Former Trump Campaign Adviser Michael Caputo: The FBI Paid a Russian to Offer Me Phony "Dirt" on Hillary Clinton In Order to Frame Me in Their Spying Operation

Spying? What spying?

Former Trump 2016 Campaign Adviser Michael Caputo told FOX Business' Trish Regan Opens a New Window. that a Russian FBI informant approached him offering dirt on Democratic presidential candidate Opens a New Window. Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election.

"I was approached by a Russian national FBI informant in late May of 2016. He wanted to give me some dirt on Hillary Clinton. I turned it down," Caputo said on Tuesday.

Caputo said he only learned the individual was an FBI informant after he sat down with investigators for Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

"When they asked me about him, I told them what I knew. By their faces I knew that it was someone that had been sent to me. It was after my interrogation with the Mueller team that I went out, hired private investigators and found out the guy had used a fake name, Henry Greenberg, and that he had been working with the FBI for 17 years."

Caputo also said he tried to give this information to Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz.

The FBI and perhaps the CIA ran multiple fake undercover spies at Trump associates, often conducting these spying operations on foreign soil.

There have always been indications that the operation went far beyond the FBI, however. For example, former CIA director John Brennan, now an MSNBC contributor, separately briefed Sen. Harry Reid, (D-Nev.) about the operation. Reid understood that move was undertaken so he could publicize the Russia investigation to influence the ongoing presidential election campaign.

Former director of national intelligence James Clapper, now a CNN contributor, admitted to discussions with media outlets about the investigation. The U.S. embassy in London was used contrary to established protocol to funnel hearsay that was used as a pretext to officially launch a wide-ranging investigation against the entire Trump orbit. Clinton-connected officials in the State Department were also used to disseminate unverified gossip and allegations about Trump throughout the federal government.

The use of covert individuals to surreptitiously obtain information on private American citizens and share it with the government is the most obvious publicly known indication that agencies beyond the FBI may have been intimately involved in the operation. It is clearly possible that every single instance of intelligence collection was done entirely by the FBI without any assistance from any other federal intelligence agency. However, that has not been determined by any investigative body.

The use of Stefan Halper, for example, a London-based American academic with longstanding ties to the FBI, CIA, and Defense Department, raises serious questions about whether CIA assets or resources were used against American citizens. Following Nixon-era domestic spying abuses by the U.S. intelligence community, oversight bodies restricted the authority of the CIA to spy on U.S. citizens on U.S. soil.

Numerous Trump affiliates were lured to meetings overseas that were then used as the basis for domestic intelligence collection. The formal launch of an enterprise investigation against the Trump campaign was opened following a report that George Papadopoulos, a former Trump campaign advisor, had told a foreign diplomat in London about another overseas meeting during which he was told Russians had dirt on Clinton.

Charles Schumer says that identifying these tactics as "spying" is "perpetuating conspiracy theories."

&bodytext=Spying? What spying? Former Trump 2016 Campaign Adviser Michael Caputo told FOX Business' Trish Regan Opens a New Window. that a Russian FBI informant approached him offering dirt on Democratic presidential candidate Opens a New Window. Hillary Clinton during the...&topic=world_news"> posted by Ace of Spades at 07:20 PM

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