Stefan Halper, the dual U.S.-U.K. citizen who reached out to Trump campaign aides George Papadopoulos and Carter Page, is the international man of mystery when it comes to the origins of the FBI counterintelligence probe of the Trump campaign and presidency.  From public records, we know he was receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars a year from the federal government national security apparatus.

From the payment statements, the Department of Defense's Office of Net Assessment appears to have been the contract award-maker.  We still do not know what he was paid for, though there are several instances seeming to indicate that he was trying to engage low-level Trump campaign staff in suspicious actions.

Calls to the Department of Defense indicated that the department had no listing for either that office or its head, James Baker.

On the other hand, the Office of Net Assessment and its head seem to have been generous to Chelsea Clinton's best friend, whose contract was heavily promoted by Hillary Clinton, as the Daily Caller reported last year.  Richard Pollock wrote in September of 2017:

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 Department of Defense think tank, but to date, the group lacks official federal approval to handle classified materials, according to sensitive documents The DCNF was allowed to review.

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

The Office of Net Assessment is so sensitive, the specialized think tank is housed in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and reports directly to the secretary.

To date, the Long Term Strategy Group has received $11.2 million in contracts, according to USAspending,gov, a government database of federal contracts.

But after winning a decade of contracts from the Office of Net Assessment, the federal agency is only now in the process of granting clearance to the company.  Long Term Strategy Group never operated a secure room on their premises to handle classified materials, according to the Defense Security Service, a federal agency that approves secure rooms inside private sector firms.  Long Term Strategy Group operates offices in Washington, D.C., and Cambridge, Mass.

A staffer, Adam Lovinger, warned about such contracts, and the head of the office, James Baker, allegedly engaged in retaliatory moves against him, even stripping him of his security clearance.  "Adam Lovinger, a whistleblower and 12-year Office of Net Assessment (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."

Indeed, the office looks like a slush fund to pay off cronies, producing useless work.  Pollock notes: "'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,' [Lovinger] wrote in the Sept. 30, 2016 email."

Some of Long Term Strategy Group's reports bear out Lovinger's critique.  A September 2010 Long Term Strategy Group 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 Long Term Strategy Group report was "On the Nature of Americans as a Warlike People."

All this lends credence to the suspicions that Stefan Halper was paid to meddle in the Trump campaign in order to help Hillary and defeat Trump, if not to bolster Steele's spurious claims upon which the DOJ and FBI relied in getting a FISA warrant.

James Baker owes us an explanation. 

Correction: "Office of National Assessment" should have been "Office of Net Assessment." AT regrets the error.