Connect with The Main Event on social media! Follow Ed Hoffman on Twitter @EdHoffman, where he tweets about current events all week long – and, like the show on Facebook at Facebook.com/TheMainEventEdHoffman. You can also call the new listener hotline to leave Ed a voicemail and tell him what you think of the show! Call The Main Event listener hotline at (855) 640-2092. Here’s a preview of this week’s show!
The Trump Campaign Spy: Who is Stefan Halper?
This week, we learned that the Obama administration under Loretta Lynch’s Department of Justice and James Comey’s FBI may have paid at least one person to infiltrate the Trump campaign. The campaign spy is reportedly Stefan Halper, a 73-year-old British professor with deep ties to American and British intelligence and a background working for the Nixon, Ford and Reagan administrations. (You will not hear his name on TV; they are only referring to him as “the British professor,” “the campaign spy” or “the informant.” If you haven’t heard the name Stefan Halper yet, Google it). He has a long history of being an FBI informant.
Late last week, reports in the Washington Post and New York Times named Halper as the informant who met with Trump campaign advisers Carter Page and George Papadopoulos starting in summer 2016. As you may remember, Papodopoulous has pled guilty to lying to the FBI, while Page was the subject of the FISA surveillance warrant which the same FBI and DOJ under Obama obtained using the phony Christopher Steele dossier.
Do we need any more proof the FBI spied on the Trump campaign?
If we needed any more proof that our own Department of Justice was seeking to create a way to discredit Trump in the event that Hillary Clinton lost the election, this is it. We now know that the “insurance policy” Peter Strozk and Lisa Page were texting about was an FBI operation that attempted to entrap Trump campaign aides into appearing interested in colluding with Russia – all with the goal of having a story to leak to the media right after the election that would make Trump’s win appear illegitimate. There were several members of the Trump campaign who were targeted – but as you may have guessed, their efforts were most successful with the young and impressionable George Papodopoulous.
How Stefan Halper Spied on the Trump Campaign
Halper’s first contact with the Trump campaign was when he met Carter Page at a British symposium in July 2016. The two struck up a suspicious friendship that went on for more than a year, meeting at Halper’s Virginia farm and in Washington, D.C. in addition to exchanging emails. Carter Page, by the way, maintains that he never felt anything was odd about his friendship with Halper. Could that be a red flag about Carter Page as well? Maybe.
A month into his friendship with Carter Page, Halper then met with Trump campaign co-chair Sam Clovis in late August. According to Clovis, Halper was attempting to get on the Trump campaign staff by offering his services as a foreign policy adviser. Clovis says he didn’t think the conversation was suspicious at the time – but now, he is “unsettled” because Halper never mentioned he was also talking with Carter Page.
So when did the young, inexperienced campaign aide George Papadopoulos get involved with Halper? It was in either August or September of 2016, when Halper offered him $3,000 and an all-expenses-paid trip to London “to write a paper about energy in the eastern Mediterranean region.” And Papadopoulos took him up on it.
So Papadopoulos went to London in September, ostensibly to meet with Halper about getting paid to write a foreign policy paper. During their meeting, Halper brought up the topic of the Russians being involved in the hacking of Hillary and the DNC’s emails: “George, you know about the hacking emails from Russia, right?”
Keep in mind, this is about one month after Trump made a remark on the campaign trail, “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you find the 30,000 emails.” So now, we know the spies were capitalizing on Trump’s joke by dangling the hacked Hillary/DNC emails as bait for campaign aides like Papadopoulos.
Halper Brings in a Honey Pot
Also in London, Halper introduced Papadopoulos to his Turkish assistant, Azra Turk. Reportedly, Turk flirted with Papadopoulos both during the meeting and later on in email exchanges. Some reports say Halper told Papodopoulous the lie that Turk was Vladimir Putin’s niece. Other reports say that a different operative posed as Putin’s niece – more on that later.
What we know for sure is that in London, Halper and Turk offered to help Papadopoulos arrange a meeting for Trump with “the Russian leadership,” AKA Putin. Papadopoulos did not commit to such a meeting, and said his campaign supervisor told him “great work” for declining it.
By the way, sources close to Papadopoulos say that now he understands Halper was spying on the campaign while working for an intelligence agency.
Who Paid Stefan Halper to Spy on the Trump Campaign?
So far, no payments to Halper from the FBI or Department of Justice have been uncovered; however, public records show he has received two large payments from Department of Defense’s Office of Net Assessment — a “shadowy think tank” that reports directly to the Secretary of Defense (in 2016-17, the Secretary of Defense under Obama was Ash Carter). The office paid Halper $282,000 in 2016 and $129,000 in 2017. So the question is, did the FBI or DOJ funnel this payment through the DOD?
