Yes, There Were FBI Informants, But They Were Paid by the CIA
by Larry C Johnson
The internet was abuzz on Thanksgiving Eve with a report by the New York Times, Review is Expected to Undercut Trump Claim of FBI Spying. Here is the lede:
The F.B.I. never tried to place undercover agents or informants inside the Trump campaign, a highly anticipated inspector general’s report is expected to find.
Apparently, someone never informed the New York Times editors that they were reporting on a review of an FBI application, which was granted by a court, to SPY on at least one person affiliated with the Trump campaign. Ignore that piece of journalistic incompetence. In the same article, buried in the 14th paragraph is this inconvenient fact (the NY Times editor must have been stoned):
The F.B.I. did have an undercover agent who posed as Mr. Halper’s assistant during a London meeting with Mr. Papadopoulos in August 2016. And indeed, another Trump adviser, Peter Navarro, reportedly pushed Mr. Halper for an ambassadorship in the Trump administration.
The New York Times is simply doing preemptive spinning about the Horowitz Report without actually knowing what the conclusions are. It would not surprise me to learn that known FBI informants were not spying on the Trump campaign at the direction of the FBI. Nope. It is highly likely that paid FBI informants were spying on the Trump campaign under the auspices of the CIA. Since Inspector General Horowitz has no purview or authority to investigate the CIA, he will (and has) punt that issue to Prosecutor John Durham. Therefore, a conclusion that the FBI was not dispatching known FBI confidential human sources to spy on the Tump campaign is not proof that no spying occurred. As they say in Paris, au contraire.
Let us start with facts. There were at least three DOCUMENTED FBI Confidential Human Sources aka spies targeting the Trump campaign:
Felix Sater
Gennady Vasilievich Vostretsov aka Henry Oknyansky aka Henry Greenberg
Christopher Steele
Felix Sater was an FBI informant since 1998. He was originally signed on as a “cooperator” in December 1998 by Robert Mueller’s number two guy, Andrew Weissman. Felix Sater was a “lure” or “bait” who, starting in September 2015, tried to tempt Trump and his team, Michael Cohen in particular, to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. Sater’s efforts to entrap the Trump campaign started months before the FBI reportedly initiated Operation Crossfire Hurricane in July 2016.Sater’s work as an FBI paid informant was confirmed again in August (2019) by Judge Glasser in New York. According to the Wall Street Journal:
Felix Sater, a former business associate of President Trump, began working with the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1998, after he was caught in a stock-fraud scheme. As he pleaded guilty, Mr. Sater turned on his co-conspirators, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn wrote in an Aug. 27, 2009, letter, unsealed Friday, to U.S. District Judge I. Leo Glasser, who was overseeing the case. He had gone on to assist various agencies in different areas of law enforcement for years, they wrote.
The“Sater went above and beyond what is expected of most cooperators and placed himself in great jeopardy in doing so,” the prosecutors wrote in pushing for him to get a lighter sentence. On the strength of his continuing cooperation, they had put off his sentencing for more than a decade, an unusually long period for such arrangements.
The unit functioned as a sealed compartment, its work hidden from the rest of the intelligence community. Those brought in signed new non-disclosure agreements to be granted access to intelligence from all three participating agencies.
We know of two other “spies” that were targeting the Trump campaign as well–Stefan Halper and Joseph Mifsud. Neither were on the payroll of the FBI. Halper’s money was coming via a DOD contract and we do not yet know who was bankrolling Mifsud. If it was not the CIA then it was a foreign agent other than Russia.
Here’s the bottomline–the spying against the Trump campaign goes way beyond the boundaries of Inspector General Horowitz’s authority and ability to investigate. That is being done by John Durham, the special prosecutor designated by Attorney General William Barr. And Durham is conducting an extensive investigation of the spying. The Horowitz report is just the beginning of the unraveling of the plot to destroy Donald Trump.
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(TLB) published this article from Sic Semper Tyrannis with our appreciation of this perspective.
Other articles by Larry C. Johnson
Larry C. Johnson is CEO and co-founder of BERG Associates, LLC, an international business-consulting firm that helps corporations and governments manage threats posed by terrorism and money laundering. Mr. Johnson works with US military commands in scripting terrorism exercises, briefs foreign governments on a regular basis on terrorist trends, and conducts undercover investigations on product counterfeiting and smuggling.
Mr. Johnson, who worked previously with the Central Intelligence Agency and U.S. State Department’s Office of Counter Terrorism, is a recognized expert in the fields of terrorism, aviation security, crisis and risk management.
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