On Thursday, Lindsey Graham released the transcript of a clandestine Deep State rendezvous at a “prestigious” London social club. Only weeks before the 2016 presidential election, undercover rat Stefan Halper wore an FBI wire to a secret meeting with Trump campaign aid George Papadopoulos. Everything they recorded worked against them to destroy their case. The scary part is, instead of dropping the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, the Department of Injustice illegally concealed the conflicting evidence. So far, they’ve gotten away with it too.
Transcript proves Trump aide was trapped
The whole purpose of the entrapment scheme was to trick Papadopoulos into saying something on tape that could be used to tie him, or anyone else on the Trump campaign, to the Russian government. It didn’t work. The Federal Bureau of Instigation was really hoping that the Trump aide would say something juicy about the Democrat email WikiLeaks release. “You know this stuff out of WikiLeaks is really superb,” Halper teased.
The meeting was a huge disappointment to the FBI. Papadopoulos didn’t give them anything helpful. In fact, he shot their theories down in flames. Later, the FBI intentionally hid what he said from the FISA court in the Carter Page case, just so they could get an ear into Trump Tower.
The gambit began with the casual dropping of a few names. “I have a lot of friends in Russia,” the former Cambridge professor bragged over drinks.
All are former Russian agents. The transcript reveals for the first time that the Russian spies were Vyacheslav Trubnikov, Leonid Shebarshin, and Yuri Traughtoff. “My point is that the Russians can be very helpful to us at this time,” he enticed. He was fishing for Assange information, so dangled a little bait. “We’ve got some great information coming out.”
Halper’s helpful Russian friends
Halper and Trubnikov were old buddies. The professor hosted the former head of Russia’s foreign SVR intelligence service and KGB director at two Cambridge intelligence seminars. He also “interviewed the former Kremlin insider for a 2015 study on China-Russia relations he did for the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment.” Shebarshin “led the KGB for two days in the early 1990s.” Traughtoff was “a KGB officer.”
It’s interesting to note that the FBI was nervous Halper might be a double agent. He had “a brief falling out with the bureau in 2011.” According to the IG report, not only did Halper get a little “aggressive” with his handlers over money, he was pushed to the side for “questionable allegiance to the targets with whom he maintained contact.” The FISA court was never told that.
Christopher Steele admits that Trubnikov “was a source of some sort for the dossier.” Actually, he was the “single source.” Trubnikov collected “information from a network of contacts inside and outside of Russia” and passed it along to Steele. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court was never told that either.
It started with WikiLeaks
As the transcript reveals, the FBI scheme to entrap Papadopoulos, and any other Trump aides they could net, started July 31, 2016. That was right after the WikiLeaks release of stolen DNC emails. The FBI began the groundwork by conspiring with a “friend” of Papadopoulos, who pumped him for information “during a four-hour lunch and casino visit just before Halloween 2016.”
They didn’t get anything useful, so they decided he may be less guarded if he was outside the country. Halper had been a paid FBI informant since 2008, so the “seasoned political veteran of three Republican administrations” was the obvious choice for the mission. According to the recently released report of IG Michael Horowitz, Halper agreed “without any hesitation.”
Since Papadopoulos had been in London before, and allegedly told Australian diplomat Alexander Downer that “Russians might have information on Democrats that would help the Trump campaign,” they decided to lure him back to London.
Laying the groundwork
Halper also “secretly recorded Carter Page” in August of 2016 and sat down with Sam Clovis, “a Trump campaign official, on Aug. 30, 2016, but did not record that conversation.”
Carter Page’s tape reveals he “told Halper that he had never met Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort.” The FBI covered that up to the FISA Court. The “key claim” in Steele’s dossier had been used in Page’s wiretap application. The FBI knew it was a lie at the time, but the court is just finding out about it now.
After doing his homework, Halper lured Papadopoulos to Britain. On September 2, 2016, he offered “to fly the Trump aide, whom he had never met, to London to discuss writing a paper on energy issues for $3,000.” He brought along a female “honey pot.” A “woman the professor claimed was his assistant, Azra Turk.”
Papadopoulos was paid to be there.
During his tenure as an FBI rat, Halper was paid $1.1 million for “four studies on geopolitical events in Russia, China, and India.” That was used as a cover. It was typical for Halper to pay a small sum for studies like the one he approached Papadopoulos about.
In London, on Sept. 15, 2016, the two men met for brunch. All they talked about was the cover story. The transcript notes, “they discussed details of the research paper Papadopoulos had agreed to write.”
Since the FBI didn’t get anything from that at all, they tried again with a second wired meeting for “pre-dinner drinks.” That time, they went on the offensive. Halper grilled Papadopoulos with “direct questions about whether the Trump campaign benefited from, or anyone in the Trump campaign had knowledge of, Russian assistance or the Wikileaks release of information that was damaging to the Clinton campaign.”
They did not like what he had to say. About Assange, Papadopoulos was clueless. “No one knows what he’s going to release.” Assange was a loose cannon who could do just about anything. He might even “release information about Trump” as a “ploy to basically dismantle and undercut” the campaign.
He really ticked off the FBI when he said “the Trump campaign would not engage” in such nonsense “because at the end of the day it’s illegal. This is a form of treason.” No wonder the transcript got buried.
Halper’s handler at the FBI was Stephen Somma. The IG report has terrible things to say about him. Somma was “primarily responsible” for the “most significant” errors. He’s the one accused of failing “to disclose the exculpatory information related to Page and Papadopoulos, as well as information from interviews with Steele’s main source, who disputed many of the allegations from the dossier.” He also knew for certain since mid-August 2016, “that Page was an ‘operational contact’ for the CIA” and intentionally hid that from the court.