Huge. Just huge. Stefan Halper was working for the FBI when he targeted Michael Flynn. And Maltese professor Joseph Misfud was no Russian asset when it came to the seditious Trump-Russia Collusion conspiracy.

But who hired them?

Joseph Misfud, Western Intelligence

Lawyers for Misfud have confirmed to The Hill’s John Solomon and to congressional investigators their client worked for Western intelligence, not Russia, as the FBI and Mueller Report long inferred. According to Solomon, Misfud was tasked with connecting Trump campaign adviser George Papadapoulos to Russia in effort to show Trump-Russia collusion. Not establishing a connection. Not confirming a connection. Not even investigating a possible connection. Actually creating a connection.

In other words, staging a scenario which the Obama Administration would spin as a justification for spying on the Trump campaign.

Solomon revealed his latest findings on Fox News’ Sunday Morning Futures show:

Well, I interviewed Mr. Misfud’s lawyer the other day, Stefan Rowe, and he told me and also provided me some deposition evidence to both Congress and myself that his client was being directed and long worked with Western intelligence. And he was being directed specifically, he was asked to connect George Papadopoulos to Russia, meaning it was an operation, some form of intelligence operation. That was the lawyer’s own words for this. If that’s the case that means the flash point the started the whole investigation was in fact manufactured from the beginning.

And they say Obama didn’t create any manufacturing jobs.

Dashing the Flash Point

We had long been told the FBI’s counter-intelligence “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation into Trump-Russia Collusion was launched because of Papadopoulus. The basic story is this:

1. Papadapoulous meets with suspected Russian agent Joseph Misfud.
2. Misfud tells George P. the Russians had Hillary’s emails and planned to release them to damage the Hillary campaign.
3. George P. later repeats this information to Australian diplomat Alexander Downer over drinks in London.
4. When Wikileaks released DNC and Podesta emails, Downer remembers the conversation with Papadapoulos. The next day he tells Aussie intelligence, who immediately notified U.S. intelligence.
5. “OMG, The Trump Campaign had pre-knowledge of the Russian hack! Trump’s in bed with the Ruskies!’ And a counter-intelligence investigation is launched.

Simple enough. Except this is all a fiction. Staged. Every step. Bob Fosse didn’t choreograph so carefully. Obviously, if Misfud isn’t a Russian asset, the dominoes collapse. Just a couple guys yapping a bunch of hearsay. Nothing that would justify spying on an opposition campaign. And if Misfud was actually sent by a Western intelligence agency to feed information to Papadapoulos as part of a plan to frame Donald Trump? You’re at a whole new level of sinister.

Let’s run through that list again:

1. Only one week after joining Trump’s team, Papadapoulos meets Misfud at Link Campus University, a small school run by a former Italian intelligence official, Vincenzo Scotti. They’d meet several times. One time they’re joined by a woman posing as a Cambridge University research assistant. She’s actually an investigator working for the U.S. intelligence community. (Papadapoulos claims this woman, who goes by the name Azra Turk, would later push him on Russia and attempt to seduce him.)
2. Misfud plants the information.
3. Papadapoulos is paid to go to London by Stefan Halper. Halper is a known U.S. intelligence operative and he’s just been paid hundreds of thousands of dollars by the U.S. Department of Defense to … uh, um, do reports. Wink-wink. Halper hooks young George up with Downer for a drunken schmooze-fest. The veteran diplomat is not only chummy with the Western IC crowd, he arranged Australian’s massive contribution to the Clinton Global Initiative. (A contribution the Aussies cancelled after Hillary lost.) Papadapoulos says Downer kept pumping him about connections between the Trump campaign and Russia. Oh, and Downer was recording the conversation. Because that’s what you do at a London pub, right?
4. Downer says George P. never mentioned anything about Hillary emails. Only a vague reference to having heard Russia had dirt on Hillary. (Well, who the heck didn’t?) Still, he felt compelled to contact Australian intelligence, even though the emails released by Wikileaks were not Hillary’s deleted emails.
5. Brennan’s CIA and Comey’s FBI had their hook. They could justify their surveillance of the Trump campaign. (Spying that may well have been going on since late 2015. Surveillance of Republicans is thought to date back to 2012. That’s how far back former NSA head Mike Rogers traced severe abuses of the FISA system for political purposes.)

