NYT’s Reluctantly Comes Clean About How Obama Spied On Trump
After years of denial that the Obama Administration never spied on the Trump administration the New York Times comes clean.
In an effort to get out in front of Attorney General Barr’s investigations the New York Times admitted that multiple foreign intelligence assets were deployed against then-presidential candidate Donald Trump.
The Times noted that long-time informant Stefan Halper was ordered to collect intel on the Trump campaign. The report details that an anonymous woman was flown to America to oversee the operation, the Times would not name the women but she went by “Azra Turk” and did have a relationship with an unidentified federal intelligence agency.
Mollie Hemingway at The Federalist reports:
Halper was handpicked by a seasoned FBI counterintelligence agent out of the New York office, according to the article. While the Times does not identify the agent by name, the paper says the FBI agent spoke at a conference organized by Halper about a 2010 case involving Russians posing as Americans. The public schedule for a 2011 conference hosted by Halper about the exact same case shows that three FBI counterintelligence agents were invited to speak on the topic.
The three agents publicly identified as speaking at that conference on the topic are George J. Ennis, Jr., Alan E. Kohler, Jr., and Stephen M. Somma. Ennis currently serves as the special agent in charge in the FBI’s New York office, according to his LinkedIn profile, and worked closely with Preet Bharara, former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, a virulent anti-Trump activist whom the president fired in 2017.
It just so happened that real estate records also show that Kohler moved to DC shortly after special counsel Robert Mueller was appointed to investigate President Trump. Hemingway did ask the FBI about Kohler:
When asked whether Kohler had been transferred to the FBI’s Washington field office, an FBI representative for that office directed the questions to the FBI headquarters in D.C. The FBI refused to comment when asked whether Kohler had been detailed to work on Mueller’s investigation of Trump or whether he was the agent responsible for deploying Halper against the Trump campaign in 2016.
“Turk” who worked as Halper’s assistant, is the spy that targeted George Papadopoulos and according to Papadopoulos she’s wasn’t a very good one. He mentioned that, “She could hardly speak English and was tasked to meet me about my work in the energy sector offshore Israel/Cyprus which Turkey was competing with,” and that she “clearly was not FBI” and thought she was “CIA and affiliate with Turkish intel.”
The New York Times claims that the unprecedented action of deploying spies overseas to gather intel “yielded no fruitful information.” However, what we don’t know is if any of that intel was used for FISA warrants against American citizens.
Hemingway believes that the Times wrote the article as a way to “spin-off” some of the damaging information that is about to be revealed from investigations being conducted by Attorney General Barr. The article written by the Times frequently mentions an upcoming inspector general review that shows the Obama DOJ abused their authority to punish the government’s political enemies.
