{"id":1368886,"date":"2022-03-10T06:36:39","date_gmt":"2022-03-10T11:36:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1368886"},"modified":"2022-03-10T11:40:53","modified_gmt":"2022-03-10T16:40:53","slug":"the-curious-case-of-stefan-halper-longtime-zelig-of-american-scandals-who-crossfired-trump","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/the-curious-case-of-stefan-halper-longtime-zelig-of-american-scandals-who-crossfired-trump\/","title":{"rendered":"The Curious Case Of Stefan Halper, Longtime \u2018Zelig\u2019 Of American Scandals Who \u2018Crossfired\u2019 Trump"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">28<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fthe-curious-case-of-stefan-halper-longtime-zelig-of-american-scandals-who-crossfired-trump%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1368886&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><div><\/div>\n<p><span>In the late summer of 2016 Stefan A. Halper met with at least three of Donald Trump\u2019s associates in England and the United States, bragging about his friendship with Russian spies who \u201ccan be very helpful to us at this time.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>As they listened to his tales of foreign intrigue and promises of illegal foreign help, what George Papadopoulos, Carter Page and Sam Clovis did not know was that Halper was not who he said he was. He was, indeed, a spy, but his handler was not the Kremlin \u2013 it was the FBI. Armed with leading questions and on at least two occasions a hidden tape recorder, Halper had been tasked by the bureau with finding dirt on the Trump campaign.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Halper\u2019s undercover operation, which was documented in <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/interactive\/2019\/12\/09\/us\/politics\/fbi-ig-report-document.html\"><span>a report<\/span><\/a><span> by the Department of Justice\u2019s Inspector General, would prove largely a bust. Transcripts between Halper and Trump campaign officials would show that\u00a0 none of them took the bait, or appeared to otherwise be soliciting Russia\u2019s help in the 2016 presidential campaign<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Even now, it might seem odd that the FBI made Halper, then a septuagenarian Cambridge University professor, a linchpin of its top-secret counterintelligence probe codenamed \u201cCrossfire Hurricane.\u201d But a closer look at Halper\u2019s life and work makes that decision seem inevitable. Stefan Halper is the Zelig of modern American political scandal \u2013 a chameleon-like, unusually ubiquitous figure who keeps appearing when mischief is afoot.<\/span><\/p>\n<h3><strong>A Wide Resume, and Questions About It<\/strong><\/h3>\n<p><span>The former son-in-law of a top CIA official, Halper cut his teeth in the Nixon White House during Watergate. The New York Times identified him as the Reagan campaign\u2019s point man in an alleged effort to spy on President Jimmy Carter, and he was later chairman of a bank that helped provide money to surreptitiously fund Nicaragua\u2019s pro-American contra rebels during the 1980s. In the run-up to his subterfuge in the Trump-Russia caper, Halper was paid more than $1 million by a Pentagon office that produced work deemed of such little value that Sen. Charles Grassley recently identified it as a prime example of the government\u2019s \u201csystemic failure to manage and oversee\u201d spending.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Given the secret nature of his work, it is not surprising that Halper\u2019s exact role in these scandals is still debated by insiders and historians. An examination of long-ignored records by RealClearInvestigations, however, shows that Halper has added to the mystery by appearing to consistently misrepresent his background and experience on resumes. There is, for example, no public evidence for his claim, on a resume he submitted to the Ford White House, that he was class president at Stanford University in 1967, or a Fulbright scholar. Nor is there any for the claim on another resume that he held the prestigious position in the Ford administration listed.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Halper declined to speak with RCI when asked for an interview in person at his Virginia home. He also declined to respond to a letter from this reporter subsequently sent to his attorney, inquiring about discrepancies documented in this article.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<h3><strong>Reinvention at the Center of History<\/strong><\/h3>\n<p><span>For an example of the entrenched, protective, and largely unaccountable\u00a0 \u201cdeep state\u201d that many see as a central problem in Washington, one would be hard-pressed to find a more fitting embodiment than Stefan Halper. Like the fictional character Leonard Zelig in Woody Allen\u2019s 1983 mockumentary, Halper \u2013 who worked for Republicans until he helped try to take down a GOP candidate \u2013 has used his ability to reinvent himself to stay at the center of history.