The combined intelligence agencies of the leading Western nations targeted former President Donald Trump’s associates and advisors well before the FBI supposedly began investigating him for colluding with Russia, according to a report by Public citing unnamed sources.
The revelation implies that the intelligence community was keeping an eye on Trump long before the FBI’s “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation that kicked off in July 2016.
The official narrative that comprised the basis of the Russia collusion allegations purportedly started with a boast made in May 2016 by Trump advisor George Papadopoulos to an Australian diplomat that Russia had thousands of emails belonging to Hillary Clinton. But British intelligence had information on “interactions” between people close to Trump and Russian agents back in 2015, according to an unnamed source, The Guardian reported. The information was passed on to the United States.
However, a new joint report by Public and Racket News has allegedly thrown that narrative into question. Public and Racket claimed, based on unnamed sources, that John Brennan, CIA director under former President Barack Obama, arranged for the intelligence services of the “Five Eyes” — the United States, the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zeland — to “make contact with or manipulate” 26 Trump associates prior to the summer of 2016.
According to Public and Racket, Western intelligence services initiated a global operation that included the Israeli Mossad to “bump” or turn the Trump associates into double agents.
The Pentagon even allegedly paid Cambridge academic Stefan Halper over $400,000 through its spy-handling department for contacting Trump National Security Advisor Michael Flynn in order to try and turn him, per the outlets.
Another figure touted by Democratic lawmakers on Capitol Hill as a Kremlin asset who interacted with George Papadopoulos turned out to be an MI6 agent, according to Public and Racket.
Their report claims that the CIA’s involvement could be construed as illegal absent a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant.
Public and Racket also alleged that the actions of not just U.S. intelligence agencies but the involvement of the FBI would constitute election interference.
Allegedly, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence created a large binder with extensive information on the surveillance and FBI investigation that would be very damaging to the intelligence community’s justification for targeting the people close to Trump, per the outlets. The binder, however, is missing, with some observers suspecting that recovering the binder was the hidden objective of the FBI raid on Trump’s home and office in Mar-a-Lago in August of 2022.
As the potentially illegal actions allegedly undertaken by the U.S. intelligence community have been slowly uncovered, the FBI at least has begun to acknowledge its mistakes, including that the FISA warrant to wiretap Carter Page was based on false intelligence.
Papadopoulos told Public and Racket, “There are so many unanswered questions that the investigations kept covered up … I do believe that the operation will be declassified, should Trump get re-elected, which is why his second term represents an existential threat to the intelligence agencies.”