Strange Dr. Halper: Or how the left learned to stop worrying & love the CIA

The ability of the intelligence community to shape public opinion through both overt and covert means was never more obvious than in the 10 years following the JFK assassination.

Likewise, there has never been a period when the mainstream media’s abject failure to hold government agencies accountable was more apparent than in the years following Dallas.

Until now.

Watching Anderson Cooper or any other CNN host smirk their way through an interview with supporters of President Trump cannot help but bring back memories of Dan Rather dissing proponents of assassination conspiracy theories. But whereas CBS only spent an hour or two every year defending the CIA and the FBI, our own beloved CNN does so 24 hours a day, seven days a week (barring the occasional intrusion of a royal wedding).

Thank goodness that in the world where CNN lives, the CIA and FBI can do no wrong. Unfortunately, in the world where the rest of us live, the intelligence and police agencies of the United States are entirely capable of demonstrating the truth of Lord Acton’s dictum that “absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Last week, the vast chasm between the facts and the left-wing media widened even further than ever before. As story after story demonstrated a well-orchestrated campaign within the Obama administration’s highest levels to target Donald Trump, the mainstream media took the side of former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who argued (on “The View” no less) that Trump should be happy that the FBI was spying on him! Yippee!

Meanwhile, the news media geniuses thought they were being good citizens by not revealing the identity of the Cambridge professor who had reeled in three low-level Trump campaign aides to get the Russia collusion story rolling. In fact, most of the media parrots were being disingenuous by not trumpeting the fact that Stefan Halper had close ties to the CIA for at least four decades and that he was almost certainly running a disinformation campaign that was aimed at protecting the intelligence community from the threat that Trump represented as an outsider who would never go along with the dirty tricks that had become so commonplace in the Deep State’s protection of its own power base.

There’s no doubt that Halper met with those three Trump aides during the summer of 2016 and apparently reported back to his bosses in the Obama administration about what he learned about the Trump campaign’s connection to Russia (pretty much zilch).

I say that his bosses were in the Obama administration because we know that from May 2012 until September 2016, Halper was paid more than $900,000 by the Department of Defense for “classified” work. He also got paid $129,280 in July 2017 (the smallest of his five checks), which may have settled up his account for “work” done during the final year of the Obama administration, and yes, by work I mean spying on Trump.

In July 2016, Halper met in London with Carter Page (the foreign-policy and energy adviser who was additionally spied on with a FISA warrant starting in September 2016).

In August 2016, Halper met with Trump campaign co-chairman Sam Clovis and offered his own services as a foreign-policy adviser to Trump — an offer which wisely was never pursued.

Then, shortly after the meeting with Clovis, Halper reached out to another obscure Trump campaign aide named George Papadopoulos and offered to pay him $3,000 and an all-expenses-paid trip to London to write a paper about energy issues in the Middle East. Both Halper and a young woman identified as Halper’s assistant quizzed Papadopoulos about his knowledge of Hillary Clinton’s emails and a Russian connection to the campaign. Papadopoulos denied any knowledge of any interference in the campaign.

Apparently, Halper reported to someone in the FBI or CIA or both about his contacts with the three campaign aides, and shortly thereafter the report by British spy Christopher Steele was shopped around to the news media with information alleging connections between Trump and Russia. We won’t know more about any of this, or what it proves, until Congress uses its subpoena power to force testimony from Halper and others, but we can certainly be suspicious.

That’s because Halper is not just a “Cambridge professor.” The Okford Ph.D. got his start in politics in the Nixon White House, but it was his association with Gerald Ford’s CIA director George H.W. Bush that launched him into the national spotlight. Halper’s support of Bush in the 1980 presidential campaign resulted in him being named Director of Policy Coordination for the Reagan-Bush ticket when that team was running against Jimmy Carter. Halper is widely believed to have run the plot to gain access to Carter’s briefing book prior to a critical debate. Although Halper has long-denied involvement, the plot apparently involved former CIA agents inside the White House with ties to Bush. Carter blamed “Debategate” for his loss to Reagan.

At this point, it might be worth noting that Halper’s father-in-law at the time was Ray Cline, the former deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Halper, who was in charge of Bush’s opposition research team, also employed a CIA veteran named Robert Gambino. Although Halper remained a paid adviser to the Department of Defense, he left his official government job in the early 1980s to become the founder and chairman of Palmer National Bank in Washington, D.C.

Palmer was funded by a Dallas, Texas, real estate developer named Harvey McLean Jr. who also had ties to George Bush, but according to “Inside Job,” an account of the savings & loan scandal of the 1980s, the real money behind the bank came from Herman Beebe Sr., who reportedly had extensive connections to organized crime figures such as Carlos Marcello, who himself has been linked to the assassination of President Kennedy.

“Inside Job” called Beebe’s thrifts “potentially the most powerful and corrupt banking network ever seen in the U.S.” Beebe later went to jail for bank fraud, but Halper, the chairman of Palmer National Bank, was never caught up in any banking scandal. He was however caught up in another spying scandal when Palmer National Bank was used by Oliver North to funnel money to the Contras during the Iran-Contragate scandal, though which the Reagan administration sent missiles to Iran in exchange for money to secretly fund the Contra rebels in Nicaragua.

Was it just an accident that Halper was involved in the second of two “gate” scandals, or was he part of what historian James Canham-Clyne called the “national security state”? And looking forward, can Halper’s involvement in the 2016 “Spygate” scandal be considered anything other than proof that what is now called the “Deep State” is nothing less than the latest manifestation of that CIA-FBI-Defense nexus that Eisenhower warned against as the military-industrial complex?

One thing is certain. You won’t get any answers to these questions from the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, CBS or NBC. As far as they are concerned, the “intelligence community” is beyond reproach. That is, if you ignore the Kennedy assassination, the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile, the wiretapping of Martin Luther King Jr., the failure to stop the 9/11 attacks, Iran-Contra, drug trafficking, lying to Congress, etc.

Yet the geniuses in the national media want you to believe that you have nothing to fear from the CIA or FBI except fear itself. There’s no way we should be worried about the national security apparatus of the United States spying on a presidential candidate of the opposition party.

Except, wait a minute, what about Watergate?

Wasn’t that a case of a president spying on the headquarters of the opposition political party? And weren’t the five Watergate burglars all associated with the CIA? James McCord was a former FBI and CIA agent, and the other four burglars were all tied to the CIA’s operations against Cuba after the Castro revolution. The two top dogs were G. Gordon Liddy, a former FBI agent, and E. Howard Hunt, a longtime CIA agent whose own connections went back to the Bay of Pigs and the Kennedy assassination.

So yeah, you can just nod your head and go along with the mainstream asleep-at-the-wheel media while they drive off a cliff, or you can pay attention and start connecting the dots for yourself. We’re not in Kansas any more, Toto. This is a Crossfire Hurricane (look it up!) aimed not just at President Trump but at anyone who dares to challenge the establishment elite who have run things for far too long.