Trish Regan: Did the FBI possibly entrap a Trump campaign aide?
As Attorney General William Barr faces fresh attacks on his credibility, there’s one question no democrat in Washington is able to provide an answer to: why would our FBI rely on opposition research to help secure a FISA warrant to spy on an innocent American?
This is the question every American left, right, and in the middle deserves an answer to and it’s the question that may prove to be the undoing of our intelligence agencies.
Standards should be extraordinarily high in the FISA court, but we’re learning they were anything but that. Instead, they were so lax that the FBI could use a flimsy piece of opposition research, compiled by a former British intelligence operator, i.e. a foreigner, who solicited stories from his friends in Russian intelligence, i.e. not only foreigners, but foreigners who were and are adversaries of the United States.
I mention the foreigner part because for all those democrats complaining about foreign interference in our elections—because the Russians created fake social media accounts—I should think they’d be a little bit more worked up over how the FBI treated a bunch of former KGB folks’ intel as gospel.
Anyway, while we know the unproven dossier was part of the evidence justifying a warrant to spy on the Trump campaign, the other evidence may have come from the FBI’s possible entrapment.
The FBI increasingly looks like it may have tried to effectively entrap Trump campaign aide Carter Page via a Cambridge professor named Stephen Halper. According to reports, including one in the Washington Post, Halper contacted three Trump campaign advisers for brief talks and meetings that largely centered on foreign policy and at some point during that time, again per a report in the Post, began working as a secret informant for the FBI as it investigated Russia’s interference in the campaign.
Huh? Is this in any way normal? Why would the FBI be hiring secret informants to report back to them on the Trump campaign? Is this what the FBI does in every election to the opposition?
Carter Page says his contacts with Halper “intensified” in the month before the FBI obtained its first FISA warrant to spy on him, which was authorized by a FISA judge in October 2016 and subsequently renewed three times.
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As Page told Maria Bartiromo on Sunday, “I had a longstanding relationship with Professor Halper. I always believe in 'innocent until proven guilty,' but my conversations with him intensified right in the month before my illegitimate FISA warrant in September 2016, when all these defamatory articles are being placed by the DNC.”
Bizarre, right? If the FBI really and truly thought Trump was an agent of Russia that would be one thing. But it seems the FBI wanted to try to catch the opposing party and candidate in something.