Richard Pollock of the Daily Caller News Foundation has uncovered a fascinating vignette from the swamp, involving high-level secrets, Clinton friends, and apparent failure to obey the rules.  Oh, yeah – and money.

A company whose president is "best friends" with Chelsea Clinton received more than $11 million in contracts over the last decade from a highly secretive Defense Department think tank, but to date, the group lacks official federal approval to handle classified materials, according to sensitive documents TheDCNF was allowed to view.

Chelsea campaigning for her mother.  Photo credit: Kyle Cassidy.

Jacqueline Newmyer, the president of a company called the Long Term Strategy Group (LTSG), has over the last 10 years received numerous Department of Defense (DOD) contracts from a secretive think tank called Office of Net Assessment (ONA).

The important context here is the practice of contracting out highly sensitive policy-related functions to people who may or may not be reliable, because they and or their facilities have not gone through proper screening.

Adam Lovinger, a whistleblower and 12-year ONA veteran, has repeatedly warned ONA's leadership they faced risks by relying on outside contractors as well as the problem of cronyism, and a growing "revolving door" policy where ONA employees would leave the defense think tank and join private contractors to do the same work.

This is classic example of Beltway Bandits cashing in and building big businesses, cutting themselves in for a piece of the action.  The government pays more, the workers get more, the contractor take a percentage off the top, and everybody wins – except taxpayers.  This happens on a vast scale, and when national security is involved, the stakes are high.

Still, the nature of the work performed for all those millions has a whiff of cronyism more than security lapses.

One of Lovinger's main complaints about ONA was that many of the reports contractors imparted very little new information to the think tank. "Over the years ONA's analytic staff has expressed how they learn very little from many (if not most) of our often very thin and superficial contractor reports," he wrote in the Sept. 30, 2016 email.

Some of LTSG's reports bear out Lovinger's critique. A September 2010 LTSG report, titled "Trends in Elite American Attitudes Toward War," came to the astounding conclusion that, "American intellectuals have for the last century held considerably more cosmopolitan views than their non-intellectual counterparts."

Another LTSG report was "On the Nature of Americans as a Warlike People."

Lovinger also suggested in a March 3, 2017 memo to the record that contractor studies should be peer reviewed. "There has never been an external review of these contractors' research products," he said, adding, "It is now clear that over several decades the office transferred millions of dollars to inexperienced and unqualified contractors."

The contempt for taxpayers is almost palpable here.