Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper admitted Thursday that he was not aware of any FBI moles embedded in the Trump campaign until he read media reports about it.
Clapper appeared on the "The Hugh Hewitt Show" and spoke about a host of issues. Near the end of the interview, Hewitt asked him about an FBI informant that was tied in with the Trump campaign.
"No, I do not," Clapper said when asked if he knew Stefan Halper, a University of Cambridge scholar who fed information to the FBI from his post within the Trump campaign. "I didn't know anything about that until it came out in the media."
Clapper said he was familiar with Carter Page's, who briefly worked on the Trump campaign as an adviser and who was the subject of FBI surveillance, through media reports.
"None of these names, actually, when we left the scene in January of '17, I never heard of George Papadopoulos. Carter Page, I may have known about mainly through media, but, and certainly the identity of the informant, I didn’t know," Clapper said.
President Donald Trump has blasted reports that the FBI had at least one informant on his campaign. The FBI was surveilling certain members of the campaign as part of a larger probe of Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. election.
Since May 2017, the Department of Justice has been investigating whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to defeat Democrat Hillary Clinton.
Clapper said last month the FBI engaged with both the Trump and Clinton campaigns out of concerns that Russia was trying to influence the election outcome.
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