FBI’s Anti-Trump Spying Was ‘Running Out of Gas’

Increasingly desperate efforts by the FBI to penetrate President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign indicate the bureau was getting desperate to keep the counterintelligence operation going, according to an adviser who was the target of a government informant.

Sam Clovis, who joined the Trump campaign as an adviser in 2015, recounted Tuesday his interactions with Stefan Halper — the man reported to be working as an FBI snoop.

Clovis (pictured above) said on “The Laura Ingraham Show” that he views the FBI’s use of Halper as a sign that a “small cabal” of agents and Department of Justice (DOJ) officials were trying to avoid failure after months of fruitless efforts to identify a conspiracy involving the campaign.

The FBI hoped Halper’s interactions with the campaign would produce probable cause to keep surveillance operations going, Clovis said.

“They were running out of steam,” he said. “September [2016] — if you remember, September’s only six weeks or eight weeks away from the election, and they were running out of gas.”

Clovis recalled that Halper, who had served in previous Republican administrations and had been a CIA source in the past, contacted him during the campaign. He said the two men set up a September 1 meeting over coffee.

Clovis described the ensuing conversation as a high-minded back-and-forth between two academics that had little to do with the campaign. He said Halper talked about his academic research and offered it to the campaign.

Clovis said he thought little of the meeting at the time.

“It was an academic discussion,” he said. “It wasn’t anything substantive. It wasn’t anything mechanical about the campaign. It was like two faculty members in the lounge talking about research.”

Clovis said he believes Halper used the meeting to gain access to Carter Page and later George Papadopoulos, two low-level Trump advisers who have come under suspicion for their contacts with Russians.

Papadopoulos last year pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about those contacts. And Page, though he has not been charged with a crime, was the subject of a surveillance warrant granted under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

Clovis said he and Halper exchanged about four emails. One of those messages had attachments that Clovis claims not to have read.

“To this day, I’ve not opened those attachments,” he said. “I have no idea what’s in ’em. And I never reported on my meeting” to superiors in the campaign.

Clovis said he believes Halper was trying to find a “weakness or a soft spot” in the campaign in order to create an “audit trail” back to the emails of Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton that the Russians supposedly had.

Halper was the key to keeping a sputtering investigation going, Clovis said.

“I think they were scrambling even at this point in time, trying to find justification for furthering the investigation,” he said. “And I really think this is the doing of a very small cabal of people at the FBI and the DOJ, who isolated themselves, who created circumstances to create this investigation.”

Related: FBI Not Only ‘Obama Agency’ Spying on Trump in 2016?

Rep. Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.), in a separate appearance on the radio show, said Halper’s role seems almost to cross the line on entrapment. He said Congress needs to see precisely how Department of Justice officials directed him.

“It seems to me that some of his interactions, it was almost as if he was trying to manufacture additional quote-unquote ‘contacts’ between these kind of tangential figures of the Trump campaign and people who may be affiliated with Russia somehow,” he said.

Despite a string of indictments and guilty pleas racked up by independent counsel Robert Mueller, DeSantis said the probe has failed to produce evidence of collusion.

“He’s gotten convictions about things having nothing to do with the underlying reason that he was appointed,” he said.

PoliZette senior writer Brendan Kirby can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter.

(photo credit, article image: Sam Clovis, CC BY 2.0, by Alex Hanson)