Series Of Strong Thunderstorms Set To Rake Roseville

By then, as has been reported in multiple places (including Racket), a cabal of aging spooks that included Cambridge-based “informant” Stefan Halper, British ex-spy Christopher Steele, and former MI6 Chief Richard Dearlove had already begun investigating the Trump campaign. Halper was “unofficially” spying for the FBI on Carter Page, Michael Flynn, Papadopoulos and others dating as far back as April of 2016.

Halper attended a dinner then that allowed him to be a source later for an absurd false story about official “concerns” that Flynn had fallen under the spell of a Russian siren. Steele began publishing his infamous dossier in June 2016 (if not earlier) and was in contact with his former superior Dearlove, who met onetime Trump aide Carter Page at a Cambridge Intelligence Seminar weeks before Page’s first appearance in Steele’s reports. Dearlove incidentally was facing investigation at the time for overseeing the production of a British intelligence dossier whose sub-source included a fictional detail from the Sean Connery-at-Alcatraz movie The Rock in allegations about Saddam Hussein moving chemical weapons around in “glass beads or spheres.”

In order to preserve the story that the investigation of Trump “officially” began with Downer, and not when the linked figures Halper and Steele (who were both officially folded into the probe later) began investigating earlier, a new story had to be invented. In the report of Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz, the story of how “Source 2,” a.k.a. Halper, came to become an FBI “confidential human source” reads:

In addition, [Halper] told the Crossfire Hurricane team that [Halper] had known Trump’s then campaign manager, Manafort, for a number of years and that he had been previously acquainted with Michael Flynn. Case Agent 1 told the OIG that “quite honestly ... we kind of stumbled upon [Halper] knowing these folks.” He said that it was “serendipitous” and that the Crossfire Hurricane team “couldn't believe [their] luck” that [Halper] had contacts with three of their four subjects, including Carter Page. ###/blockquotespeaking to the New York Times, he was sent into President Jimmy Carter’s campaign “to collect inside information on Carter Administration foreign policy”