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Little information is available about Halper\u2019s childhood. His Wikipedia entry says he was born in 1944. A relative who requested anonymity said he was reared in New Jersey. His public biography picks up in 1967, when he graduated from Stanford University \u2013 though he was not, as he later claimed, class president. That <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/news.stanford.edu\/2017\/07\/23\/1967-year-summer-love-stanford\/#:~:text=Class%20president%20Jim%20Binns%20remembers%20asking%20the%20crowd,%E2%80%9967%20grad%2C%20who%20didn%E2%80%99t%20want%20his%20name%20used.\"><span>honor belonged to Jim Binns<\/span><\/a><span>, a Vietnam veteran who would later go on to have <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/obamawhitehouse.archives.gov\/champions\/veterans\/james-binns\"><span>a distinguished career in government service<\/span><\/a><span>. According to the Stanford Quad yearbook, Halper was president of the Institute of International Relations club.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>After Stanford, Halper earned a Ph.D. from Oxford in 1971, according to both his Ford White House resume and <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20121028020437\/https:\/www.iwp.edu\/faculty\/detail\/stefan-halper\"><span>one<\/span><\/a><span> posted until 2020 on the website of the Institute for World Politics, a foreign policy graduate school where Halper was on the faculty as a \u201cresearch professor.\u201d At Oxford, such a doctoral degree requires a dissertation to be submitted to the university\u2019s library system, a search of which showed <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk\/search\/site\/%22stefan%20halper%22\"><span>no listing for Stefan Halper<\/span><\/a><span>. The school would neither confirm nor deny for RCI whether Halper had earned a Ph.D. from the university. A 1968 newsletter <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.hertford.ox.ac.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/11\/1968-No.-55-The-Hertford-College-Magazine.pdf\"><span>does place him at the school<\/span><\/a><span>. The dust jacket of a book of essays he co-edited in 1972 says that he \u201crecently completed a doctoral thesis at Oxford.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Halper\u2019s Ford resume states that he was a Fulbright Scholar in 1971. Peter VanDerwater, Head of Outreach and Recruitment for the Fulbright Student and Scholar Programs, said he was not \u201cable to locate [Halper\u2019s] name in the directories we publish for the Fulbright Student and Scholar programs.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Halper\u2019s claims about Stanford, Oxford and the Fulbright scholarship were among the discrepancies and gaps in the official record RCI asked Halper to clarify. He declined.<\/span><\/p>\n<h3><strong>The Nixon Years<\/strong><\/h3>\n<p><span>During that same busy year of 1971, according to Halper\u2019s Institute for World Politics resume, he joined the Nixon White House as a member of the Domestic Policy Council.\u00a0 If this were true, it would have placed him near the nerve center of Nixon-era dirty tricks. Council staff were <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.brookings.edu\/blog\/fixgov\/2015\/03\/24\/cabinet-secretaries-versus-the-white-house-staff\/\"><span>recruited by John Ehrlichmann<\/span><\/a><span>, who also oversaw the infamous White House Special Investigations Unit \u2013 better known as the \u201cplumbers.\u201d With a team that included CIA alum E. Howard Hunt, the unit was designed to stop leaks of damaging information questioning America\u2019s role in the Vietnam war. The plumbers would later execute the break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office complex in Washington, which led to Nixon\u2019s resignation and landed Hunt, Ehrlichmann, and others in prison.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>But civil service records obtained by RealClearInvestigations indicate that Halper did not work for the Domestic Council. His job title is listed as \u201cSpecial Assistant to the Director, Special Action Office for Drug Abuse Prevention\u201d (SAODAP). Although this office was overseen by the Council\u2019s head, Egil \u201cBud\u201d Krogh Jr. (who was supervised by Ehrlichmann), it was a separate program within the Executive Office of the President.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Jerry Jaffe, the former head of the SAODAP program, confirmed in an email to RCI that, \u201cMr. Halper worked for the special action office for drug abuse prevention, and that the dates were approx 1971 to 1973.\u201d Jaffe added: \u201cSAODAP was not part of the Domestic Council.