(NOTE: To accompany today’s post and video about how Stefan Halper had dreams of infiltrating the Trump Administration as a highly placed official in the State Department, I am reposting this May 2018 column that detailed some of Halper’s nefarious connections to the Deep State. (Included in “Why We Needed Trump: Part 3”.) Halper may be the essential man in the Russia Hoax, having roped in Carter Page and George Papadopoulos to be the patsies for the fake Trump-Russia narrative. Why hasn’t he ever testified in public?)
STRANGE DR. HALPER:
OR HOW THE LEFT LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING & LOVE THE CIA
May 27, 2018
Frank Miele/Daily Inter Lake
The ability of the intelligence community to shape public opinion through both overt and covert means was never more obvious than in the 10 years following the JFK assassination.
Likewise, there has never been a period when the mainstream mediaâs abject failure to hold government agencies accountable was more apparent than in the years following Dallas.
Until now.
Watching Anderson Cooper or any other CNN host smirk their way through an interview with supporters of President Trump cannot help but bring back memories of Dan Rather dissing proponents of assassination conspiracy theories. But whereas CBS only spent an hour or two every year defending the CIA and the FBI, our own beloved CNN does so 24 hours a day, seven days a week (barring the occasional intrusion of a royal wedding).
Thank goodness that in the world where CNN lives, the CIA and FBI can do no wrong. Unfortunately, in the world where the rest of us live, the intelligence and police agencies of the United States are entirely capable of demonstrating the truth of Lord Actonâs dictum that âabsolute power corrupts absolutely.â
Last week, the vast chasm between the facts and the left-wing media widened even further than ever before. As story after story demonstrated a well-orchestrated campaign within the Obama administrationâs highest levels to target Donald Trump, the mainstream media took the side of former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who argued (on âThe Viewâ no less) that Trump should be happy that the FBI was spying on him! Yippee!
Meanwhile, the news media geniuses thought they were being good citizens by not revealing the identity of the Cambridge professor who had reeled in three low-level Trump campaign aides to get the Russia collusion story rolling. In fact, most of the media parrots were being disingenuous by not trumpeting the fact that Stefan Halper had close ties to the CIA for at least four decades and that he was almost certainly running a disinformation campaign that was aimed at protecting the intelligence community from the threat that Trump represented as an outsider who would never go along with the dirty tricks that had become so commonplace in the Deep Stateâs protection of its own power base.
Thereâs no doubt that Halper met with those three Trump aides during the summer of 2016 and apparently reported back to his bosses in the Obama administration about what he learned about the Trump campaignâs connection to Russia (pretty much zilch).
I say that his bosses were in the Obama administration because we know that from May 2012 until September 2016, Halper was paid more than $900,000 by the Department of Defense for âclassifiedâ work. He also got paid $129,280 in July 2017 (the smallest of his five checks), which may have settled up his account for âworkâ done during the final year of the Obama administration, and yes, by work I mean spying on Trump.
In July 2016, Halper met in London with Carter Page (the foreign-policy and energy adviser who was additionally spied on with a FISA warrant starting in September 2016).
In August 2016, Halper met with Trump campaign co-chairman Sam Clovis and offered his own services as a foreign-policy adviser to Trump â an offer which wisely was never pursued.
Then, shortly after the meeting with Clovis, Halper reached out to another obscure Trump campaign aide named George Papadopoulos and offered to pay him $3,000 and an all-expenses-paid trip to London to write a paper about energy issues in the Middle East. Both Halper and a young woman identified as Halperâs assistant quizzed Papadopoulos about his knowledge of Hillary Clintonâs emails and a Russian connection to the campaign. Papadopoulos denied any knowledge of any interference in the campaign.
Apparently, Halper reported to someone in the FBI or CIA or both about his contacts with the three campaign aides, and shortly thereafter the report by British spy Christopher Steele was shopped around to the news media with information alleging connections between Trump and Russia. We wonât know more about any of this, or what it proves, until Congress uses its subpoena power to force testimony from Halper and others, but we can certainly be suspicious.
