The Obama administration paid accused informant Stefan Halper nearly $300,000 for “research” during the 2016 presidential election when Donald Trump was the GOP candidate.
Overall, Halper, who was recently accused of spying on multiple Trump campaign aides, was paid over $1 million by the Dept. of Defense between 2012 and 2018 through a variety of vaguely worded contracts.
The contracts include “Research And Development In The Social Sciences And Humanities (2012),” “Russia-China Relationship Study (2015),” and the “India and China Econ Study (2016),” according to the web site USASpending.gov.
Most interestingly, Halper was paid $282,295 only four days after the Sept. 23, 2016, Yahoo! news article which claimed that “U.S. intelligence officials” were investigating Trump aide Carter Page for alleged ties to the Kremlin.
It was later determined that the article’s author, Michael Isikoff, was fed information by “Pissgate” dossier creator Christopher Steele, which put the article’s credibility into question.
It’s plausible that Steele wasn’t the lone source Isikoff used for his article, and the FBI later used Yahoo! article and the Steele dossier to obtain a questionable FISA warrant to spy on the Trump campaign, even though the article was also based on the dossier.
During the campaign, Halper went out of his way to talk to Page, and had even claimed he was friends with Paul Manafort, even though they hadn’t seen each other since the 1970s.
According to the Daily Caller:
Page noted that in their first conversation at Cambridge, Halper said he was longtime friends with then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort. A person close to Manafort told TheDCNF that Manafort has not seen Halper since the Gerald Ford administration. Manafort and Page are accused in the Steele dossier of having worked together on the campaign’s collusion conspiracy, but both men say they have never met.
The Justice Dept.’s Inspector General has launched an investigation into the matter.
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