide information, then why are so many of the Strzok-Page text messages redacted? Is it because some information discussed is classified?

That is unlikely because both agents are highly trained in classified information and in which venues it is appropriate to discuss such information — their personal cellphones not being one of those places.

But, McCarthy wrote, “if that is the claim, are they telling us that Hillary Clinton was investigated — and given a pass — for the unauthorized transmission of classified information by FBI officials who were themselves actively engaged in the unauthorized transmission of classified information?”

“The Strzok-Page texts rate a lot more attention, and a lot more transparency,” he concluded.

 

Obama DoD Paid ‘FBI Informant’ Stefan Halper over $250,000 Right Before 2016 Election


5/21/18

Public records show Stefan Halper, the foreign policy expert “outed,” as an FBI informant that spied on Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, was paid a large sum in 2016 for work he did for the Obama administration.

The Department of Defense paid Halper $282,295 on September 27, 2016 — just months before the 2016 presidential election — for work titled, “INDIA AND CHINA ECON STUDY,” says USASPENDING.gov, a website that tracks spending data for the U.S. government. This sum was one of two payments made to Halper for the job; the second, worth $129,280, was made on July 26, 2017. The record lists Halper’s “Period of Performance” as September 26, 2016 to March 29, 2018.

USASPENDING.gov shows the Department of Defense paid Halper a total of $1,058,161 for work between 2012-2018. The work designated for “India-China” study comprised nearly 40 percent of that compensation.

The contents of the work listed above are presently unknown.

Recent reports detailed Halper’s interactions with three members of the Trump campaign— Carter Page, Sam Clovis, and George Papadopoulos.

The New York Post writes:

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.

…

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.​

The Stanford and Oxford-educated Halper started his career in government in 1971 as a member of President Richard Nixon’s Domestic Policy Council and served as the Office of Management and Budget’s Assistant Director of Management and Evaluation Division between 1973-1974. The foreign policy expert worked assistant to all three of President Gerald Ford’s Chief of Staffs — Alexander Haig, Donald Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney — until 1977.

In March 2016, Halper told Sputnik News that he believed then-Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton would prove more effective than other candidates in maintaining the “special relationship” between the United States and Britain.

“I believe Clinton would be best for US-UK relations and for relations with the European Union. Clinton is well-known, deeply experienced and predictable. US-UK relations will remain steady regardless of the winner although Clinton will be less disruptive over time,” Halper told the Russian news outlet.

 

Whats hilarious is he has been right, literally about everything. Right when schneiderman got busted, someone pulled up a tweet Trump put out from 2013, saying that he was more corrupt than Weiner and Spitzer, and that one day he would fall also. The left can make fun of him all they want, but the main reason all these politicians from both parties are pissed at him is because he is “breaking up the band” so to speak. And outsider coming, blowing

 

Dammit it cut me off....

Blowing up their sanctified little club. Exposing the bullshit they have been pulling.

That is why they are pissed. And delivering results at the same time. So what he talks like your drunk uncle joe at a holiday bbq. Is he doing his job? Putting AMERICA and AMERICAN citizens first? Getting results? He has done more in 17 months, than the previous administration did in 8 years, and fixed all of the crap that destroyed much of this countries well being.