BOOM! Trump Shuts Down Pentagon Office Linked to Russiagate Probe

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From the Washington Free Beacon: 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.

The scheme played out during the Obama administration, as they realized that New York business tycoon Donald Trump, who Democrats had dismissed as someone having no chance of ever being president, was now getting closer to doing just that.

Under the guise of his ONA position, Harper cozied up to Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos, and offered him $3,000 to write a report for an ONA assessment about the Middle East in September 2016, and even paid his travel expenses and lodging in London.

On the trip they tricked Papadopoulos into taking, Halper introduced Papadopoulos to Azra Turk, who Halper claimed was his research assistant. Turk was actually an undercover FBI agent.

The Free Beacon describes the deceptive plot they used to try to snag Papadopoulos:

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.

Eventually federal investigators finally had to admit they found no evidence of any “Russia collusion” by Trump’s 2016 campaign.

READ FULL DETAILS from the Washington Free Beacon.

Sen. Grassley cheered the move, writing on X, “Praise the Lord Pres Trump & Scty Hegseth sacked Office of Net Assessment. It failed to strengthen our natl defense & abused taxpayer $$$. I’ve been exposing ONAs wrongdoing thru oversight since 2019. This wise move saves American taxpayers over 20MILLION a yr.”

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