Ex-MI6 spy ran honeytrap op to snare Trump enemies
Sting targeted FBI agents and members of President’s government
A FORMER MI6 agent hired glamorous women to ensnare possible enemies of Donald Trump within his government, it has been claimed.
British ex-intelligence officer Richard Seddon allegedly co- ordinated the ‘honeytrap’ plot alongside a network of Trump activists and allies.
They targeted FBI agents, State Department staff and even Mr Trump’s former national security adviser, HR McMaster, it was reported.
An investigative journalist and a Russian reality TV star were said to be among the ‘undercover operatives’. Mr Seddon allegedly trained them to woo officials and record any disparaging comments about the then-president while on dates.
The ex-spy reportedly ran the operation out of an £8,000-a-month, six-bedroom home in a wealthy area of Washington between 2016 and 2018.
The plotters allegedly set up Texan gunloving journalist Tarah Price to target Mr McMaster, who later became a critic of the former president, at an Italian restaurant he frequented in the US capital.
They also recruited Anna Khait, a Russian-born former contestant on the US TV show Survivor, to get State Department employees to talk about their dislike of Mr
‘Offered thousands to set up big names’
Trump. Several of those behind the plot work for Project Veritas, a right-wing group that has carried out controversial sting operations against Democrats.
In a video on YouTube, Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe said an article detailing the honeytrap claims in the New York Times was a ‘hit piece filled with vapid supposition’.
He said Veritas did carry out a probe into officials and it ‘proudly stands behind its investigation into federal employees behaving badly’. There was no comment from Mr Seddon.
The plotters, it was claimed, hoped to obtain incriminating recordings to weed out members of the ‘deep state’ – meaning they believed a secret group of officials was working against Mr Trump.
Mr Seddon was recruited to Project Veritas in 2016 by ex-US Navy Seal Erik Prince and was said to have turned the ramshackle outfit into a fledgling spying operation. Women living at the Washington house were given code names such as ‘Tiger’ and told to get out of taxis far from the residence so nobody would know its location.
Mr McMaster became a target in 2017 after a report said that he called Mr Trump an ‘idiot’ during a private dinner. Mr Seddon allegedly recruited Miss Price and offered her thousands in cash to ‘go undercover and set up some big-name political figure’.
But the plot to record and use quotes against Mr McMaster was abandoned in March 2018 when he resigned after clashes in the White House. It is reportedly unclear if anyone in the White House was working on the plot but one woman involved said she was brought in by somebody ‘ with access to McMaster’s calendar’.
Pro-Trump Miss Khait, an ex-poker player, was reportedly asked to target State Department staff.
Insisting she had done nothing wrong, she tweeted yesterday: ‘It’s not illegal to investigate the people who are SUPPOSED to be transparent with the American people.’
Mr Prince founded private military company Blackwater, whose employees shot dead 17 Iraqi civilians in the 2007 Nisour Square massacre in Baghdad during the US-UK occupation. Four staff convicted over the slaughter were pardoned in 2020 by Mr Trump, to whom Mr Prince is an adviser.
Mr Prince and Miss Price were unavailable for comment.