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Other records show that Halper tried and failed to secure a prominent role in the administration as a speechwriter. In a 1972 memo regarding Halper\u2019s job interview, Nixon speechwriter Harold J. \u201cTex\u201d Lezar described him as \u201cvery smooth,\u201d \u201ca little surer than he had a right to be,\u201d \u201csomething of a schemer,\u201d and \u201ca bit disingenuous.\u201d Nonetheless, a resume Halper submitted to the White House in 1975, which is stored at the Gerald Ford presidential library, claims that he served as a \u201cconsultant\u201d to Nixon\u2019s speechwriting staff in 1972.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Questions were raised back then about Halper\u2019s resume.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>\u201cI remember that at some point after he was hired someone on the staff pointed out that there were discrepancies between the credentials he claimed to have earned and those we could verify,\u201d Jaffe wrote RCI. \u201dAfter more than 50 years, I can no longer recall what was done about these findings.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<h3><strong>The Ford Years<\/strong><\/h3>\n<p><span>The resume Halper submitted to the Ford White House raises other questions. Along with a White House memo dated July 23, 1975, it states that he was working at the Office of Management and Budget.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Halper\u2019s later resume posted by the Institute for World Politics places him in a far more significant position. It says that from \u201c1974 \u2013 January 20, 1977\u201d Halper worked at the \u201cWhite House Office of the Chief of Staff [as] Assistant to the Chief of Staff. (responsibilities included summary and analysis of foreign developments and security issues).\u201d This would have been a very significant position, as it meant Halper had worked under Ford\u2019s noteworthy chiefs of staff \u2013 Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and Alexander Haig.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>But documents obtained from the Gerald Ford Presidential Library show that Halper was employed by OMB during much of that time and didn\u2019t join the Ford White House until May 17, 1976, where he was a \u201cconsultant\u201d in the press secretary\u2019s office. On August 9, 1976, he moved to full-time status with the title of Staff Assistant for Communications. The Ford Library also has a December 1976 memo to Halper from Ron Nessen, Ford\u2019s press secretary, thanking him for his service as the administration drew to a close.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>While it appears that Halper struggled to gain prominent political jobs, his career soon got a leg up thanks, in part, to family ties. In the mid-1970s, Halper married Sybil Cline, whom he met while she was working at a drug abuse council and he was working at the OMB. Her father was Ray S. Cline, who served as a codebreaker for the Navy during World War II until he was assigned, in 1944, to the newly created Office of Strategic Services \u2013 a precursor of the CIA. (E. Howard Hunt had worked alongside Cline in the OSS during World War II and later at the CIA.) Cline, who died in 1996, became Director of the Directorate of Intelligence during the pivotal years from 1962 to 1966 \u2013 the No. 2 position at the Agency \u2013 and later served as the Director of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research in the Nixon administration.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>\u201cI think that [Halper\u2019s] career early on was promoted by Ray [Cline],\u201d says Richard Perle, a prominent former national security official who knew Halper from their time together in the Reagan administration. \u201cAnd Ray was a pretty widely respected intelligence official.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<h3><strong>Ronald Reagan and the \u2018Debategate\u2019 Scandal<\/strong><\/h3>\n<p><span>In 1980, Halper joined the ultimately unsuccessful first presidential campaign of former CIA Director George H.W. Bush. A Washington Post article that year reported that Bush\u2019s primary campaign was generating \u201crumblings of uneasiness\u201d over its close ties to the intelligence community. The article specifically noted that Ray Cline \u201crecommended his son-in-law, Stefan A. Halper, a former Nixon White House aide, be hired as Bush\u2019s director of policy development and research.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>After Ronald Reagan\u2019s victory over President Carter, with Bush as Reagan\u2019s running mate, Cline appears to have helped his son-in-law get a job at the State Department\u2019s Bureau of Politico-Military Affairs. Richard Burt, whose long record of government service included a stint as Director of the Bureau during the Reagan Administration, confirms Cline\u2019s influence was pivotal. \u201cAnd as is typical with these new administrations you\u2019re running or in charge of a small bureaucracy. There are usually these political types that have some kind of in with the new administration,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd you\u2019re sort of told that you\u2019re going to hire them.