Stefan Halper, FBI spy, foretold Michael Flynn's fall, ex-student says

Stefan Halper, FBI spy, foretold Michael Flynn's fall, ex-student says

FBI spy foretold Michael Flynn's fall, ex-student says

In this Dec. 1, 2017, photo, former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn leaves federal court in Washington. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh) **FILE** more >

By Rowan Scarborough - The Washington Times - Monday, August 10, 2020 

 

A onetime associate of FBI spy Stefan Halper says the University of Cambridge professor told him that retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn was “unsuitable” for the post of President Trump’s national security adviser and added, “I don’t think Flynn’s going to be around long.”
Mr. Halper’s remarks to Steven P. Schrage, then a doctoral candidate at Cambridge, were recorded on Jan. 10, 2017, two days before a Washington Post column on Flynn led to his quick White House dismissal.
Mr. Schrage outed himself Sunday as a whistleblower with a post, “The Spies Who Hijacked America,” on journalist Matt Taibbi’s blog.

“In these discussions I stressed that Flynn was indispensable,” wrote Mr. Schrage, who was an official in the George W. Bush administration. “He was perhaps the only campaign adviser who both had Trump’s personal trust and the deep intelligence experience necessary to expose hidden problems in the intelligence community. At one point, I even recall telling Halper that taking Flynn out would be like ‘beheading’ Trump’s team. I had no idea I had been unintentionally aiding a spy preparing the guillotine and helping lead Flynn to exactly such a beheading.”

Mr. Halper’s remarks were recorded weeks before liberal media began suggesting, without detail, that Flynn had done something inappropriate regarding a Russian-born scholar. His supposed transgression happened at a 2014 dinner among intelligence academics at the University of Cambridge, where Flynn, then the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, was the guest of honor.
Three years later, an FBI counterintelligence probe found no evidence that Flynn, as an intelligence officer or in retirement, had any inappropriate foreign contacts, according to a bureau report unearthed by a special investigator appointed by Attorney General William P. Barr.
The Russian-born scholar, Svetlana Lokhova, alleges that it was Mr. Halper who spread the unfounded smears as a way to create another Trump-Russia conspiracy story. At least one 2018 story about the Cambridge dinner said Mr. Halper was, indeed, a person who complained about Flynn. In response to a lawsuit filed by Ms. Lokhova, a British citizen, Mr. Halper has denied that he was a media source.