This is just insane.
The FBI and Department of Justice has been fighting tooth and nail to not tell Congress the identity of the informant they used to gather intelligence on the Trump campaign. And their allies in Congress and elsewhere have chimed in with all manner of ridiculous and bullsh** threats directed at Devin Nunes…though not at Trey Gowdy who is working with Nunes to identify this FBI source. A reflexively leftwing law professor (but I repeat myself) made this astonishing statement tonight:
This is just stupid. The law clearly defines who it covers as employees of an intelligence agency. This does not cover informants or sources and intelligence agencies are forbidden by law from collecting information on US persons. And the very idea that the Department of Justice is going to okay a grand jury investigation and indictment of a member of Congress when the FBI has leaked the same information to multiple media outlets is simply insane.
The ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee made a similar threat today:

The top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee warned Friday that his colleagues could be committing a crime if they obtain the identity of a secret FBI source and use it to undermine the ongoing investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) raised the alarm in a Friday evening statement, as Republican allies of President Donald Trump have pressed the Justice Department for details about a source believed to have aided the FBI and Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Trump campaign contacts with Russians.
“It would be at best irresponsible, and at worst potentially illegal, for members of Congress to use their positions to learn the identity of an FBI source for the purpose of undermining the ongoing investigation into Russian interference in our election,” Warner said. “Anyone who is entrusted with our nation’s highest secrets should act with the gravity and seriousness of purpose that knowledge deserves.”

If Warner were truly concerned about irresponsible or illegal he’s be worried about the FBI and Justice because they have effectively outed their informant. Last week, there was speculation that the informant was a US academic teaching at Cambridge named Stefan Halper. He had a connection to US intelligence. He had a friendship with a retired head of MI6. He contacted George Papadopoulos out of the blue and paid for his flight to London in addition to several thousand dollars for a “research paper.” Papadopoulos broke off contact with Halper started asking about Clinton emails. Halper struck up a friendship with Carter Page.

Today, the FBI and Justice go back the the leak well and give us enough information that we can say pretty conclusively that Halper is the man.
Secret FBI source for Russia investigation met with three Trump advisers during campaign.

In mid-July 2016, a retired American professor approached an adviser to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign at a symposium about the White House race held at a British university.
The professor took the opportunity to strike up a conversation with Carter Page, whom Trump had named a few months earlier as a foreign policy adviser.
…
The Washington Post — after speaking with people familiar with his role — has confirmed the identity of the FBI source who assisted the investigation, but is not reporting his name following warnings from U.S. intelligence officials that exposing him could endanger him or his contacts.
…
Page recalled his conversation with the professor as pleasant, if not particularly memorable. It was the first interaction they ever had, he said.
…
Page and the FBI informant stayed in touch after the conference, meeting several times in the Washington area, Page said. Page said he did not recall exactly what the two men discussed.
…
People familiar with his outreach to Papadopoulos said it was done as part of the FBI’s investigation. The young foreign-policy adviser had been on the radar of the FBI since the summer, and inside the campaign had been pushing Trump and his aides to meet with Russian officials.
[Trump campaign emails show aide’s repeated efforts to set up Russia meetings]
“Please pardon my sudden intrusion just before the Labor Day weekend,” the professor wrote to Papadopoulos in a message described to The Post.
He said he was leading a project examining relations between Turkey and the European Union. He offered to pay Papadopoulos $3,000 to write a paper about the oil fields off the coast of Turkey, Israel and Cyprus, “a topic on which you are a recognized expert.”

Here the FBI claims that they are trying to protect this guy’s identity but they give it to the Washington Post who then calls people to ask them about their contacts with the source.
And apparently Trump’s tweet today on the subject acted like catnip for the New York Ties because this
yielded this:
F.B.I. Used Informant to Investigate Russia Ties to Campaign, Not to Spy, as Trump Claims.

