Yep. If the idiotic “CrossFire Hurricane” didn’t start until July 31, 2016...what was Halper doing contacting Carter Page in June 2016? Just random chance?
The same Halper who offered him a free trip to London and money for a paper? Who pointedly asked him about “stuff on Hillary”?
Dan Bongino (”SpyGate” and “Exonerated”) and Gregg Jarrett (”Witch Hunt”) cover this very well.
The obvious guess is that Halper was working on behalf of a friendly foreign government (the UK most likely), since we know they had their own investigation going beforehand. The information they provided is what gave the FBI the flimsy excuse to start “Crossfire Hurricane” in the first place.
This whole thing is a case study in how the intelligence apparatus abuses every loophole to accomplish what should be illegal spying, but give it the color of legality. The CIA/NSA can’t just spy on US citizens, but they can ask foreign governments to do it for them. However, if those foreign governments spied on them inside the US, then that would cause problems, so they ask them to do it when the US citizen travels OUTSIDE the US.
Then, when they need to gin up a BS FISA warrant to spy domestically, they need to verify all the information in it. Unless that information comes from a confidential informant, so there’s another loophole. They just get the CI to tell them what they need to get the warrant, and it can be transparently false, because they will never have to verify it at all.
Then they abuse the “hop” system, so if they can’t get a warrant on someone they want to monitor, they just have to find someone in the outer orbit connected to that target by a few degrees, and gin up enough fake evidence to get a warrant on that secondary target.
That’s not even going into some of the other scams they pulled, like using one asset to feed incriminating information to a target, then using another asset to draw that information back out and report it, to disguise the actual source of the information. Or the other kind of entrapment scams they were attempting, or the falsifying of interview records, or trying to bully subjects into false confessions with threats and intimidation.
It’s kind of amazing that even though they seem to have used every dirty trick in their playbook, they still didn’t manage to get a single shred of dirt to stick on Trump. I doubt if any actual career politician could have withstood that treatment.