While it may not be the government’s business to inquire whether a political party is paying for propaganda, it sure the heck is its business to ensure the CIA and FBI aren’t.
It’s long been known that Stefan Halper served as a confidential human source (CHS) for the FBI. Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report on Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) abuse, while not identifying Halper by name, added many details concerning his extensive role in spying on the Trump campaign: Halper secretly recorded several conversations with Trump campaign advisors Carter Page and George Papadopoulos and, more troublingly, the FBI tasked Halper to tape an extensive conversation with Sam Clovis—a co-chair of the Trump presidential campaign.
Publicly available information on government contracts also reveal that Halper received hundreds of thousands of dollars for four projects he completed for the Department of Defense’s Office of Net Assessments. As part of his oversight responsibilities as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Sen. Chuck Grassley has raised concerns about the merits of those contracts and further questioned whether Halper “used any taxpayer money in his attempt to recruit Trump campaign officials as sources.”
Grassley has yet to receive answers to his questions. And it remains unknown which Trump campaign officials Halper “attempt[ed] to recruit as sources,” as the IG report—or at least the unredacted portions of that report—make no mention of such efforts.
Something Grassley hasn’t probed, however, but merits further investigation is whether Halper received further funding from the Department of Defense “off-the-books” or through some pass-through conduits. Publicly available information suggests Halper had done so in the past.
Specifically, a syllabus for the intelligence seminar at the University of Cambridge where Halper taught alongside the former head of MI6, Richard Dearlove, listed Halper as leading a discussion of “The Afghan End Game.” And the summary of Halper’s scheduled October 7, 2011, seminar presentation noted that he had “recently completed a major survey of Allied end game options in Afghanistan for the then Secretary of Defense Robert Gates.”
But a search for contracts awarded to Halper revealed only the four contracts Grassley inquired about, and the oldest contract awarded Halper had a start date of May 2012. A search of all available fiscal years, which dated back to 2008, revealed no hits for Halper in 2011 or earlier—the time period a contract would have been issued for his research project on Afghanistan. These facts suggest not all of Halper’s work for our government was captured in the contracting databases.
Of course, one wouldn’t expect the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to disclose its agents and sources publicly. But that didn’t stop “people familiar with the matter” from leaking to the Washington Post that “the professor”—easily identified as Halper from the details included in the Post’s article—had served as a source for both the FBI and the CIA.
Halper’s past relationship with the CIA highlights yet another possible task master for the 76-year-old during the 2016 election and raises the question of whether Halper was working for the CIA or another intelligence agency before the FBI brought him on as a CHS in early August 2016. The IG report’s conclusion that the FBI had not used any confidential human sources prior to the launch of Crossfire Hurricane on July 31, 2016, indicates Halper had another boss before then, because Halper first engaged with Page at a small dinner gathering at Magdalene College in Cambridge on July 10, 2016.
But additional facts raise still another possibility: that Halper was working with the Clinton campaign at this time:
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