Law enforcement officials have refused, saying that handing over the documents would imperil both the source’s anonymity and safety. The New York Times has learned the source’s identity but typically does not name informants to preserve their safety.
…
The informant is well known in Washington circles, having served in previous Republican administrations and as a source of information for the C.I.A. in past years, according to one person familiar with the source’s work.
F.B.I. agents were seeking more details about what Mr. Papadopoulos knew about the hacked Democratic emails, and one month after their Russia investigation began, Mr. Papadopoulos received a curious message. The academic inquired about his interest in writing a research paper on a disputed gas field in the eastern Mediterranean Sea, a subject of Mr. Papadopoulos’s expertise.
The informant offered a $3,000 honorarium for the paper and a paid trip to London, where the two could meet and discuss the research project.
“I understand that this is rather sudden but thought that given your expertise it might be of interest to you,” the informant wrote in a message to Mr. Papadopoulos, sent on Sept. 2, 2016.
…
Mr. Page, a Navy veteran, served briefly as an adviser to Mr. Trump’s campaign until September 2016. He said that he first encountered the informant during a conference in mid-July of 2016 and that they stayed in touch. The two later met several times in the Washington area. Mr. Page said their interactions were benign.
The two last exchanged emails in September 2017, about a month before a secret warrant to surveil Mr. Page expired after being repeatedly renewed by a federal judge. Mr. Trump’s congressional allies have also assailed the surveillance, accusing law enforcement officials, with little evidence, of abusing their authority and spying on the Trump campaign.
The informant also had contacts with Mr. Flynn, the retired Army general who was Mr. Trump’s first national security adviser. The two met in February 2014, when Mr. Flynn was running the Defense Intelligence Agency and attended the Cambridge Intelligence Seminar, an academic forum for former spies and researchers that meets a few times a year.

The identity of the informant could not be more clear. And the identification didn’t come from a leak by Congress, it came from multiple leaks by the FBI and DOJ who are burning Halper to the ground for their own reasons And I think those reasons will be come abundantly clear as the DOJ IG finishes up his investigations.

