Former Trump campaign aide Michael Caputo revealed Tuesday on Fox News that he was approached in May 2016 with an offer for Hillary Clinton-related emails from a former U.S. government contractor.
The former contractor, from a U.S. government agency Caputo refrained from naming, had contacted a friend of Caputo’s on May 6, 2016, and told him the agency had emails and wanted to get them to the Trump campaign.
The friend notified Caputo on May 9, 2016, of the offer.
“It was a former contractor for that agency who said that actual staff members of the agency had Hillary Clinton-related emails,” he added.
He said both he and his friend took the emails to mean the ones that Clinton had acknowledged deleting because she said they were not work-related.
Caputo said he did not think accepting the emails was a good idea and turned down the offer, and he never told anyone on the Trump campaign.
“By the time the 16th of May came around, I came to the conclusion that I did not want to take possession of these emails, I thought they might be classified documents, and I urged through the intermediary that the people of the government organization do it through a proper whistleblower process,” he said.
“I never revealed this conversation to anyone at the Trump campaign – I was uncomfortable talking about it, and I then broke off contact with that government organization representative,” he said.
Caputo said he was frightened by the prospect of taking custody of the emails.
“I didn’t want to be involved in bringing in this kind of information,” he said. “It became very frightening for me … I thought it could be a crime to take them into my own custody.”
Caputo said after he left the campaign on June 20, 2016, the contractor reached out to his friend again and tried to get him interested in the emails.
Caputo said he has told the House Intelligence and Senate Intelligence Committees about the offer, as well as the special counsel team led by Robert Mueller.
Caputo said the Mueller team “never reached out” to his friend to check on the information, or to the contractor.
Caputo said his friend is willing to go on the record “at the right time.”
“But he wants to be on the record, he’s willing to talk to Fox, and he and I were both kind of amazed that we were getting this kind of a contact from a government organization,” Caputo said.
Caputo’s revelation comes after recent news that an FBI informant had approached former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page on July 11, 2016.
A Ph.D. student connected to the informant invited Page, in June 2016, to a symposium in London that was taking place on July 11-12, 2016.
The informant, who has been identified as Cambridge University professor Stefan Halper by various news outlets, including the Washington Post, approached Page.
That outreach took place before the FBI said they received information from an Australian ambassador to the United Kingdom that prompted them to launch their investigation of the Trump campaign.
Halper also approached Trump campaign advisers Sam Clovis and George Papadopoulos. He asked Papadopoulos repeatedly about Russian hacks of emails, and reportedly got increasingly irritated when Papadopoulos said he did not know anything about the emails.
Caputo said Monday night on Fox News’s Ingraham Angle that the former government contractor was a “second government informant.”
He also revealed the agency was not the FBI, but a different agency. He did, however, suggest it was somehow connected to former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.
“When we finally find out the truth about this, Director Clapper and the rest of them will be wearing some orange suits,” he said.
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