Former Trump campaign aide Roger Stone told the Washington Post that he met with a Russian named Henry Greenberg. who offered to sell the Trump campaign dirt on Hillary Clinton for $2 million.
Stone was introduced to Greenberg by another Trump aide, Michael Caputo. Stone rejected the offer and forgot about the incident.
Who is “Henry Greenberg”? Both Stone and Caputo believe him to be an FBI informant.
Both Stone and Caputo, who did not reveal the interaction to congressional investigators, alleged that the man, who called himself Henry Greenberg, was a FBI informant.
The Post reported that records do not indicate that Greenberg was a FBI informant. Documents do show that he has stated that he worked as an informant for the agency in the past, but that he said he stopped working with the FBI after 2013.
Greenberg denied to the Post that he was working on behalf of the FBI during the meeting.
“If you believe that [Greenberg] took time off from his long career as an FBI informant to reach out to us in his spare time, I have a bridge in Brooklyn that I want to sell you,” Caputo told the Post.
Both former campaign aides told the newspaper they did not bring up the meeting during their testimony before the House Intelligence Committee because they forgot about the incident.
The men said they remembered the encounter after Caputo was shown past text messages about the meeting during a May 2 interview.
The explanation for why they didn’t tell Congress about the meeting with Greenberg could easily be true. Campaigns are approached constantly by people trying to sell dirt. Most, like Greenberg’s offer, are ridiculous and quickly forgotten.
But was he an FBI plant looking to entrap Trump campaign officials into purchasing dirt? Here’s how the Post describes Greenberg and his federal law enforcement connections.
Stone and Caputo, who did not previously disclose the meeting to congressional investigators, now say they believe they were the targets of a setup by U.S. law enforcement officials hostile to Trump.
They cite records — independently examined by The Post — showing that the man who approached Stone is actually a Russian national who has claimed to work as an FBI informant.
Interviews and additional documents show that Greenberg has at times used the name Henry Oknyansky. Under that name, he claimed in a 2015 court filing related to his immigration status that he had provided information to the FBI for 17 years. He attached records showing that the government had granted him special permission to enter the United States because his presence represented a “significant public benefit.”
There is no evidence that Greenberg was working with the FBI in his interactions with Stone, and in his court filing, Greenberg said that he had stopped his FBI cooperation sometime after 2013.
Greenberg, in text messages with The Post, denied that he had been acting on the FBI’s behalf when he met with Stone.
The Post claims the meeting between Stone and Greenberg took place two months before the bureau decided to conduct a counterintelligence operation against the Trump campaign. Does that mean that Greenberg could not have been an informant? Of course not. Given his 17-year association with the bureau as an informant, he might have been sent to feel out the Trump campaign and see if it was worth going after them.
The sole reason this story is “news” is that Greenberg is a Russian. The Post doesn’t claim that Greenberg has any connections to to the Russian government, Russian oligarchs, the Russian mob, or even the Russian ballet, although he apparently married an actress. He’s one of 200 million people who say they are Russian, and yet because he met with dirty trickster Roger Stone, it’s suggestive of Russian collusion with the Trump campaign?
I call bullcrap on that.
The paranoia on the left about anyone meeting with Russians is far worse than the 1950s anti-Russian hysteria of the John Birch Society, the Committee on Un-American Activities, and the “Blacklist” put together.
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