https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-03-31/trump-was-not-just-spied-upon-it-was-entrapment

Excerpts:

A top FBI official admitted to Congressional investigators last year that the agency had contacts within the Trump campaign as part of operation "Crossfire Hurricane," which sounds a lot like FBI "informant" Stefan Halper - a former Oxford University professor who was paid over $1 million by the Obama Department of Defense between 2012 and 2018, with nearly half of it surrounding the 2016 US election.

The Post further noted that the academic, since identified as Stefan Halper, first met with Trump campaign advisor Carter Page “a few weeks before the opening of the investigation,” and then after Crossfire Hurricane’s July 31, 2016, start, he met again with Carter Page and “with Trump campaign co-chairman Sam Clovis,” offering the latter his “foreign-policy expertise” for the Trump team. Then in September, Halper “reached out to George Papadopoulos, an unpaid foreign-policy adviser for the campaign, inviting him to London to work on a research paper.”

Who ordered it is the obvious question, but I'm not going to leave it there. I suggest that an attempt was being made to implant Halper in the Trump campaign, one way or another, not just for spying purposes but actually to help create this collusion of the campaign with Russia–that is, to help manufacture it.

Four decades ago, Halper was responsible for a long-forgotten spying scandal involving the 1980 election, in which the Reagan campaign – using CIA officials managed by Halper, reportedly under the direction of former CIA Director and then-Vice-Presidential candidate George H.W. Bush – got caught running a spying operation from inside the Carter administration. The plot involved CIA operatives passing classified information about Carter’s foreign policy to Reagan campaign officials in order to ensure the Reagan campaign knew of any foreign policy decisions that Carter was considering.

>>6000963

The article referenced within the zerohedge article

https://thefederalist.com/2019/03/25/launched-investigation-trumps-campaign-crossfire-hurricane/

References to Lisa Page testimony…

Page later said she believed Crossfire Hurricane had been launched as a “full investigation” and not a “preliminary investigation.” She also confirmed that there are three basic types of investigations: an assessment, a preliminary investigation, and a full investigation.

Page added that, because there are multiple types of assessments, without the Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide (DIOG) in front of her, she was hesitant to explain the various investigations in detail. However, she did note that when a preliminary or full investigation is opened, agents may use more investigative tools than those available at the assessment stage.

This testimony calls to mind the Washington Post’s article last year, “Secret FBI source for Russia investigation met with three Trump advisers during campaign.” In that piece, the Post reported that an unnamed professor—and “longtime U.S. intelligence source”—“began working as a secret informant for the FBI as it investigated Russia’s interference in the campaign.”

In reporting Halper’s mid-July contact with Carter Page, the Post explained that “the FBI commonly uses sources and informants to gather evidence and its regulations allow for use of informants even before a formal investigation has been opened. In many law enforcement investigations, the use of sources and informants precedes more invasive techniques such as electronic surveillance.”

That is all very true. But Lisa Page’s testimony now highlights a point missed at the time: An assessment is a formal FBI investigation. It is just a different category of investigation. As a formal investigation, FBI employees must comply with the provisions in the DIOG, which includes ensuring the assessment serves “an authorized purpose” and has a “clearly defined objective.” The DIOG also mandates that “all assessments be documented in the appropriate form,” and states that “the effective date of the Assessment is the date the final approval authority approves,” the appropriate form.

Yet in her testimony, Lisa Page mentions only one investigation—the launch of Crossfire Hurricane on July 31, 2016