The former co-chairman of the Trump campaign who met with a suspected FBI informant said during a recent radio interview he believes the source was attempting to establish an “audit trail” that would provide the FBI with justification to obtain warrants to spy on members of the campaign.
Sam Clovis confirmed during a radio interview Monday with the “Simon Conway Show” that he met with Stefan Halper, the suspected informant, in either late August or early September 2016.
“They were trying to literally plant evidence or create an audit trail that would lead investigators on something. Then they would have justification to go back for their [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] warrants and all their other things,” Clovis said of the FBI and Halper.
Clovis said he and Halper met in the lobby of a DoubleTree hotel in Arlington, Va., for coffee, and described the gathering as an “academic meeting,” during which Halper discussed his research on China.
“The meeting wasn’t very high level. It was like two faculty members sitting down in the faculty lounge talking about research,” he said. “There was no indication that this was anything other than just wanting to offer up his help to the campaign if I needed it.”
Clovis said Halper, who previously worked at the University of Cambridge and for past Republican presidential administrations, had met with Trump campaign aide Carter Page, and used that meeting as “bona fides” to secure an appointment with Clovis.
“And then I think he used my meeting as bona fides to get a meeting with George Papadopoulos,” Clovis said.
Papadopoulos, a former foreign policy adviser for the Trump campaign, pleaded guilty last year to lying to the FBI and is cooperating with special counsel Robert Mueller and his team as they continue their investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.
Clovis said he and Halper did not have any other contact again until late September 2016, when Halper emailed him academic papers that “to this day, I have not read a single one of them.”
The former Trump campaign co-chairman, who went on to work in the Department of Agriculture but left the administration this month, said he believes Halper’s motivation was to get to Papadopoulos. But he said the FBI “misread” Papadopoulos’ relationship with the campaign.
“What unsettled me, and I think that’s accurate, is the fact of what he tried to do with George Papadopoulos, and that was to establish an audit trail from the campaign or somebody associated with the campaign, back to those Clinton emails —whether or not they existed, we don’t know,” Clovis said.
“This to me appears to have been a deliberate effort, a deliberate and intentional effort on the part of the leadership of the FBI to create something that did not exist, and that is exactly what this looks like,” Clovis said. “And I think at the end of the day that’s what we’re going to find out.”
Reports last week detailed how the FBI had a confidential source working for it as it investigated Russian meddling.
Trump has accused the bureau of embedding a “spy” in his campaign and demanded Sunday that the Justice Department investigate whether the FBI “infiltrated or surveilled” his campaign for political reasons.
But the Washington Post and other outlets reported the informant, later identified as Halper, was not planted in the campaign, but rather sought out and met with Clovis, Papadopoulos, and Page.
