Is the FBI Informant a Spy? It Depends on Your Media Outlet

The FBI dispatched a Cambridge professor to gather information from Trump campaign advisers suspected of ties to Russian meddling in the 2016 election. Was he an informant, or a spy?

Depends on who you ask. And the distinction has become a pedantic linchpin in the fight between President Donald Trump‘s media defenders and detractors.

The spat began with a New York Times report revealing that an anonymous FBI informant, elsewhere identified as professor Stefan Halper, spoke to junior Trump campaign staffers, including George Papadopoulos and Carter Page.

Trump’s media backers, used to spinning any semblance of impropriety in the Russia probe into full blown conspiracies to tout on Hannity, ran with the news: Obama’s FBI spied on the Trump campaign, possibly for nefarious political purposes.

The president agreed. Picking up on their comments, Trump declared a “major SPY scandal.”

The “SPY” designation was a branding ploy, according to an AP report: “Trump told one ally this week that he wanted ‘to brand’ the informant a ‘spy,’ believing the more nefarious term would resonate more in the media and with the public.”

The New York Times and other outlets struck back with fact-checks of Trump’s claims. “F.B.I. Used Informant to Investigate Russia Ties to Campaign, Not to Spy, as Trump Claims,” a Times headline declared, unequivocally. The piece acknowledged there was an “FBI informant” who spoke to campaign advisers, but argued: “No evidence has emerged that the informant acted improperly… or that agents veered from the F.B.I.’s investigative guidelines and began a politically motivated inquiry, which would be illegal.”

For Trump’s defenders — including the likes of Mollie Hemingway at The Federalist and Tucker Carlson at Fox News — that was a laughable distinction without a difference. An “FBI informant” dispatched to glean information from Trump campaign staffers… is a spy, and to suggest otherwise is a lame attempt at covering up “deep state” wrongdoing.

In a tweet published Friday morning, Trump quoted Hemingway, who appeared on Carlson’s Fox News show the night before:

“Everyone knows there was a Spy, and in fact the people who were involved in the Spying are admitting that there was a Spy…Widespread Spying involving multiple people.” Mollie Hemingway, The Federalist Senior Editor But the corrupt Mainstream Media hates this monster story!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 25, 2018

In the Fox News segment, which you can watch above, Carlson lamented: “There are still news outlets as of tonight that are pretending that there was no spying on the Trump campaign.”

Hemingway, chief copywriter for Trump’s SPYGATE branding agency, replied:

“Everyone knows there was a spy, and in fact people who were involved in the spying are admitting that there was a spy. They’re saying though that because the government term is ‘human intelligence informant’ or something like that, that therefore it’s not a spy.”

“Whereas normal Americans understand that when you are gathering information on someone surreptitiously, that’s the common definition of spying,” she added.

As far as Hemingway’s claims that “people who were involved in the spying are admitting there was a spy,” she, like Trump, is misconstruing comments made by James Clapper on The View.

Even Republicans present at the Justice Department briefing on the FBI informant are not referring to Halper as a spy. “A confidential informant is not a spy,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said, when asked about the briefing by Hugh Hewitt.

But what of Hemingway’s central claim that Halper’s actions fall under the “common definition of spying”?

Here’s the Oxford Dictionary definition of “spying”: to “work for a government or other organization by secretly obtaining information about enemies or competitors.” Merriam-Webster’s definition is similar: “to watch secretly usually for hostile purposes.”

(Notice the emphasis, and it’s obvious why Trump thought it would be more effective to brand Halper as “spy” than “informant.”)

Hemingway, even in her best efforts to find and exploit wrongdoing in the Russia probe, has yet to provide any evidence that the Trump campaign was seen as an “enemy” by the FBI, nor that it was probed for “hostile purposes” — thus failing to clear the Oxford and Webster bars for spy.

Halper’s work, as the Washington Post‘s Philip Bump writes, was (as far as we know) fairly limited:

[Halper] apparently contacted two Trump campaign advisers, Carter Page and George Papadopoulos, in 2016 to seek out information for the FBI. Halper’s outreach came only after the FBI was already focused on Page and Papadopoulos, and at no point was he directly involved in the Trump campaign itself. Nor were Page and Papadopoulos high-ranking staffers; when Papadopoulos was first wrapped up in the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, he was disparaged as a ‘coffee boy.’

So what is it, informant or spy? Given our definitions and the available evidence, “informant” seems far more accurate.

For now, it’s prudent to ignore Trump’s pleas to make “SpyGate” happen until there’s actual evidence supporting the claim that the FBI targeted his campaign for reasons other than its highly suspicious ties to Russia.

[image via screengrab]