\u201d A <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1983\/07\/07\/us\/reagan-aides-describe-operation-to-gather-inside-data-on-carter.html\"><span>New York Times report from 1983<\/span><\/a><span> was even more blunt: \u201cState Department officials said the White House, and [Reagan adviser and later Clinton adviser David] Gergen in particular, had applied a great deal of pressure to create this position for Mr. Halper.\u201d Gergen did not respond to an emailed request for comment.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Though Halper was closely associated with his father-in-law, those who knew them in the Reagan administration had divergent opinions of the two men. Barbara Ledeen, an ex-Senate staffer who worked in the Department of Defense in the Reagan administration, says she and her husband, Michael, who also worked under Reagan, were \u201cold buddies through the fight against communism\u201d with Cline during the cold war. But their interactions with Halper were off-putting. \u201c[Halper] was like a guy who was pretending to be a Republican, but he really was not on our team at all,\u201d Ledeen said. \u201cHe was on Stef Halper\u2019s team.\u201d Michael Ledeen added, \u201cHe was unreliable \u2026 a very murky person.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Halper\u2019s time on the Reagan team did connect him to another scandal \u2013 \u201cDebategate.\u201d In July 1983, the New York Times reported that <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/1983\/07\/07\/us\/reagan-aides-describe-operation-to-gather-inside-data-on-carter.html\"><span>Reagan\u2019s 1980 campaign had engaged in a spying operation<\/span><\/a><span> that obtained top secret briefing materials Jimmy Carter was using to prepare for the candidates\u2019 <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Debategate\"><span>second presidential debate<\/span><\/a><span>. According to the Times, the operation \u201cinvolved a number of retired Central Intelligence Agency officials and was highly secretive\u201d and \u201csources identified Stefan A. Halper, a campaign aide involved in providing 24-hour news updates and policy ideas to the traveling Reagan party, as the person in charge.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Cline told the Times that reports suggesting former CIA officials were running a spy ring for the Reagan-Bush campaign were a \u201cromantic fallacy.\u201d Halper told United Press International the report was \u201cjust absolutely untrue.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>The Times report noted that Halper was no longer working for the State Department at the time.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<h3><strong>Stefan Halper, GOP Banker<\/strong><\/h3>\n<p><span>Now out of government, Halper landed a surprising position, this time in the private sector: Despite having no previous experience in finance or banking, Halper was chairman and majority shareholder, according to his IWP resume, of the Palmer National Bank in Washington.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Palmer was initially financed with nearly $3 million from Herman K. Beebe, a Louisiana financier who was convicted in 1985 of <\/span><a href=\"http:\/\/content.time.com\/time\/subscriber\/article\/0,33009,957050,00.html\"><span>defrauding the Small Business Administration over a loan to allegedly finance a nursing home<\/span><\/a><span>. Beebe was sentenced to community service for defrauding the SBA, but he would later serve 10 months in prison for a later fraud conviction for <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/greensboro.com\/crime-paid-big-for-s-l-barons-the-light-tap-of-the-law\/article_a309174d-97a5-5231-a97f-f469cbcb6b71.html\"><span>his role in Savings and Loan crisis of the late 1980s<\/span><\/a><span>.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Beebe also had extensive ties to Louisiana and Texas politicians, including George H.W. Bush, as well as relationships with organized crime. Other key figures involved in the founding of Palmer had ties to the vice-president and former CIA director, including William Kilberg, an attorney who was part of the Reagan-Bush transition team, and Harvey McLean, Jr, a real estate developer who worked on Bush\u2019s campaign and whose father had worked for Bush at an offshore oil drilling company.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>According to \u201cThe Mafia, CIA, &#038; George Bush\u201d \u2013 a 1992 book by former Houston Chronicle investigative reporter Pete Brewton in which Halper was interviewed and quoted \u2013 Halper was \u201ceased\u201d out of his position as chairman of Palmer National Bank in 1984 as Debategate attracted more publicity. Halper then became chairman (and, according to his IWP resume, majority shareholder) of the National Bank of Northern Virginia, a bank that, according to Brewton, \u201cPalmer expressed interest in purchasing at one time.