FBI had doubts about Russia informant's allegation that helped prompt Mike Flynn probe

Agents ultimately deemed the account "Not plausible" and "Not accurate" but proceeded to investigate Flynn anyway, newly declassified documents show.

FBI confidential human source reports show Stefan Halper, an academic who long worked for the bureau as a trusted informant, was the original source of a story that Flynn had left a 2014 event in Cambridge, England, with the Russian scholar Svetlana Lokhova while he was still the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency.

The memos show Halper offered the Lokhova story during his first Russia collusion debriefing on Aug. 11, 2016, shortly after Donald Trump had accepted the Republican presidential nomination and days before the bureau opened an investigation codenamed Crossfire Razor focused on whether Flynn was wittingly or unwittingly aiding Moscow.

"The CHS did not remember another officer with CR, but said that there was a representative from CR's organization there from a local military base." Four days later on Aug. 16, 2016, documents show, the FBI formally opened a counterintelligence investigation into Flynn as part of the Crossfire Hurricane probe into the now-disproven allegations of Trump-Russia collusion.

The documents make clear that Halper's allegations of the Lokhova encounter were included in the Flynn probe, and that the FBI checked U.S. and foreign intelligence databases on the Russian-born academic and "Reported no derogatory information in its holdings." In fact, a former bureau official told Just the News, the FBI was favorably familiar with Lokhova because she had been cleared to work with the bureau's official historian while researching a book on Soviet-era spying.

The documents state that early on agents asked Halper if he might "Be able to meet with CR as part of the CHS' due diligence" and create "Another opportunity for the CHS to address the ties to the Trump campaign." There is no evidence in the memos that Halper was able to meet with Flynn during the probe though.

"According to the lies, I am General Flynn's Russian girlfriend, and that lie is the reason that the FBI opened up a counter-intelligence investigation on General Flynn." In his debriefings as a cooperating witness with Special Counsel Robert Mueller, Flynn also directly knocked down any suggestion of an untoward encounter with Lokhova as "Ridiculous." Flynn "Did not have any other interaction with her during that trip, or on any other occasion," Flynn told prosecutors, according to an FBI report of the interview.

https://justthenews.com/accountability/russia-and-ukraine-scandals/fbi-had-doubts-about-russia-informants-allegation-helped