Deep state hits man who complained about payments to Halper

Rowan Scarborough:

A Trump-supporting Pentagon analyst was stripped of his security clearance by Obama-appointed officials after he complained of questionable government contracts to Stefan Halper, the FBI informant who spied on the Trump presidential campaign.

Adam Lovinger, a 12-year strategist in the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment, complained to his bosses about Halper contracts in the fall of 2016, his attorney, Sean M. Bigley, told The Washington Times.

On May 1, 2017, his superiors yanked his security clearance and relegated him to clerical chores.

Mr. Bigley filed a complaint July 18 with the Pentagon’s senior ethics official, charging that Mr. Lovinger’s superiors misused the security clearance process to punish him. He said his client complained about excessive “sweetheart” deals for Mr. Halper and for a “best friend” of Chelsea Clinton.

“As it turns out, one of the two contractors Mr. Lovinger explicitly warned his ONA superiors about misusing in 2016 was none other than Mr. Halper,” Mr. Bigley wrote in his ethics complaint, which called the contracts “cronyism and corruption.”

Mr. Lovinger filed a whistleblower reprisal complaint in May with the Defense Department inspector general against James Baker, director of the Office of Net Assessment. The complaint also singles out Washington Headquarters Services, a Pentagon support agency that awarded the Halper contracts totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars.

In an internal October 2016 email to higher-ups, Mr. Lovinger wrote of “the moral hazard associated with the Washington Headquarters Services contracting with Stefan Halper,” the complaint said. It said Mr. Baker hired Mr. Halper to “conduct foreign relations,” a job that should be confined to government officials.

“It was a topic of conversation within the office,” Mr. Bigley told The Times. “What is Halper doing, and why is he being paid astronomically more than others similarly situated?”

The Office of Net Assessment conducts analyses of future threats and ways to defeat them.

“Nobody in the office seemed to know what Halper was doing for his money,” Mr. Bigley said. “Adam said Jim Baker, the director, kept Halper’s contracts very close to the vest. And nobody seemed to have any idea what he was doing at the time. He subcontracted out a good chunk of it to other academics. He would compile them all and then collect the balance as his fee as a middleman. That was very unusual.”
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The timing suggests that Halper was working on spying on the Trump campaign at the time.  If that is the case this matter just got much more important.  Some have alleged that Halper was part of an operation seeking to entrap George Papadopoulos and Carter Page.  Papadopoulos was subsequently indicted by Mueller for making false statements and Page was the subject of a FISA warrant.  Was teh Obama administration using Pentagon assets to spy on the Trump campaign?  It looks like a possibility.