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<h3><strong>A Connection to Oliver North and Iran-Contra<\/strong><\/h3>\n<p><span>The Palmer National Bank would go on to become closely associated with the Republican Party in the Reagan era \u2013 managing the finances of various GOP political action committees and conservative organizations, including Sen. Bob Dole\u2019s PAC and the influential American Legislative Exchange Council. However, the bank had less reputable clients, and it appears that despite being at a different bank, Halper was still involved in operations at Palmer. Brewton reports that \u201ca former top officer at Palmer\u201d said Halper was responsible for bringing on conservative fundraiser Carl R. \u201cSpitz\u201d Channell as a client at the bank \u2013 a claim that Halper denied, telling Brewton he had \u201cnever met Spitz Channell in my life.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Channell established an account at Palmer for the National Endowment for the Preservation of Liberty, an organization that raised some $10 million for contras fighting Nicaragua\u2019s ruling communist Sandinistas, after Congress prohibited U.S. military aid. Eventually that money made its way from Palmer National to Swiss bank accounts controlled by Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North. While working for the White House National Security Council, North was responsible for selling weapons through cutouts to Iran, and using the profits from the arms sales to fund the contras. The Iran-contra scandal would result in weeks of televised congressional hearings and become the biggest scandal since Watergate. Channell later pleaded guilty to defrauding the government as a result of his involvement in Iran-contra, and died in 1990 at age 44 after being hit by a car while standing on a street in Washington D.C.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Despite Halper denying to Brewton any knowledge of Palmer\u2019s role in the scandal, the day Ollie North was fired from the White House for his role in the clandestine mission to fund the contras, North titled an entry in one of his notebooks \u2014 \u201cLegal Defense Fund\u201d \u2014 and under the heading was written Halper\u2019s name. Halper told Brewton: \u201cOllie is a friend of mine. His daughter and my daughter are in the same pony classes, stuff like that.\u201d He also admitted to helping North after he was enmeshed in scandal. \u201cWe at that time thought we might be able to help him [North] in the development of a legal defense fund. The fund got off the ground. He did develop a legal defense fund. We got trustees and put it in place,\u201d he said.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Further, Brewton reports that Curtis Herge, an attorney with the National Bank of Northern Virginia where Halper was chairman, represented Channell, the National Endowment for the Preservation of Liberty, and another organization, the Nicaraguan Resistance Education Foundation, which got into legal trouble for a role in funding the contras. Herge also worked for the National Conservative Political Action Committee, a large client at Palmer National Bank.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Halper\u2019s father-in-law, Cline, also ended up testifying before the congressional committee investigating Iran-Contra about his role advising GeoMiliTech, a company that was also heavily involved in private efforts to arm the contras. The fees GeoMiliTech paid Cline went to a company whose stockholders were members of Cline\u2019s family, including his daughter Sybil, Halper\u2019s wife. Halper and Sybil Cline would separate at some point around this time. By 1989, <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/projects.kora.matrix.msu.edu\/files\/210-808-2563\/APIC_Invisible_Crimes_opt.pdf\"><span>Sybil Cline was travelling around Africa with Col. Bob Mackenzie<\/span><\/a><span>, a notorious mercenary and editor at \u201cSoldier of Fortune\u201d magazine. They married and had a child before Mackenzie died fighting in Sierra Leone in 1995.<\/span><\/p>\n<h3><strong>The Cambridge Years \u2013and $1 Million-Plus\u00a0in Dubious Pentagon \u2018Research\u2019<\/strong><\/h3>\n<p><span>Throughout the 90s, Halper\u2019s IWP resume says, he retreated into the world of think tanks and journalism. He wrote books, a syndicated newspaper column, and had various affiliations with foreign policy think tanks including the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Center for the National Interest, and the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies. But if Halper avoided public controversy during this time, his personal life appeared troubled. In 1994, he was arrested in Washington D.C. for possession of crack cocaine \u2013 though the case file <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/Techno_Fog\/status\/1004001829548580864\"><span>detailing the circumstances of the arrest has been destroyed<\/span><\/a><span>.