By Matt Palumbo and Dan Bongino

As the spygate scandal unraveled early last year, “Stefan Halper” is a name that wouldn’t stop popping up.

Having previously been involved in a CIA spying scandal in the 1980s, Halper got another spy gig in the 2016 election in which he attempted to infiltrate the Trump campaign. In a prior article I extensively detailed Halper’s involvement in trying to entrap various Trump campaign team members.

Even after the election, Halper pitched himself as an ambassador to China for the Trump team after his presidential victory. In other words, even after Trump’s victory, a spy was nearly embedded within the Trump team.

Thanks to recently released notes from an interview the State Department’s Kathleen Kavalec had with dossier author Christopher Steele, a possible bombshell connection between Halper and the dossier has been uncovered. As discussed earlier in the week on the podcast, those notes also demonstrate Steele failing to keep his story straight between the State Department and FBI, proving how unreliable he is.

In Kavalec’s handwritten notes from their interview she makes note of two of Steele’s dossier sources; “Trubnikov” and “Surkov.”

Surkov is Vladislav Surkov, an aide of Vladimir Putin who is on the U.S.’s list of sanctioned individuals, and Trubnikov is Vyacheslav Trubnikov, who is currently the First Deputy of Foreign Minister of Russia and formally served as the Director of Foreign Intelligence Service.

Interestingly, Trubnikov is an associate of Halper. As Sara Carter reported back in August of 2018:

Halper… left the Cambridge Intelligence Seminar in December 2016, saying he was concerned about Russian influence. Halper had told reporters at the time that it was due to “unacceptable Russian influence.” Ironically, documents obtained by SaraACarter.com suggest that Halper also had invited senior Russian intelligence officials to co-teach his course on several occasions and, according to news reports, also accepted money to finance the course from a top Russian oligarch with ties to Putin. Several course syllabi from 2012 and 2015 obtained by this outlet reveal Hapler had invited and co-taught his course on intelligence with the former Director of Russian Intelligence Gen. Vladimir I. Trubnikov.

While Carter has his name as “Vladimir” not “Vyacheslav,” this is indeed the same individual. Carter’s article continues:

On May 4, 2012, the course syllabus states, “Ambassador Vladimir I. Trubnikov will comment on the challenges faced while directing the Foreign Intelligence Service, his tenure as Ambassador to India, President Putin and the likely course of Russia’s relations with Britain and the U.S.” In May 2015, Trubnikov returned to teach with Halper at his seminar in Cambridge on “current relations between the Russian Federation and the West.”

Clearly the two have a working relationship.

Stefan Halper had cozied up to three Trump campaign advisers, Carter Page, Sam Clovis, and George Papadopoulos in an attempt to garner damning information from them. The FBI would (falsely) claim one of those men (Papadopoulos) was the reason they began investigating the Trump campaign in the first place, while they obtaining a FISA to spy on another (Page).

Halper’s tentacles keep popping up everywhere in the spygate scandal – would it really be all too surprising if Halper was feeding Steele (bogus) information through Trubnikov? I’d say not.

Now we know where the real Russian collusion was.