Thatâs because Halper is not just a âCambridge professor.â The Oxford Ph.D. got his start in politics in the Nixon White House, but it was his association with Gerald Fordâs CIA director George H.W. Bush that launched him into the national spotlight. Halperâs support of Bush in the 1980 presidential campaign resulted in him being named Director of Policy Coordination for the Reagan-Bush ticket when that team was running against Jimmy Carter. Halper is widely believed to have run the plot to gain access to Carterâs briefing book prior to a critical debate. Although Halper has long-denied involvement, the plot apparently involved former CIA agents inside the White House with ties to Bush. Carter blamed âDebategateâ for his loss to Reagan.
At this point, it might be worth noting that Halperâs father-in-law at the time was Ray Cline, the former deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Halper, who was in charge of Bushâs opposition research team, also employed a CIA veteran named Robert Gambino. Although Halper remained a paid adviser to the Department of Defense, he left his official government job in the early 1980s to become the founder and chairman of Palmer National Bank in Washington, D.C.
Palmer was funded by a Dallas, Texas, real estate developer named Harvey McLean Jr. who also had ties to George Bush, but according to âInside Job,â an account of the savings & loan scandal of the 1980s, the real money behind the bank came from Herman Beebe Sr., who reportedly had extensive connections to organized crime figures such as Carlos Marcello, who himself has been linked to the assassination of President Kennedy.
âInside Jobâ called Beebeâs thrifts âpotentially the most powerful and corrupt banking network ever seen in the U.S.â Beebe later went to jail for bank fraud, but Halper, the chairman of Palmer National Bank, was never caught up in any banking scandal. He was however caught up in another spying scandal when Palmer National Bank was used by Oliver North to funnel money to the Contras during the Iran-Contragate scandal, though which the Reagan administration sent missiles to Iran in exchange for money to secretly fund the Contra rebels in Nicaragua.
Was it just an accident that Halper was involved in the second of two âgateâ scandals, or was he part of what historian James Canham-Clyne called the ânational security stateâ? And looking forward, can Halperâs involvement in the 2016 âSpygateâ scandal be considered anything other than proof that what is now called the âDeep Stateâ is nothing less than the latest manifestation of that CIA-FBI-Defense nexus that Eisenhower warned against as the military-industrial complex?
One thing is certain. You wonât get any answers to these questions from the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, CBS or NBC. As far as they are concerned, the âintelligence communityâ is beyond reproach. That is, if you ignore the Kennedy assassination, the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile, the wiretapping of Martin Luther King Jr., the failure to stop the 9/11 attacks, Iran-Contra, drug trafficking, lying to Congress, etc.
Yet the geniuses in the national media want you to believe that you have nothing to fear from the CIA or FBI except fear itself. Thereâs no way we should be worried about the national security apparatus of the United States spying on a presidential candidate of the opposition party.
Except, wait a minute, what about Watergate?
Wasnât that a case of a president spying on the headquarters of the opposition political party? And werenât the five Watergate burglars all associated with the CIA? James McCord was a former FBI and CIA agent, and the other four burglars were all tied to the CIAâs operations against Cuba after the Castro revolution. The two top dogs were G. Gordon Liddy, a former FBI agent, and E. Howard Hunt, a longtime CIA agent whose own connections went back to the Bay of Pigs and the Kennedy assassination.
So yeah, you can just nod your head and go along with the mainstream asleep-at-the-wheel media while they drive off a cliff, or you can pay attention and start connecting the dots for yourself. Weâre not in Kansas any more, Toto. This is a Crossfire Hurricane (look it up!) aimed not just at President Trump but at anyone who dares to challenge the establishment elite who have run things for far too long.
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Heartland Diary is solely operated by Frank Miele, the retired editor of the Daily Inter Lake in Kalispell, Montana. If you enjoy reading these daily essays, I hope you will consider purchasing one of my books. They are available through the following Amazon links. My new book is âHow We Got Here: The Leftâs Assault on the Constitutionâ and is now available in paperback and as an eBook. It is 536 pages long and chock full of research on the progressive movement and the patriotic heroes who have fought against it. My earlier books include “The Media Matrix: What if everything you know is fake?” and the “Why We Needed Trump” trilogy. Part 1 is subtitled “Bush’s Global Failure: Half Right.” Part 2 is “Obama’s Fundamental Transformation: Far Left.” Part 3 is “Trump’s American Vision: Just Right.” As an Amazon Associate, I may earn referral fees for qualifying purchases through links on my website. Also consider subscribing to Heartland Diary on YouTube by clicking here for News Every Conservative Can Use. My goal is to reach 1,000 subscribers.