Judicial Watch digs for 'spy' link to Trump campaign

A watchdog organization known for keeping an eye on the federal government has filed a lawsuit seeking information about a former Bush administration official who is suspected of spying on the Trump campaign in 2016.

Judicial Watch has filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Department of Defense seeking information about a September 2016 contract between that agency and Stefan Halper.

Halper, a Cambridge University professor, has been identified as a secret FBI informant used by the Obama administration to spy on President Trump's presidential campaign. He served as an assistant secretary of state under George W. Bush and reportedly has high-level ties to both U.S. and British intelligence.

Sean Dunagan, a senior investigator for Judicial Watch, says Halper received more than $1 million in government contracts between 2012 and 2018 from the Office of Net Assessment, a small Defense Department unit known as the Pentagon's think tank,

"And we can't really find what those contracts are for," says Dunagan. "But around the time of the last presidential election, Halper met with George Papadopoulos, with Carter Page, with Sam Clovis in the Trump campaign, and really tried to get information particularly from George Papadopoulos about potential Russian hacking of Hillary Clinton emails."

At the same time, Halper received more $400,000 in another contract.

"So the lawsuit that we just filed is really to find out what this $400,000 got us," Dunagan advises, "and whether there was any connection between that contract and the work that Halper was doing as an informant spying on the Trump campaign."

Americans want to know, says the Judicial Watch investigator, if the Defense Department was working with the FBI, DOJ and other Obama agencies to spy on Donald Trump.