The swiftness with which the media have brushed aside Stefan Halper’s role in the Russia investigation should be a sign that he’s certainly more important than they’re admitting.

Halper was identified by the Daily Caller's Chuck Ross last weekend as the professor who worked in some still-unknown capacity to inform the FBI on the Trump campaign in 2016 as part of the agency’s probe of Russia’s election meddling.

Halper met with at least three of then-candidate Donald Trump’s campaign advisers, and records show he was paid nearly $300,000 by the Defense Department in September 2016.

No one in the Trump campaign knew that Halper was a longtime source of information for the FBI, thus he was effectively acting as a spy. National news outlets are refusing to make that connection or are attempting to minimize Halper as a factor altogether.

Washington Post foreign affairs columnist David Ignatius on Tuesday dismissed Halper as a mere “middleman” and chalked up his relationship with the FBI as similar to what other “underemployed ex-professors” might do.

Yes, survey your old college instructors and you’re just bound to find a few of them "underemployed" and passing time as secret agent men!

“[I]t’s laughable to imagine Halper as a superspy, infiltrating the heart of the Trump campaign,” Ignatius wrote. "[H]e likes to gossip, and perhaps that made him a good intelligence source. But this is not James Bond.”

If Halper is just the Nutty Professor, Ignatius might want to ask his own paper why it initially declined to publish his name, even when its reporters already knew it.

The Post reported on March 18 that the paper had “confirmed the identity of the FBI source who assisted the investigation” but that it would not name him “following warnings from U.S. intelligence officials that exposing him could endanger him or his contacts.”

In a separate report the previous day, the Post said that "the stakes are so high" for Halper, who was still anonymous at the time, "that the FBI has been working over the past two weeks to mitigate the potential damage if the source’s identity is revealed" and that the FBI "is taking steps to protect other live investigations that the person has worked on and is trying to lessen any danger to associates if the informant’s identity becomes known ..."

Halper’s anonymity was so crucial that “exposing him could endanger him” before, but once he was identified, he became Professor Plum.

The New York Times in its own reporting last week declined to name Halper because, the paper explained, it “typically does not name informants to preserve their safety.”

And yet, in that same report, the Times insisted that despite Trump asserting that his campaign was spied on (it was), Halper was an “informant” and his clandestine overtures to the campaign were "not to spy, as Trump claims."

Why did he need safety if he’s not a spy but just an “informant”?

The distinction itself is absurd with the media insisting there’s a difference while refusing to explain what it is.

I asked the Times on Tuesday to explain its reasoning to dispute Trump’s characterization of Halper as a spy but a spokeswoman said they were “not going to comment.”

Chris Cuomo on CNN’s “New Day” described Halper as a “confidential source, who apparently contacted people in the [Trump] campaign” but challenged Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, to produce evidence of spying.

Hey, I took money from your purse but prove to me that I robbed you.

When Jordan referred to the Times report on Halper’s activity with the FBI, Cuomo interrupted to note that he was never described by the paper “as a spy.”

This would be like describing Cuomo as a “newsman who leads a morning program on CNN.” A normal person would go, ”Why didn’t you just call him a TV anchor?”

Because, you fool! I never said anchor! He’s only a newsman who leads a cable show!

We don’t know everything about Halper. But we know he was a spy.