Edition

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is one of the finest law enforcement agencies on earth—perhaps the finest. While no sprawling bureaucracy of tens of thousands of special agents, analysts and support personnel, scattered around 56 field offices nationwide, is without its malcontents and missteps, the FBI’s overall reputation is one of honesty, dedication and professionalism, deservedly so.
Given its role as America’s top law enforcement agency, the Bureau has been a lightning rod for criticism since its founding 110 years ago, and the astonishingly long tenure of J. Edgar Hoover as its director from 1924 to 1972 remains a touchy topic, not always fairly. Historically, most of the criticism of the FBI has come from civil libertarians and the Left, whereas more recently attacks on the Bureau have shifted to stemming from the Right, specifically fans of the Trump administration, who in an unhinged fashion have compared the FBI to Nazis and the KGB.
The Bureau’s top critic today is President Donald Trump himself, who ever since his inauguration has waged an ugly public campaign against the FBI, regularly accusing it of irregularities and worse in its investigation of his secret Kremlin connections. Today, Trump took to Twitter, as he so often does, and raged at the FBI again, accusing it of having a “representative implanted, for political purposes, into my campaign for president. It took place very early on, and long before the phony Russia Hoax became a ‘hot’ Fake News story. If true—all time biggest political scandal!”
If true, indeed. This is a grave accusation, and it’s false on its face. In the first place, the FBI is forbidden from engaging in any overtly political investigations. Moreover, there’s as yet no public evidence of any FBI-controlled person inside the Trump campaign in 2016 (to say nothing of the fact that moles are “planted” while fake breasts are “implanted”). Lastly, the president seems not to understand that if anyone connected to him went to the FBI to report his or her concerns about ties to Russia, that’s a very different story than the Bureau planting someone inside the Trump campaign. This matter needs resolution. Indeed, the president could settle the matter immediately by picking up the phone and asking Attorney General Jeff Sessions if these rumors are true—that’s his right as the current resident of the White House. That Trump prefers to tweet angrily about what’s alleged on Fox News speaks volumes.
Nevertheless, Trump’s public anger at the FBI is something that’s unhealthy in any law-based democracy, and it may have long-lasting effects, all of them negative. That said, the remarkable thing is that it took this long for a White House to declare open war on the Bureau. Richard Nixon came close as the walls of Watergate closed in on him—and he certainly would have if he had known that the main leaker to the media about the whole affair was the FBI’s associate director, Mark Felt, who hated the president for not appointing him director—but even Nixon’s attacks on the Bureau appear tame next to Trump’s scorched-earth campaign.
As both the leading federal law enforcement agency and our top domestic intelligence agency, the FBI occupies a uniquely powerful position in our country. This situation is frankly anomalous, an accident of American history, and may not be healthy or conducive to good governance in the 21^st century. There’s a reason that most Western democracies split law enforcement duties and spying on their own citizens between different agencies. Both those missions include a great deal of bureaucratic power, and placing them under one roof seems like an invitation to abuse if the institution is not monitored very carefully.
Although few Americans realize it, the FBI is replicated in few of our close security partners. Looking at the so-called Five Eyes espionage alliance, the Anglosphere intelligence network that’s been the world’s most powerful spy system since World War II, illustrates the difference. In Britain, the domestic intelligence mission is handled by the Security Service (popularly called MI5)—that means counterintelligence and counterterrorism, watching for foreign spies and terrorists—while the job of arresting bad guys falls to Metropolitan Police Special Branch, cops who are cleared to know state secrets, but who are not themselves spies.
Canada replicates this system, with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service as MI5 and the storied Mounties acting as Police Special Branch. It’s the same in Australia and New Zealand, with only the agencies’ names changed. Israel models its spy services on Britain and possesses its Security Agency (SHABAK in Hebrew) for domestic intelligence, which cooperates with the national police if cases lead to arrests. Germany, too, follows this model with the mouthful Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) to monitor spies, terrorists, and extremists inside the country, while the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) makes arrests when needed.
In many ways, this is a better arrangement, and not just because it provides an added layer of protection to civil liberties. Americans seldom ponder it, but it may not be a wise idea to blend the spy-cop mission as the FBI does and always has. Moreover, allowing your domestic intelligence agency to focus solely on spying, instead of working as police simultaneously, may lead to more efficient counterintelligence and counterterrorism operations. Contrary to TV and movies, most domestic spy operations stop short of arrest, for good reason.
This became an issue in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, when it was apparent that the FBI had dropped some balls in counterterrorism. This had something to do with the fact that in the 1990s, its fast-track agents went into catching bank robbers and other criminals, not domestic intelligence, which after the Cold War became a career backwater. Arrests, especially high-profile ones, led to Bureau awards and promotions, while hush-hush successes in domestic intelligence—which may not lead to any arrests—didn’t necessarily.
After 9/11, the FBI’s national security work got a big boost in money, people and prestige, and for more than a decade, catching terrorists is where the Bureau’s fast-movers gravitated. However, counterintelligence suffered, as was demonstrated by the FBI’s lackluster performance in its inquiry into the Trump campaign’s links to Russia. Contrary to Trumpian complaints about an overly aggressive Bureau trampling on civil liberties, the FBI’s slow-moving 2016 counterintelligence investigation of Team Trump, memorably termed CROSSFIRE HURRICANE, in fact was stymied by insufficient resources, bureaucratic dysfunction and excessive caution.
In the early-aughts, when Congress investigated our Intelligence Community to ensure the painful lessons of 9/11 were learned, taking the domestic intelligence mission away from the FBI was briefly pondered, but the idea never got much traction inside the Beltway. The creation of a stand-alone domestic spy agency was resisted mightily by the FBI for turf reasons. Suggestions, particularly by some in American counterintelligence, to remake our spy system more like our Five Eyes partners’, thus faded by the end of George W. Bush’s first term. This is regrettable, since had the FBI been taken out of the espionage business, and left to focus on federal law enforcement, we would not have the awkward mess that is causing so much chaos in Washington, D.C. right now, and Trump would not have the FBI as his Twitter whipping boy.
In the aftermath of KremlinGate, there will surely be post-mortems and perhaps full-fledged Congressional investigations of what went wrong—and how not to repeat the events of 2016, when Russian spies and lies subverted our democracy. Without any insult to the men and women of the FBI, the overwhelming majority of whom are hard-working patriots, recasting American domestic intelligence along the lines of our closest security partners needs to be on the table for serious consideration.
John Schindler is a security expert and former National Security Agency analyst.