Lawsuit Suggests Spying On Trump Campaign Started In Early 2016

Svetlana Lokhova’s complaint now raises the question of whether the efforts to spy on the Trump campaign date back even further, to late 2015 or early 2016.

Late last week, Svetlana Lokhova, a Russian-born English citizen, sued presumed Spygate frontman Stefan Halper and three media giants—the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and MSNBC—for defamation and conspiracy, alleging the defendants falsely painted her as a Russian spy and Michael Flynn paramour in order to push the Russia collusion narrative.

Lokhova’s 66-page complaint reads more like a political shock jock transcript than a legal document: “Stefan Halper is a ratf—er and a spy, who embroiled an innocent woman in a conspiracy to undo the 2016 Presidential election and topple the President of the United States of America,” her lawsuit opened. But behind the colorful language—clearly crafted for public consumption—Lokhova’s lawsuit lays out facts that suggest spying on the Trump campaign began in early 2016 and with the aid of British intelligence.

In her lawsuit, Lokhova detailed how she first met the retired general and short-lived Trump national security advisor Michael Flynn. In January 2014, while working to complete her Ph.D. at Cambridge University, her mentor Professor Christopher M. Andrew (“Andrew”), and Sir Richard Dearlove (“Dearlove”), invited Lokhova to attend a group dinner with Flynn.

Andrew and Dearlove are connected to British intelligence, with Andrew having served as the official historian to “MI5,” the counterintelligence organization in the UK, and Dearlove having spent “decades with British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), known as MI6,” and serving as its director from 1999 to 2004.

Lokhova stated the purpose of the dinner was to promote what was to become the Cambridge Security Initiative (CSI), “a group chaired by Dearlove,” which sought “to advance education in international security and intelligence issues and to help support graduate students, such as Lokhova, while they were studying at Cambridge.” Among the 20 guests attending the February 28, 2014, dinner at Cambridge was Flynn, then President Barack Obama’s director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).

Following the dinner, and while in the presence of the other attendees, Lokhova spoke briefly with Flynn about her research into the founding of the Soviet intelligence service. Lokhova and Flynn later exchanged emails, which the Russian scholar stressed in her complaint were always shared with Andrew, with whom she was co-authoring a book. These events later took on a surreal significance when Trump was elected president and Obama administration officials and high-level D.C. government insiders traded leaks for the legacy media’s peddling of the Russia collusion narrative.

But in Lokhova’s case, the complicity came from the United Kingdom, when her former professor, mentor, and co-author Andrew penned a February 19, 2017, piece for the United Kingdom’s Sunday Times. “I met him three years ago,” when as director of the DIA he “visited the Cambridge intelligence seminar, of which I was a convenor,” Andrew wrote of Flynn. Then, while not naming Lokhova in his article, Andrew wove words of inuendo to launch a narrative that would soon take hold: that Lokhova was a British spy and a love interest of the married Flynn.

[Full article is at the Federalist]

https://thefederalist.com/2019/05/28/lawsuit-suggests-spying-trump-campaign-started-early-2016/