This weekend, Spygate insider Steven Schrage broke his silence.
In “The Spies Who Hijacked America” and a follow-up appearance on Maria Bartiromo’s “Sunday Morning Futures,” Schrage detailed the origins of Stefan Halper’s meeting with then-Trump advisor Carter Page. Halper would later serve as a confidential human source (CHS) for the Crossfire Hurricane probe, secretly recording multiple conversations with Page, as well as Trump advisor George Papadopoulos.
But it is what Schrage revealed about Halper’s initial non-interest in Page then Halper’s prediction on January 10, 2017, that Michael Flynn would not last long in the Trump administration that suggest significant revelations will be forthcoming from U.S. Attorney John Durham’s investigation into the origins of Spygate.
In July 2016, Schrage was finishing his Ph.D. at Cambridge University under Halper’s supervision when he invited Page to speak at a conference entitled “2016’s Race to Change the World: How the U.S. Presidential Campaign Can Reshape Global Politics and Foreign Policy.” Given Halper’s later role as a CHS in Crossfire Hurricane, many surmised that Halper sought out Page’s attendance at the conference.
But on Sunday, Schrage made clear that he, not Halper, was responsible for Page’s participation in the conference. In fact, Halper “ironically,” as Schrage wrote, “had repeatedly urged [Schrage] to cancel” the conference, which was “headlined by Presidential Candidate Hillary Clinton’s confidante Madeleine Albright.”
But Schrage did not cancel the conference. Instead, “after a 20-something Cambridge administrative official smugly told me ‘there’s no way Trump can win’ and cut our travel funding, it sent me on a mad scramble,” Schrage wrote. “I had to find someone, anyone, to fly over on a last-minute economy ticket to represent the Trump campaign,” and that is how Page crossed paths with Halper. During his interview with Bartiromo, Schrage added that he wanted a representative of the Trump campaign at the conference to provide balance.
From Schrage’s telling, then, neither he nor Halper sought out Page’s participation in the conference for a nefarious purpose. But he says things changed when former MI6 director Sir Richard Dearlove arrived toward the end of the conference.
“For most of the conference, Halper couldn’t be bothered with Page, about whom he made snarky comments about behind Page’s back,” Schrage wrote. “That all changed,” though, after Halper spoke to his “long-time collaborator,” Dearlove. Halper then “seemed desperately interested in isolating, cornering, and ingratiating himself to Page and promoting himself to the Trump campaign.”
read more:
https://thefederalist.com/2020/08/10/what-we-learned-sunday-from-spygate-insider-steven-schrage/
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