Leak Of Crossfire Hurricane Agent’s Identity To The NYT Suggests More To Come
The leak of Stephen Somma’s identity to the pair of favored New York Times journalists looks like an attempt to preempt, and thereby soften, damaging information soon to come.
Last week, The New York Times outed Crossfire Hurricane Case Agent #1 as Stephen Somma. Crossfire Hurricane is the Obama administration’s secret surveillance of the Trump campaign on the pretext of collusion with Russia that was later disproven by a two-year special counsel probe.
In a story headlined “National Security Wiretap System Was Long Plagued by Risk of Errors,” SpyGate denier Charlie Savage and his co-author, Adam Goldman, portrayed the egregious Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act abuse targeting former Trump campaign advisor Carter Page as typical of the missteps made in other, less politically sensitive FISA court cases.
Of course, as Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s 400-plus page report detailed, the FISA abuse in the Trump campaign was very unusual and very excessive—and the formerly unnamed Case Agent #1 played a large part in the plot to target the Trump campaign.
As such, the leak of Somma’s identity to the pair of favored New York Times journalists looks like an attempt to preempt, and thereby soften, damaging information soon to come. We saw a very similar tactic when the Times ran an article shortly before Horowitz’s report dropped that revealed government lawyer “Kevin Clinesmith, altered an email that officials used to prepare to seek court approval to renew the wiretap.”
The Times’ reveal of Case Agent #1’s identity will likely prove to be a tell that the spotlight will soon shine on Somma. With this in mind, a re-read of the IG report unearths several details now carry new significance.
Somma Immediately Suggested FISA Spying
“Almost immediately after opening the Page, Papadopoulos, and Manafort investigations on August 10, the case agent assigned to the Carter Page investigation, Case Agent 1, contacted [the Office of General Counsel] about the possibility of seeking FISA authority for Carter Page,” the IG report revealed. Cont.
Shame on Somma
Whether Somma knew of Steele’s reporting before it made its way to the rest of the Crossfire Hurricane team is unclear. What is clear, though, is that Somma was desperate to surveil Page—and in turn the Trump campaign. Beyond pushing for the FISA surveillance to start immediately, Somma bore responsibility for many of the substantial omissions and misstatements in the FISA warrant, as the IG report detailed:
Spygate Spins Round to Halper Again
Somma’s supersized role in the FISA abuse seems eerily similar to the tentacle-wide reach of CHS Halper, whom Somma just so happened to handle. The day after the Crossfire Hurricane team opened an investigation into Page, Somma and his fellow team members met with Halper.
Somma claimed that since he “had never previously dealt with the ‘realm’ of political campaigns,” and thus “lacked a basic understanding of simple issues, for example what the role of a ‘foreign policy advisor’ entails, and how that person interacts with the rest of the campaign,” he proposed meeting with Halper, whom he knew “had been affiliated with national political campaigns since the early 1970s.” Significantly, the IG report then noted that Somma “also believed [Halper] might have information about, and potentially may have met, one or more of the Crossfire Hurricane subjects.”
Who’s Handling Who?
The other possibility is that Somma wasn’t handling Halper, but that Halper was handling Somma.
It was Halper who asked Somma during the first meeting on Crossfire Hurricane “whether the team had any interest in an individual named Carter Page.” It was Halper who claimed Page had approached him during the mid-July meeting and asked him to be “a foreign policy advisor for the Trump campaign”—a claim Page told The Federalist was not true. Cont.
https://thefederalist.com/2020/03/02/leak-of-crossfire-hurricane-agents-identity-to-the-nyt-suggests-more-to-come/