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>In 2001, he became a professor at the University of Cambridge, where in 2004 he claimed a second Ph. D. According to Barbara Ledeen, Halper \u201cwent to England because nobody would hire him over here.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Whether through personal pique at being frozen out by old allies or an epiphany, Halper appears to have undergone a significant ideological transformation in the early 2000s. In 2004, as the post-9\/11 war on terror was in full swing, Halper, along with Jonathan Clarke, authored \u201cAmerica Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order,\u201d a book that attacked many figures in the Republican party foreign policy establishment whom Halper had previously worked alongside.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Perle says he was not surprised by Halper\u2019s about face. \u201cHe was the sort of person who would befriend people with ulterior motives \u2026 He always gave the impression that he valued our relationship, which I think wasn\u2019t sufficient to constitute a real relationship,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd then one day he, out of the blue, he writes this book about neoconservatives in which he attacks me relentlessly. It was a complete 180-degree turn.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>According to one former student, Halper didn\u2019t exactly keep a low profile at Cambridge. In a town notable for historic buildings going back to the 13<\/span><span>th<\/span><span> century, Halper lived in an expensive, modernist residence with an elaborate video security system, and the student told RCI that he just assumed Halper did intelligence work. It was an astute assumption. Despite his checkered past, Halper returned to government work in 2008 \u2013 this time as an FBI informant. But controversy followed. According to an Inspector General report, in 2011 the FBI stopped using Halper as a \u201cconfidential human source\u201d because of his \u201caggressiveness toward [his] handling agents\u201d over a dispute about what he was getting paid for his services. The IG report also added that the FBI had additional concerns about \u201cquestionable allegiance to the [intelligence] targets.\u201d The IG report doesn\u2019t specify what \u201ctargets\u201d the FBI was referring to, though it\u2019s known that Halper had relationships with Russian intelligence.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>But Halper rose from the ashes almost immediately. Still working at Cambridge, he began a lucrative side gig in 2012 writing research papers for the Department of Defense\u2019s Office of Net Assessment. Ultimately <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.realclearpolitics.com\/articles\/2019\/07\/18\/the_labyrinthine_ways_and_wages_of_stefan_halper_140809.html\"><span>he would earn more than $1 million<\/span><\/a><span> over the next few years for foreign policy studies that appear to have made little impact until another IG report cited them as evidence of deep problems at ONA. The 2019 report notes that the cost basis for a study of potential Russian-Chinese collaboration against the U.S. included travel to Moscow and Beijing where Halper would interview key players. \u201cNone of the 851 footnotes\u201d in that study, the IG found, \u201cattributed source material to an interview conducted by Professor Halper.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Halper was awarded his largest ONA contract \u2013 $411,575 for two studies on the Chinese economy \u2013 on September 26, 2016. At that same time, he was also working for the FBI. How he rekindled that relationship remains a mystery.\u00a0 Halper reported to the FBI after meeting with two men affiliated with the Trump campaign who were invited to events at Cambridge: George Papadopoulos, whose supposed knowledge of Russian \u201cdirt\u201d on Hillary Clinton was cited as the cause for initiating the FBI\u2019s investigation of the Trump campaign, and Carter Page, whose Russian business dealings led the Department of Justice to surveil him even though he had assisted the FBI in an earlier investigation.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>It\u2019s been widely speculated the ONA was being used as a cutout for intelligence services to pay informants, as well as for other dubious services.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>In 2016, an ONA employee, Adam Lovinger, complained internally that he couldn\u2019t find a valid reason for the agency\u2019s contracts with Halper, as well as an $11 million ONA contract given to a company owned by a close friend of Chelsea Clinton, the daughter of the former president and 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. What Lovinger did not know at that time was that Halper was also working as a confidential source for the FBI trying to find Trump campaign ties to Russia in the final weeks of the campaign against Clinton. In January of 2017, just as Lovinger was poised to start a new job working at the Trump administration\u2019s National Security Council under National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, who was a target of the FBI\u2019s Russia investigation, Lovinger\u2019s supervisors at ONA filed a series of charges against him involving mishandling of classified information. In May of 2017, Lovinger\u2019s security clearance was revoked. Lovinger claims that the charges against him are politically motivated he has been at the center numerous legal actions disputing them since then..