Confidential human sources is the official name for spies, I’ll provide a few examples.
Realclear politics.
While Washington pols and pundits angrily debate who counts as a spy, and whether any such exotic creatures have ever been employed by the FBI, new evidence is emerging that the FBI not only uses spies, but has done so extensively, including in the Trump-Russia investigation.
On Thursday, CNN host John Berman
asked former FBI general counsel James Baker: “Did the FBI spy on the Trump campaign as the attorney general suggested?” Baker didn’t initially say no, but rather objected that the word “spy” has negative connotations.
Baker then seemed to switch the question from whether spying occurred to its intent, saying: “There was no intention by myself or anybody else I’m aware of to intrude or do activities with respect to the campaign.” Then he continued his sentence with a clause that significantly modified even that claim. There was no intrusion of the Trump campaign, he said, done “in order to gather political intelligence to find out what the political strategies were.” The FBI was only interested in what the campaign was up to regarding Russia.
There’s a very big difference between saying “I didn’t spy” and saying “I didn’t spy for inappropriate reasons.” The former is a denial, the latter is all but an admission. Baker asserted there was no spying done to gather information on Trump’s campaign strategies. Which could very well mean there was spying, just not any for the narrow reason given.
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Spying for Citizenship: An FBI Deal for Muslim Informants
In 2006, then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales laid out guidelines for the FBI's use of "confidential human sources," also known as informants.
His directives, which are still in force today, prohibit the FBI from recruiting informants through the promise of help on residency or immigration status.
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/takeaway/segments/spying-citizenship-deal-offer-fbi-informants