So who hired Misfud? Misfud’s lawyers said at one point Misfud was encouraged to set up Papadapolous by Scotti.

Even if true, common sense says it wasn’t the Italian’s idea. Look at all the American spooks involved. And why in the world would a foreign intelligence service be interested in Trump when everyone thought Hillary was going to win? Remember the immortal words of Prince Humperdink in The Princess Bride: “The loser is nothing. Only the princess matters.” Or in this case, the would-be female president.

No, the people behind the operation wanted it on foreign soil with foreign intelligence officials involved so they could get away with deeper clandestine operations against American citizens. Who had the juice to get such operatives involved from so many different countries? Certainly no low-level punk out at Langley or the FBI.

One person pops up all over the Papadapoulos story, the Carter Page story and several other Trump campaign members targeted: Stefan Halper. We can now say without hesitation Halper is an FBI asset. And he was working for the Obama Administration to frame Trump campaign officials. How do we know this? Last week, Halper admitted it.

Halper Claims Immunity

As we reported in April, Halper was sued by a Russian academic named Svetlana Lokhova. She says Halper was trying to ruin Lt. General Michael Flynn, and smeared her in the process. Halper had spread word in the American media that Flynn and Lokhova were lovers.

Flynn had long been loathed by Obama … and for that matter, former FBI Director Andrew McCabe. It was McCabe who famously said “First we f*** Flynn, then we f*** Trump.”

The minute Flynn joined the Trump campaign, someone ordered Halper to pounce. He called Lokhova, who he’d met a couple years before, out of the blue. Halper invited her to a fancy gathering of intel pros in London. Flynn would be there too. After the dinner, Halper went around claiming Flynn had compromised himself by hooking up with Lokhova at the gathering. A flat out, slanderous lie, says Lokhova. She was no Russian honeypot. So she sued.

Halper has now filed a motion to get the case thrown out. His argument? He had immunity because he was working as an agent. According to his motion to dismiss, “Private individuals who participate in FBI investigations are subject to the federal common law qualified immunity applicable to government agents.”

Understand what he is saying: He was hired by the Obama FBI to smear Trump’s national security adviser during the 2016 campaign. Stefan Halper is confessing that the Obama administration was using the powers of the U.S. government to undermine the American election.

Will Halper have the same defense when forced to face the music for his actions in helping set up George Papadapoulos and Carter Page?

I’m immune. I was just following orders.

Leaving us with the million dollar question: Whose orders?

A Counter-Intelligence Operation for the President

This was a counter-intelligence operation. And as legal author Andrew C. McCarthy noted this morning, counter-intelligence operations belong to the president. In this case President Barack Obama.

“They are only done for one reason,” McCarthy said, “and that is to gather intelligence so that the president can carry out his national security responsibilities under the Constitution.”

Fox & Friends host Steve Doocy wanted to make sure he heard right. “This goes to the West Wing?”

Replied McCarthy:

It goes to the president. That’s the way it’s supposed to work. If it’s not working that way, then it shouldn’t be a counter-intelligence investigation in the first. But here we don’t have to speculate because there is plenty of indication that President Obama was informed and knew what exactly they were doing.”

“POTUS wants to know everything we are doing,” Lisa Page told Peter Strzok. What did he know? When did he know it? How much of a hand did he have in orchestrating it? Why didn’t he stop it?

If Obama was kept in the dark, why isn’t he leading the call for justice now that the truth of the Russian fraud has been exposed? Day by day, fact by fact, confession by confession, the answer becomes more self-evident: He’s at the center of the web.

 

Al Perrotta is the Managing Editor of The Stream and co-author, with @JZmirak, of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration. You can follow him at @StreamingAl. And if you aren’t already, please follow The Stream at @Streamdotorg.