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Tipsheet

Trump Campaign Aide: There's A Second Spy...Allegedly; UPDATE: A Misunderstanding?

Wait a second; there are two informants that were spying on the Trump campaign? That’s what campaign aide Michael Caputo was alleging on Monday (via Daily Caller):

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Former Trump campaign adviser Michael Caputo had much to tell on Monday night when he claimed on Fox News he was approached by a second government informant during his stint on President Donald Trump’s team.

“Let me tell you something that I know for a fact,” Caputo said on “The Ingraham Angle” with host Laura Ingraham. “This informant, this person [who] they tried to plant into the campaign … he’s not the only person who came at the campaign. And the FBI is not the only Obama agency who came at the campaign.”

“I know because they came at me. And I’m looking for clearance from my attorney to reveal this to the public. This is just the beginning.”

Well, as it turns out, this might have been a misunderstanding, according to Caputo. The Daily Wire has more on how both parties—Caputo and the alleged informant—got the lines crossed:

On May 7, 2016, Caputo's friend, Kirk Bell, attended a DC-area Kentucky Derby event at the house of his friend Nick Ikeda, a military staffer for US Senator Mazie Hirono (D-HI).

At the event, Bell spoke with a government contractor, who asked not to be named in this report; this is the person Caputo told The Daily Wire he thought may have been another informant in light of the recent revelations about the FBI's alleged secret informant. At the event, the government contractor mentioned to Bell that he had heard about some of Hillary Clinton's missing emails and said that the campaign should see if they could obtain them.

The government contractor told The Daily Wire that the information he had heard about some of Clinton's missing emails came from a business meeting that he had while he was trying to drum up business for a private sector tech company. The missing emails came up in casual conversation with another man, in which the subject of the 2016 election was briefly mentioned. The man that the contractor met with suggested that Clinton's missing emails could contain more damaging information in them than people realized.

It was that conversation that inspired the government contractor to mention Clinton's emails to Bell.

Two days later, on May 9, 2016, Bell texted Caputo about the information the government contractor relayed to him about Clinton's missing emails.

Caputo told The Daily Wire that he never spoke to the government contractor. The government contractor also said he does not remember explicitly speaking with Caputo, although he does say that someone reached out to him but he doesn't remember who it was.

Caputo says that he did not reach out to the government contractor because he was fearful of possibly taking possession of any material that he might have which could have contained classified information.

[…]

The government contractor and Caputo also agreed on most of the major details in each other's stories and it appears as though there was a misunderstanding between the two men.

Caputo thought that the government contractor was coming to him with an offer but messages reviewed by The Daily Wire appear to show that the government contractor was making suggestions for the campaign rather than offering the campaign anything specific.

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Still, this doesn’t negate the fact that the FBI did spy on the Trump campaign. And thanks to the news media leaving all the breadcrumbs, we know his name—CIA operative and Cambridge University professor Stefan Halper. Halper approached George Papadopoulos, Carter Page, and Sam Clovis, though the Page encounter occurred weeks before what we were told was the official start of the FBI counterintelligence probe: July of 2016. So, when did the actual FBI investigation start is another question in this latest chapter of the Trump-Russia saga. The Wall Street Journal editorial board noted his activities:

We now know, for example, that the informant is “an American academic who teaches in Britain” who “served in previous Republican administrations.” He has worked as a “longtime U.S. intelligence source” for the FBI and the CIA.

The stories provide the names of the three Trump campaign officials who the informant sought to court— Carter Page, Sam Clovis and George Papadopoulos —as well as specific dates and details of the encounters. He met with Mr. Page at a symposium at a “British university” in “mid-July,” and stayed in touch with him for more than year. He met with Mr. Clovis at a “hotel café in Crystal City,” Virginia, on “either Aug. 31 or Sept. 1.”

The informant didn’t previously know the three men but offered to help with the campaign. He also threw money at Mr. Papadopoulos, and the stories even report the exact language of the message the informant sent to Mr. Papadopoulos offering him a $3,000 honorarium to write a research paper and a paid trip to London. Media accounts differ about whether the informant asked the three men what they knew about Russia. But this sure sounds like a classic attempt to make friends for intelligence-gathering purposes.

This ought to disturb anyone who wants law enforcement and U.S. intelligence services to stay out of partisan politics. We can’t recall a similar case, even in the J. Edgar Hoover days, when the FBI decided it needed to snoop on a presidential campaign.

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Yeah, we have spy-gate—I’m sure New England Patriots fans are happy—though while there might not be a second informant, the fact that a sitting president had his intelligence apparatus spy on an opposing political campaign on shoddy reasoning or reasons that are nothing but political given what we know now—is highly disturbing. Also, let’s not forget that besides Obama’s DOJ/FBI quarterbacking the effort, the Hillary campaign funded the dossier effort, contracting Fusions GPS, who then hired former MI6 spook Chris Steele to gather dirt on Trump. This was then handed over to the FBI. Say what you will about how American liberalism is abjectly stupid regarding safe spaces and political correctness, and that’s all true—they are incredibly cunning. And this effort showcases the lengths at which they’ll go to win an election. 

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