Stefan Halper Touted Contacts with Russian Intel Officers in Conversation With Papadopoulos, Transcript Shows

A redacted transcript shows has revealed that FBI source Stefan Halper bragged about his own extensive contacts with Russian intelligence officers while probing then-Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos for information about the campaign’s Russia contacts during a conversation in London ahead of the 2016 election.

A transcript of the conversation was released along with other documents by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) as part of a larger effort to disclose information about the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation of the 2016 Trump campaign. The transcript shows Halper touted his own Russian connections before pressing Papadopoulos multiple times about allegations that the Trump campaign had conspired with the Russians and WikiLeaks to hack into the DNC.

“The Russians can be very helpful to us at this time, and we’ve got some great information coming out. You know this stuff coming out of WikiLeaks is really superb,” Halper said after mentioning his relationship with Russian intelligence officers Vyacheslav Trubnikov, Leonid Shebarshin, and Yuri Traughtoff.

The Daily Caller reported that Halper has an extensive relationship with Trubnikov, the former head of Russia’s foreign intelligence service who served as a source for Christopher Steele’s infamous dossier. In January, Senator Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) cited Halper’s use of Trubnikov as a source for a 2015 Pentagon study on China-Russia relations as a rationale to expand a probe into the DOD’s awarding of more than $1 million in contracts to Halper since 2012.

Last week, requests by Grassley and Ron Johnson for the declassification of several footnotes from IG Michael Horowitz’s December report of Crossfire Hurricane yielded their release. The footnotes show that, as early as 2017, the FBI believed part of Steele’s sourcing was Russian disinformation.

While Papadopolous did not make any claims of Russian contacts and denied having any knowledge of the DNC hack in the transcript, Halper continued to press him on the matter.

“I think this is a time when given Hillary’s weaknesses and given her strengths, that help from a third party like WikiLeaks for example, or some other party like the Russians, could be incredibly helpful,” Halper suggested, adding that “it could make all the difference.”

But Papadopolous pushed back, saying “as a campaign, of course, we don’t advocate for this type of activity because at the end of the day it’s illegal . . . the campaign does not advocate for this, does not support what’s happening.”

Laughing at the suggestion of purposeful malfeasance, the former Trump aide went on to state that “our campaign is not engage or reaching out to WikiLeaks or to whoever it is to tell them ‘please work with us, collaborate,’ because we don’t, no one does that.”

Towards the end of the brief conversation, Halper said that he was “happy to hear from you that there has been no interference in the campaign from outside groups like WikiLeaks or any of those people.”

In a separate transcript of a conversation with a different FBI source that was released earlier this month, Papadopoulos maintained his line of reasoning, saying he knew “for a fact” that the Trump campaign had nothing to do with the DNC hack.