by Chuck Ross, The Daily Caller:

• A former U.S. government official is threatening to expose the activities of Stefan Halper, an FBI source who cozied up to several Trump campaign advisers as part of Crossfire Hurricane. 


• President Trump coined the term “Spygate” in 2018 following revelations that the FBI used Halper to gather intelligence on Carter Page and George Papadopoulos.


• Steven Schrage, who served in the Bush administration, says that Halper delayed his Ph.D. work at Cambridge in order to use him to help research Trump associates.  


• Schrage invited Page to the Cambridge event in July 2016 where the Trump aide first met Halper. 

A former U.S. government official who studied at the University of Cambridge under FBI informant Stefan Halper says he has the goods to expose “Spygate,” the term that President Donald Trump coined for the intelligence-gathering activities against his campaign.

Steven Schrage, who served as a deputy assistant secretary of state in former President George W. Bush’s administration, alleges that Halper used his position at Cambridge to force him to research Trump associates in 2016 under the guise of working on his dissertation.

“I definitely believe he used his position of power to keep me silent and stretch out my research as well as having me research things to support his activities,” Schrage told the Daily Caller News Foundation of Halper.

“I believe that beyond a shadow of a doubt and have hard evidence supporting it.”

Schrage, who worked on his Cambridge Ph.D. from 2013 through 2019, first came forward to discuss Halper on Sunday in an essay and an appearance on Fox’s “Sunday Morning Futures.”

Schrage said he plans to release information about Halper and other Cambridge luminaries, including former MI6 chief Richard Dearlove. He said he believes that the “real smoking gun” in the Trump intelligence operation is what went on at Cambridge.

In his essay, Schrage teased information from August 2016 that “should have immediately ended their investigation alleging Page was a master spy linking top Trump officials to Putin.” At that point in time, the FBI was ramping up its Crossfire Hurricane investigation into several Trump campaign aides, including Carter Page, George Papadopoulos and Michael Flynn.

A Justice Department inspector general’s report said that FBI agents first met with Halper on Aug. 10, 2016 to discuss using him in the Trump probe. The report said that Halper covertly recorded Page during a meeting in Virginia on Aug. 20, 2016. He taped Papadopoulos during multiple meetings in London in mid-September 2016.

Schrage has so far been hesitant to provide specific dates or documents that will shed light on his interactions with Halper, though he says to stay tuned.

“There is a lot more information that will be coming out,” he told the DCNF in a phone interview.

Schrage is who organized the July 2016 political conference where Carter Page first met Halper, he says.

His involvement in setting up the forum, which Madeleine Albright, former President Bill Clinton’s secretary of state also attended, has led to speculation that Schrage worked with Halper to lure Page over to England as part of an FBI spy operation. (RELATED: EXCLUSIVE: Cambridge Prof With MI6, CIA Ties Met With Trump Aides During Campaign, Beyond)

Schrage’s sudden apparition in the press has also stoked skepticism among some Trump supporters who have questioned why he laid low for more than two years after Halper was outed as an FBI informant.

Schrage says that he remained out of the spotlight so that he would not tip Halper and others off to the information that he had.

“Talking would have helped me and my family avoid smears, but hurt the mission of catching those behind it,” he says.

Schrage denies knowing that Halper was serving as an FBI informant until 2018, when Halper was identified as a confidential human source (CHS) for the bureau. Schrage’s invitation to Page was reported soon after Halper was outed.

“I had no idea he was spying on Trump officials,” Schrage told the DCNF of Halper. “By every indication he was doing all this to revive his own career by ingratiating himself to the Trump team, which it now seems clear that he was, just for a hidden purpose.”

Schrage says that he invited Page to Cambridge in order to have someone from the Trump campaign represented at the Cambridge forum.

Page, who is releasing a memoir later this month, has told the DCNF that he maintained contact with Schrage after the Cambridge seminar. He has also said he does not believe that Schrage was involved in Halper’s work for the FBI.

Schrage has released some evidence showing that Halper displayed interest in Flynn. He aired audio on “Sunday Morning Futures” of a conversation he said he had with Halper on Jan. 10, 2017 discussing Flynn’s future role in the Trump administration.

According to Schrage, Halper told him that Flynn was “fucked” and that he didn’t think Flynn was “going to be around long.”

Read More @ DailyCaller.com