\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Also ongoing are congressional attempts to get to the bottom of ONA\u2019s payments to Halper. On February 7 of this year, Iowa Republican Senator Grassley gave a floor speech titled \u201c<\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.grassley.senate.gov\/news\/remarks\/grassley-the-office-of-net-assessment-is-a-failure\"><span>The Office Of Net Assessment Is A Failure.<\/span><\/a><span>\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>\u201cSince 2019, I\u2019ve repeatedly asked for a full accounting of Stefan Halper\u2019s contracts,\u201d said Grassley. \u201cEither they never had one or they\u2019ve decided to obstruct Congress.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<h3><strong>The Matter of Michael Flynn and Svetlana Lokhova<\/strong><\/h3>\n<p><span>Halper is currently listed as a trustee of the <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/thecsi.org.uk\/people\/#CSI-Trustees\"><span>Cambridge Security Initiative<\/span><\/a><span>, a consultancy chaired by Richard Dearlove, the former chief of the British intelligence service MI6 who, the Washington Post reported, advised former British spy Christopher Steele regarding his now discredited \u201cdossier\u201d alleging Trump colluded with Russia.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Notably, Dearlove also hosted a dinner in 2014 that resurfaced years later in the heat of the Russiagate furor. Two who attended and conversed at the dinner, Flynn and Russian-British scholar Svetlana Lokhova, were now linked in widely leaked innuendo about an illicit affair. In 2019, Lokhova <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/casetext.com\/case\/lokhova-v-halper\"><span>sued<\/span><\/a><span> Dearlove\u2019s colleague Halper and various news outlets for defamation, asserting that that Halper intentionally misrepresented her as a \u201cRussian spy\u201d who \u201chad an affair with General Flynn on the orders of Russian intelligence\u201d and \u201ccompromised General Flynn.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>A federal judge threw out the case against the publications because the one-year statute of limitations had expired. And the suit against Halper was dismissed because there was no evidence he was the anonymous source for the article \u2013 the news outlets never revealed who the source was. An FBI agent who later worked with special counsel Robert Mueller wrote a memo in which he concluded the bureau\u2019s original tip about Flynn and Lokhova was unreliable.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Unable to reach Halper by email, RCI went to his northern Virginia home on Feb. 23 to ask about the Flynn-Lokhova episode and other questions surrounding his long career. As he remained silent, the woman beside him ordered the reporter to leave. A few hours later, his lawyer sent a threatening letter, to which RCI responded by asking Halper to clarify the discrepancies reported in this article. Instead of providing answers, Halper\u2019s counsel threatened legal action.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>Like the fictional Zelig, Halper remains ubiquitous, in plain sight, yet hard to pin down.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><em>This story was originally <a href=\"https:\/\/www.realclearinvestigations.com\/articles\/2022\/03\/08\/the_curious_case_of_stefan_halper_longtime_zelig_of_american_scandals_who_crossfired_trump_818108.html\">published<\/a> on RealClear Investigations.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><i>The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author\u2019s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the late summer of 2016 Stefan A. Halper met with at least three of Donald Trump\u2019s associates in England and the United States, bragging about his friendship with Russian<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2315279,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1368886","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1368886","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1368886"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1368886\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2315279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1368886"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1368886"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1368886"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}