Others who Spied on the Trump Campaign
But Stefan Halper wasn’t the only one trying to infiltrate the Trump campaign through George Papadopoulos. This kid was entrapped by up to three people.
- March 14, 2016: Papadopoulos had the first of a series of meetings with another British professor, Joseph Mifsud. Mifsud has deep ties to the Kremlin and has been rumored to be a Russian agent for many years. Ten days later, Papadopoulos met with Mifsud and Russian lawyer Olga Polonskaya. Some reports say that it was this woman, not Stefan Halper’s assistant, who was the person introduced to Papadopoulos as Vladimir Putin’s niece. We may never know. (Google Josef Misfud’s name and you’ll see he has gone completely off the grid in the last three months, quitting his job at both of the universities he was teaching at and ignoring all interview requests from the media).
- Like Halper, Mifsud pretended to befriend Papadopoulos. At one point, he told him that the Russians had “dirt on Hillary Clinton – thousands of emails.” So now, this is the second time a mysterious British professor has contacted George Papadopoulos, asked for a meeting, shown up with a flirtatious woman, and dangled Hillary Clinton’s emails under his nose like a carrot.
- Not long after that, Papadopoulos was invited out to drinks with the Australian Ambassador to Great Britain, Alexander Downer, who has close ties to the Clinton Foundation and is a member of Haklyut, a private British intelligence firm that hires ex-Russian agents among other types of spies. We now know that Alexander Downer was, like Halper, acting as an FBI informant. Papadopoulos doesn’t seem to question why all these foreign diplomats are interested in meeting with him, so he has drinks with Downer – and while he’s liquored up, Papadopoulos spilled what he heard from Mifsud: that the Russians had dirt on Hillary Clinton in the form of thousands of emails.
The Big Picture
Now, this is coming full circle:
-
-
- The FBI had already sent two spies, Halper and Mifsud, to bait Papodopoulous with the idea that the Russians wanted to share Hillary’s hacked emails with the Trump campaign. For the third time, Papadopoulos was being entrapped by spies placed in the campaign by the FBI – but with Downer, the FBI hit paydirt.
-
-
-
- Papadopoulos believed Downer was just the Australian ambassador, but in reality he was also an FBI informant whose goal was to get Papadopoulos drunk so he would blurt out what Halper and Mifsud told him.
-
-
-
- Now, Downer could report what Papadopoulos said to his FBI handlers – which means the FBI could truthfully claim that someone in the Trump campaign (Papadopoulos) told an FBI informant that he knows the Russians have dirt on Hillary. Then, the FBI could leak the story to the media to make it look like the Trump campaign was colluding with Russia to win the election.
-
-
-
- And that’s exactly what they did – because just days after Trump won, CNN starts reporting about Russian interference in our election (something none of us had heard about until then). Now, we know the seeds of the story were planted all the way back in the summer of 2016, and it was initiated by Obama’s Department of Justice under Loretta Lynch and James Comey.
-
-
-
- Why didn’t CNN report on it before election day? Because this whole thing was only being done as an “insurance policy” if Hillary Clinton lost. That’s what was meant by Peter Strozk and Lisa Page, two high ranking FBI employees who were having an affair, when they texted each other about an “insurance policy.”
-
-
-
- And before anyone thinks Obama didn’t know about any of this, remember: Strozk and Page also texted, “POTUS (the President) wants to know everything we’re doing.”
-
But according to James Comey’s tweet this week, all of their spying was okay because it was “regulated” – in other words, it’s “good” spying because so many people in the government were in on it.
One more piece of evidence that this was a major conspiracy: Don’t forget that Loretta Lynch had that “totally coincidental” run-in with Bill Clinton on the tarmac in Phoenix while all of this was going on in July of 2016. Maybe now, we finally know what they were talking about.
Tune in this week to hear more!
Catch The Main Event at…
Inland Empire:
- AM 590 The Answer (KTIE), Saturdays at 10 AM/ 9 PM & Sundays at 4 PM
Los Angeles:
- AM 870 The Answer (KRLA), Sundays at 3 PM
San Diego:
- AM 1170 The Answer (KCBQ), Sundays at 7 AM
Internet radio:
- Red State Talk Radio’s Encore Channel, Sundays at 1 PM Pacific
You can also get on-demand podcasts of the show right here on the Podcast page, as well as on Soundcloud or iTunes.