Friday, May 25, 2018

It's Ridiculous To Say FBI Spying Meant To Protect The Trump Campaign

Shortly after the meeting would have ended, The New York Times and Washington Post published articles describing the dispute between Nunes and the DOJ, in which the authors referenced the FBI informant whose actions before the initiation of a formal FBI investigation into the Trump campaign apparently provoked Nunes' interest in having the information unredacted.

Their descriptions of his prior association with the FBI and CIA, his meetings with at least two of the Trump campaign members, and the timing of these meetings closely tracked Chuck Ross's reporting in The Daily Caller two months ago, in which Ross named the informant as Stefan Halper.

If the FBI was trying to use the least intrusive method to conduct their counterintelligence duty to protect the Trump campaign from Russian intelligence attempts to infiltrate, influence, entrap, compromise, or recruit Trump campaign officials, why didn't they have the wily Halper deliver the appropriate warnings to Carter Page, George Papadopoulos, and Sam Clovis during his private meetings with them?

"The FBI couldn't have called these guys in during an election! It would have actually hurt the Trump campaign if they did that. Imagine the uproar when it got out in the media that the FBI was talking to Trump campaign officials about Russian spies attempting to compromise them! They had no choice but to use the confidential informant. It was the least intrusive way of doing it."

The FBI and intelligence experts on cable news shows are telling us that a conversation such as what I've posited above would find its way onto the front page of The New York Times within hours: "The FBI is interviewing Trump campaign officials and warning them of attempts by Russian spies to infiltrate the campaign." That's the prevailing defense-that everyone would find out about it and the FBI was simply trying to avoid any possibility of their interest in Russian influence operations on Trump campaign members becoming a news story.

It is currently unknown whether Halper's conversations with the three Trump campaign officials provided any substantive input into the FBI's understanding of the identities, tactics, intentions, or effectiveness of the Russian attempt to infiltrate the Trump campaign with spies, or to compromise campaign officials in an attempt to set them up for blackmail.

The FBI's focus was to use any available resources to prove that the Trump campaign was colluding with Russia to illegally influence the election, as clearly laid out for them in a dossier provided by a man FBI director James Comey assured the Senate Intelligence Committee was a "Reliable source."

http://thefederalist.com/2018/05/25/ridiculous-say-fbis-spying-trying-protect-trump-campaign/ 

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