After allegations of an informant within the Trump campaign were made public recently, multiple media outlets have named Cambridge professor Stefan Halper as the mole placed within the campaign by the FBI. Halper, 73, met with several Trump campaign officials and discussed with them, among other things, the allegations of Russian meddling in the US Presidential elections. The publication of Halper’s name and the timeline of his activities has helped to undermine some of the previous public statements made by senior government officials about when they began their investigation into the Trump campaign.
The revelation that the FBI had an informant working to try to gain information about the Trump campaign raises obvious questions about just what the FBI knew and when. It also raises questions about whether there were actually ties between the Trump campaign and the Russian government, or if the FBI was attempting to entrap Trump campaign officials, as it has done with numerous alleged terrorists over the years. Finding out that the agency’s investigation of the Trump campaign may have just been an attempt to put a feather in the cap of some overzealous agency officials would seriously diminish the FBI’s credibility.
More information will undoubtedly be brought to light, particularly with regard to Halper and his actions in speaking with Trump campaign officials. Given Halper’s record of having received hundreds of thousands of dollars in recent years from the Department of Defense, and his actions in running a spy scandal surrounding the 1980 Presidential election, the details that will continue to be publicized in the coming weeks and months could become quite scandalous.
While the hatred the intelligence and political establishments had for Trump was clear to many outside observers, the extent to which they were willing to go to sabotage him was not. Now that the lid is being lifted on this sordid scandal, we may finally find out just how far senior government officials were willing to go to keep Trump from becoming President, and just how far they will go to cover their own tracks and defend their behavior.