JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Glenn, on another topic, a top House Republican has defended the FBI
against a series of attacks by President Trump, who has claimed without evidence that the
Bureau planted a spy in his 2016 presidential campaign.
Representative Trey Gowdy, chair of the powerful House Oversight Committee, said Tuesday that
the FBI was acting properly when it deployed a confidential informant to investigate Russian
attempts to interfere in the election.
I’m wondering if you could comment on this, because you’ve written about the person
planted and his checkered history—Stefan Halper.
GLENN GREENWALD: Right.
So it is an interesting case because obviously, in 2016, there were claims that there were
members of the Trump campaign who were colluding with or had improper relationships with various
business and political interests in Russia.
And it is completely legitimate, in fact, obligatory, for the FBI to investigate those
allegations, and using an informant to do so is an entirely proper way to investigate.
They do it all the time.
They do it to huge numbers of groups.
In fact, on some level, it is one of the least invasive ways, is to have somebody with knowledge
speak to the people who are being investigated and then report back to the FBI what it is
that they have learned.
So the idea that this is a spy or that this is something improper is ridiculous.
At the same time, there are a lot of questions about where these suspicions came from, about
who it is who started them, about who was overseeing the investigation, where the dossier
came from.
And so the question of who this informant was is a matter of legitimate public interest.
And yet the Justice Department and the FBI did what they always do when they want to
hide things, which is they claim, that, “Oh, if we learn who the informant is, it will
jeopardize lives around the world.
It will compromise intelligence assets.
It will harm the national security of the United States.”
They made it seem like the informant was some kind of covert, undercover CIA or FBI asset,
whose name, if it were disclosed, would blow all sorts of secret covert operations.
As it turned out, now that we know the name, Stefan Halper, that turned out to be a total
lie.
Stefan Halper is a longtime dirty CIA operative who has ties to the Bush family and the Republican
Party.
He was behind one of the worst CIA scandals, which is in 1980, the Reagan campaign spied
on what the Carter administration was doing by having CIA officials report classified
information to the Reagan campaign so they knew what the Carter administration was doing,
so they could use it against Carter in the 1980 campaign.
And the person who oversaw that was Stefan Halper, working with the former CIA director
and then vice presidential candidate George Herbert Walker Bush.
So Halper has been around Washington forever.
His name has long been known as a CIA operative and as a Republican operative.
And the idea that naming him would somehow jeopardize his life or the lives of other
people was an absolute lie, but the Justice Department used it to successfully convince
media outlets in the U.S. not to name him for many weeks.
And it was only once The New York Times and Washington Post published enough information
on purpose for us to learn his identity were we then able to figure out who it was.
AMY GOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald, we’re going to do part two with you and post it online
in web exclusives at Democracynow.org.
Glenn Greenwald is the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, one of the founding editors of
The Intercept.
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