Top congressional Democrats wrote National Intelligence Director Dan Coats to demand the Trump administration keep classified information on Trump campaign spy Stefan Halper.
Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Mark Warner (D-Va.), and House Intelligence Committee Ranking Member Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), said the wider sharing of the information may put sources and methods at risk.
Democrat leaders are panicked that information on the Obama administration’s spying on the Trump campaign before the summer of 2016 will be released to the public.
Obama spy Stefan Halper, was paid a total of $411,575 in 2016 and 2017 for work with the US government that included spying on the Trump campaign.
Obama spy Stefan Halper was promoting Hillary Clinton publicly while he spied on the Trump Campaign.
Democrats do not want the American public to discover that they spied on the Trump campaign during the 2016 election and afterwards.
The fact that the four top Democrats in Congress are insisting this information stays classified has been mostly ignored by the liberal mainstream media.
The New York Times reported:
The White House has rebuffed concerns among American intelligence and law enforcement officials and ordered that more lawmakers be given access to classified information about an informant the F.B.I. used in 2016 to investigate possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russia, according to two American officials with knowledge of the decision.
Both the director of national intelligence and the director of the F.B.I. tried to keep the classified documents tightly restricted, fearing that a broader dissemination of operational reports and other sensitive material could lead to more leaks of detailed information about the role of the confidential F.B.I. informant.
Some American officials believe, in fact, the reason the White House made the decision was to provide political ammunition to President Trump’s Republican allies who have argued — without any evidence — that the F.B.I. investigation was opened in July 2016 as an effort to keep Mr. Trump from becoming president.
The White House declined to comment.
The F.B.I. files about the informant will now be available to all members of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees, instead of to just a group of congressional leaders known as the Gang of Eight. It is unclear whether Mr. Trump or a lower-level White House official authorized the move.
The controversy over the F.B.I. informant is one skirmish in a searing political battle that was renewed on Thursday during a contentious hearing convened by the House Judiciary and Oversight Committees that heard testimony from Peter Strzok, an F.B.I. agent who once ran the bureau’s investigation into the Trump campaign.
During the summer of 2016, the F.B.I. sent an informant to meet with two Trump campaign advisers after the bureau had received information that the two men had suspicious contacts linked to Russia. The informant, Stefan Halper, an American academic who teaches at Cambridge University in England, had meetings with both Carter Page and George Papadopoulos to gain a better understanding of their contacts with Russians.
The New York Times did not originally name Mr. Halper because of a general practice not to name confidential F.B.I. informants to preserve their safety. Mr. Halper’s name has now been widely reported.
