Grassley ‘thrilled’ that Trump is ‘abolishing this wasteful and ineffective office’
President Donald Trump has shut down a little-known Pentagon office that paid more than $1 million to an FBI source who spied on the Trump campaign as part of its 2016 investigation into Trump’s links to Russia.
The Department of Defense announced Thursday it is “restructuring” the Office of Net Assessment, an internal Pentagon think tank that studies long-term geopolitical military trends.
“As part of the Department’s ongoing commitment to strengthening our national defense, the Secretary of Defense has directed the disestablishment of the Office of Net Assessment (ONA) and the development of a plan to rebuild it in alignment with the Department’s strategic priorities,” said Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell. Parnell said employees of the office will be “reassigned to mission-critical roles.”
The move comes after Sen. Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa), the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, voiced concerns to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth about ONA’s budget and its links to Crossfire Hurricane, the FBI counterintelligence probe into the 2016 Trump campaign’s purported ties to Russia.
ONA paid more than $1 million between 2012 and 2017 to Stefan Halper, a professor and former White House official who served as an FBI confidential source beginning in 2011. In 2016, the FBI tasked Halper to meet with multiple Trump campaign aides as part of Crossfire Hurricane.
Halper used the guise of his ONA gig to cozy up to Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos, an early target of the FBI probe. In September 2016, Halper offered Papadopoulos $3,000 to write a report for an ONA assessment about the Middle East. Halper, a longtime professor at Cambridge University, paid Papadopoulos’s travel expenses and lodging in London. Halper introduced Papadopoulos on that trip to Azra Turk, an undercover FBI agent who Halper claimed was his research assistant.
But it was all a ploy to elicit information from Papadopoulos about the campaign. Halper plied Papadopoulos with questions about Russia and the Trump campaign, according to FBI recordings of the conversations. During the meetings, Papadopoulos said he had no links to the Russian government and had no knowledge of Russian hacks of the DNC during the summer of 2016. But Halper, who served in the Ford and Reagan administrations, bragged about his connections to Russian intelligence officers, according to a transcript of the recording. As part of his work for the ONA, Halper developed a relationship with Vyacheslav Trubnikov, the former head of Russia’s foreign intelligence service, the SVR.
Federal investigators ultimately found no evidence that the Trump campaign conspired with Russia in 2016. A Department of Justice inspector general report released in 2019 found that the FBI admonished Halper in 2011 for his “aggressiveness” and “questionable allegiance” to a target of an FBI investigation.
ONA has denied that it paid Halper in his role as an FBI source. But the office acknowledged that it provided lax oversight of Halper and other contractors. According to Grassley, the office “could not provide sufficient documentation that Professor Halper conducted all of his work in accordance with applicable laws and regulations.”
Grassley cheered Trump’s decision on Thursday.
“Praise the Lord. This wise move saves American taxpayers over 20 million dollars a year,” he said.
“After years raising Cain about the Office of Net Assessment’s failure to strengthen our national defense and its rampant abuse of taxpayer dollars, I’m thrilled to hear the news that President Trump is abolishing this wasteful and ineffective office.”
