![]() Stefan Halper is an interesting man, someone who has long had one foot in Republican politics and the other in the intelligence community. Who is Stefan Halper, and what did he actually do? Stefan Halper. The scandal here isn’t that Trump was “spied on.” It’s that the FBI’s legitimate investigation into Russia is becoming a cudgel for the president to attack the Justice Department publicly and undermine its independence. Barbara McQuade, a former US district attorney, told Vox that the notion that the FBI was fishing for some kind of dirt on Trump is “baseless.” The president has dubbed this “ SPYGATE,” calling it a “scandal the likes of which this country may never have seen before!”īased on what has been publicly reported, legal experts say that Halper’s work was most likely part of a legitimate counterintelligence operation targeted at Russia’s election interference campaign and not any kind of political attack on Trump. Trump and Republicans say that Halper was a spy planted in the Trump campaign by the Obama administration “ for political purposes” - in other words, to hurt Trump’s electoral chances. The goal of these meetings was allegedly to assess whether there were any real links between the Trump campaign and Russia, enough to fuel a wider investigation. Halper, an American who taught for years at Cambridge University in the UK, has been outed in the press as a secret FBI “informant” who met with several Trump campaign advisers in mid-2016 at the bureau’s behest. His allegation centers on a retired university professor in Britain named Stefan Halper. He had to know his memo would be highly scrutinized when he wrote it.President Donald Trump claims to have uncovered one of the biggest spying scandals in American history - and that the FBI, not Russia, is the culprit. “But it’s hard to believe this will actually lead to Rosenstein’s resignation. “This explains why the GOP is pushing hard to release Rosenstein’s memo granting authority to Mueller, in violation of DOJ policy,” former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti tweeted on Friday. “Removing Rosenstein and replacing him with a deputy attorney general who is at the very least more sympathetic to Trump could have drastic repercussions for the investigation,” Rangappa wrote last December. ![]() On Thursday, the department complied with a federal judge’s order to hand over a sealed August 2017 memo written by Rosenstein that outlined Mueller’s purview.Ī showdown over any such documents that led to Rosenstein being sidelined of ejected could be more damaging to the Mueller investigation than the removal of Mueller himself, former FBI special agent Asha Rangappa and others have written. Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general overseeing the Mueller investigation, has fiercely resisted, warning earlier this month that “the justice department is not going to be extorted”. The deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, has been the target of Republican critics in Congress. ![]() Republicans in Congress led by the House intelligence committee chairman, Devin Nunes, have demanded the department release documents laying out the origins of the FBI inquiry. Whatever the unlikely merits of the “infiltration” charge – in March 2017, Trump falsely accused Barack Obama of undertaking “to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process” – the charge itself adds to pressure on the justice department to explain the FBI investigation of the Trump campaign. ![]() The status of the source in relation to the campaign was unclear. The Washington Post reported earlier this month that a “top-secret, longtime intelligence source” provided information to the FBI about the Trump campaign and Russia. The most potent line of attack, however, may be the one Trump pursued on Friday: that the FBI had infiltrated his presidential campaign. “The main focus we want is Russia,” Giuliani said, seeking to foreclose an apparently central area of Mueller’s inquiry, potential obstruction of justice by Trump. Giuliani claimed on CNN that Mueller had agreed to narrow the scope of a potential interview with Trump, which has been under negotiation for months, from five topics to two. “I would like to see it get wrapped up,” the retiring House speaker Paul Ryan said on Thursday, of the Mueller inquiry. With Mueller’s every advance, Trump and his proxies have increased the volume of their declarations that he has gone too far. Prosecutors appear to be seeking the cooperation of Manafort, who has pleaded not guilty to multiple federal felonies, in the investigation of the Trump campaign. The Mueller investigation received a potential boost on Thursday with the announcement that the former son-in-law of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort was cooperating with federal investigators. ![]()
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