Election security

The London-to-Langley Spy Ring

Even before the first Republican primary, a London-to-Langley spy ring had begun to form against Donald Trump. British spies sent to CIA director John Brennan in late 2015 alleged intelligence on contacts between Trumpworld and the Russians, according to the Guardian.

Here’s the crucial paragraph in the story:

GCHQ first became aware in late 2015 of suspicious “interactions” between figures connected to Trump and known or suspected Russian agents, a source close to UK intelligence said. This intelligence was passed to the US as part of a routine exchange of information, they added.

Notice it doesn’t say the “Trump campaign” but “figures connected to Trump.” One of those figures was Michael Flynn, who didn’t join the campaign until February 2016. But Brennan and British intelligence had already started spying on him, drawing upon sham intelligence from Stefan Halper, a long-in-the-tooth CIA asset teaching at Cambridge University whom Brennan and Jim Comey would later send to infiltrate the Trump campaign’s ranks.

It appears that Halper had won Brennan’s confidence with a false report about Flynn in 2014 — a reported sighting of Flynn at Cambridge University talking too cozily with a Russian historian. Halper had passed this absurdly simpleminded tattle to a British spy who in turn gave it to Brennan, as one can deduce from this euphemistic account in the New York Times about Halper as the “informant”...