A top Republican senator wants to know if an FBI informant used taxpayer money to recruit sources from within President Trump’s 2016 campaign.
Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, wrote to the Defense Department’s Office of Net Assessment this week asking for confirmation that funds from Pentagon contracts awarded to Stefan Halper were not used for the FBI’s investigation into a possible criminal conspiracy between the Trump camp and Russia.
Halper is a former Republican operative and White House aide who became a foreign policy academic with close ties to both U.S. and British intelligence. He had discussions with at least three Trump campaign members: foreign policy aides George Papadopoulos and Carter Page and Trump campaign co-chairman Sam Clovis.
Grassley, who for months has been pressing the Defense Department for records on all contracts rewarded to Halper in the summer of 2019, wrote to Director James Baker: “Given Professor Halper’s intelligence connections and government funding, it is reasonable to ask whether he used any taxpayer money in his attempt to recruit Trump campaign officials as sources.”
Grassley cited a June 2018 Washington Post report, which identified Halper as an FBI source, that indicated that Halper offered Papadopoulos $3,000 for assistance in completing an energy study and met Page at a Cambridge conference.
The senator’s letter, which goes beyond just Halper, asks for five years’ worth of data on ONA contracts, including details on its purposes, costs, and efforts to ensure proper oversight and compliance. Halper was rewarded more than $1 million in contracts from ONA since 2012.
In one of the contracts, awarded in September 2015, Halper listed former Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Trubnikov as a consultant and adviser in a paper he gave to the ONA. Grassley said Trubnikov was a source for British ex-spy Christopher Steele, whose unverified dossier was used by the FBI to obtain Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants to wiretap Page. In an order made public on Thursday, the FISA court revealed that the Justice Department found at least two of the four surveillance orders targeting Page lacked sufficient predication.
“It is unclear from the contracting officer file whether professor Halper paid Trubnikov for his assistance in gathering information for this paper or in what capacity professor Halper interacted with Trubnikov during the course of performing work for this contract,” Grassley wrote. The senator asked in his letter for confirmation on whether Halper disclosed his relationship with Trubnikov to the ONA and whether that suggests biased or unreliable information in his study on the Russia-China relationship.
Grassley’s letter, which copies Defense Secretary Mark Esper and acting Defense Department Inspector General Glenn Fine, gives a Feb. 5 deadline to respond to his list of questions on the ONA’s contracting practices.
A Defense Department representative did not immediately provide comment for this report.
When Halper’s role as an FBI informant was leaked to the media in May 2018, it led to accusations from Trump and Republicans in Congress that the Obama administration used Halper as part of an illegal effort to spy on the Trump campaign, dubbed “Spygate” by allies of the president. In a lawsuit brought by a Russian-born British citizen, Halper denied working with the FBI to overthrow Trump, but he neither confirmed nor denied being a bureau informant.
The FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into ties between the Trump campaign and Russia was wrapped into special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. His investigation, which concluded in the spring of 2019, did not establish any criminal conspiracy between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign.
