The head of a Department of Defense think tank, under scrutiny by Republican lawmakers for his alleged role in its counterintelligence surveillance efforts of President Trump in the 2016 campaign and transition, managed to have his job responsibilities rewritten to escape oversight by Congress.
Established in 1973, the Office of Net Assessment is an internal Pentagon think tank intended to produce research and relay its findings directly to the defense secretary and deputy defense secretary. But in August 2016, ONA, under the leadership of current Director Jim Baker, was found to have failed to generate annual top-secret assessments, as required by law.
Net assessments, which are often at least 100 pages long, include top-secret details of American military weaknesses. They provide strategic road maps to help the Pentagon ward off strategic threats, as well as give a clearer picture of different types of national security dangers to the United States.
However, questions about the annual $20 million ONA budget arose in 2016 after a Defense Department whistleblower, Adam Lovinger, revealed tangential research projects, with little to do with net assessments. Instead, the money helped pad the pockets of politically connected ONA contractors, one of which was FBI informant Stefan Halper.
In October 2016, Lovinger, the only lawyer at ONA, warned ONA leadership about the employment of Halper and by Jan. 5, 2017, national security adviser Michael Flynn asked for the “sub sources” of the Steele dossier.
The following week, Flynn appointed Lovinger to be senior director for strategic assessments at the National Security Council to help fill the void left by ONA’s inability to conduct net assessments.
However, within weeks of Flynn’s firing, Baker stripped Lovinger’s security clearance and suspended his White House detail. Three years later, Lovinger is still waiting for the DoD inspector general to issue a report on the link between Lovinger’s whistleblowing and the suspension of his security clearance.
Baker, who has served as the director of ONA since 2015, was questioned during a closed-door Defense Office of Hearings and Appeals case in December 2018 about the internal Defense Department think tank’s failure to produce a single net assessment.
He admitted ONA had not produced one net assessment since 2007.
Baker made this admission despite the department’s Dec. 23, 2009, DoD Directive 5111.11 describing the office’s responsibilities and functions that detailed his job and office’s mission and mandate to produce annual net assessments.
The ONA director was questioned again about the dearth of net assessments in a letter sent on Jan. 22, 2020, by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley.
In response to Grassley’s letter, Baker wrote to the Iowa Republican on Feb. 5, citing a now-revised “DoD Directive 5111.11” signed off on by Deputy Secretary of Defense David Norquist that similarly detailed his post’s responsibilities and functions — but expanded his responsibilities.
Baker’s February response also stated that the ONA produced two highly classified “net assessment products” since 2016. That claim, however, is directly at odds with his December 2018 admission that ONA had not conducted a single net assessment since 2007.
In addition, ONA’s new 2020 directive omits the requirement for ONA to complete its signature product — net assessments. The 2009 version required the completion of net assessments, employing the word “shall,” whereas the 2020 version deletes that requirement. In its place, the 2020 version is descriptive but not prescriptive.
However, in the revised 2020 directive, the new expansion of ONA authorities can conduct generic “research” and “war games” that are not related to or inform an actual net assessment.
“All DoD directives are routinely updated to reflect changes in capability and emphasis across the department. The mission, orientation, and tasks of ONA have remained largely unchanged for more than 40 years,” DoD spokesman Lt. Col. Uriah Orland told the Washington Examiner of the updated directive.
“The organization was codified in law in the 2015 NDAA, Sec. 904. ONA provides long-term assessments of trends, key competitions, risks, opportunities, and future prospects of U.S. military capability to the secretary of defense and deputy secretary of defense,” he said.
The controversy over net assessments is important to the case of retired Lt. Gen. Flynn, because his attorney, Sidney Powell, said in a November court filing that she believed Baker was behind the leaks that were part of the focus of the Russia investigation spearheaded by U.S. Attorney John Durham.
A DoD official denied that Baker had any involvement with the leaks, adding that Baker had never been investigated since the court filing.
Additionally, Powell’s court filing on Nov. 1 discusses Baker as a “handler” of Halper, a Cambridge professor and an FBI informant who made contact with members of the Trump campaign. Halper employed Russian intelligence officer Vyacheslav Trubnikov, a foreign national Grassley wants more information about from Baker. Grassley also wants to know if Baker pushed “biased and unreliable information” into Halper’s work.
“[Halper] was paid exorbitant sums by the FBI/CIA/DOD through the Department of Defense Department’s Office of Net Assessment in 2016. His tasks seem to have included slandering Mr. Flynn with accusations of having an affair with a young professor (a British national of Russian descent) Flynn met at an official dinner at Cambridge University when he was head of DIA in 2014,” Powell wrote of Halper.
Other Republicans are keeping an eye on Baker, including the top Republican member on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Rep. Devin Nunes of California.
“HPSCI Republicans are very interested in the strange role the Office of Net Assessments seems to have played in these affairs,” Nunes spokesman Jack Langer told the Washington Examiner. “This is an important topic of our current investigation.”
