Is this the FBI informant who 'spied' on the Trump campaign? US academic with links to the CIA and MI6 who met with three advisers of the president in 2016 while investigating Russian collusion is named as the source

An American academic who met with the President's advisers in 2016 could have been an FBI informant for its probe into the Trump campaign’s alleged collusion with Russian, reports suggest.

Both the Times and Washington Post have reported that the FBI made use of a US-born academic working in the UK as an informant, and that he met with Carter Page and George Papadopoulos, two Trump aides suspected of dealing with the Russians.

This came after the Daily Caller reported that both Page and Papadopoulos met in 2016 with an American professor at Cambridge University, which it named as Stefan Halper. He asked several questions about Russia which prompted suspicions. 

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Stefan Halper is a Cambridge Academic and has been named in several reports as an FBI informant on the Trump campaign. He is pictured in an undated image speaking at the Oxford Union debating society

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 Talk of an alleged informant has angered President Trump, who is pictured speaking at a round table event in Washington on May 16

Papadopoulos revealed in a plea agreement to having been told by an apparent Russian agent that the Putin government had access to a raft of hacked Hillary Clinton emails before this was made public. He has since pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI.

Page, meanwhile, was under surveillance by the FBI at the time he met with Professor Halper, who had links to both the CIA and MI6.

Papadopoulos first met Halper after the academic invited him to England in September 2016 to discuss energy issues, two sources familiar with his account told NBC News.

The Trump aide found Halper's behavior during these meetings suspicious, the sources said, and also noticed that the academic’s young assistant appeared to flirt with him both during and after the exchanges.