The key here is that, before Papadopoulos has even begun work for the Trump campaign--but is known to be joining it--these Deep State operatives with FBI links begin trying to feed him with talk about Russia and potential Trump/Putin meetings. Once Papadopoulos had begun work with the Trump campaign, this morphed into talk of collusion and Russia possessing Hillary Clinton emails, with Papadopoulos being contacted by intel officials from multiple Five Eyes countries: the US, UK, Australia--hot and heavy.
Listen to the whole interview. Bartiromo brings up the issue that Barr has mentioned several times--the whole question of what predication, if any, there actually was for the targetting of Trump through his campaign associates. Toward the end Papadopoulos makes some excellent comments regarding the way he was set up and framed and draws parallels to the experience of Michael Flynn. I strongly suspect we haven't heard the last of that.
UPDATE 1: Maria also has a terrific interview with Devin Nunes.
Rep. Devin Nunes: We spent $30 million on this as taxpayers and they can’t even tell us who Joseph Mifsud is? So we’re getting to the bottom of this. We believe he has ties to the State Department. Actually, our State Department had him in the United States capital in 2017!
Nunes once again points out that the Mueller narrative for the case against Papadopoulos makes no sense:
UPDATE 2: Maria had quite a day! This interview with Jim Jordan is just dynamite:
Mark --
ReplyDeleteI have never understood how Papadopoulos and Carter Page ended up working for the Trump Campaign. Neither brought anything to the table. Page was named as a foreign agent in the FISA application, but was never charged. Never charged! Makes no sense. I have also wondered about Trump Campaign 'co-chairman' Sam Clovis. Who is he? Where does he come from? The Rick Perry campaign? (He makes Halper the Walrus look svelte!) When you dig a little it turns out that both Clovis and Page had backrounds in military and national security-related occupations. I have been thinking for some time that all of Clovis, Page and Papadopoulos were plants. Or some combination of plants and dupes...Is it possible that Clovis was Deep State and he engineered the hiring of Page and Papadopoulos when nobody else on the Trump Campaign was paying attention?
Whatever the answer none of them make any sense.
Cassander
"Or some combination of plants and dupes."
ReplyDeleteThat's been my working assumption. FWIW. Like you, I've long questioned this. Here are two links--look for Mike Rogers in them:
The Spy In The Trump Campaign
What's The Bigger Picture On "Azra Turk"?
Mark, I read your links...So maybe it was (bad) Mike Rogers who puppeteered the hiring of Clovis...who hired Page and Papadopoulos. Maybe...But I remain suspicious of all three...Clovis, Page and Papadopoulos...be they plants or dupes...
DeleteCassander
Regarding Papadopoulos being invited to work for LCILP BEFORE he was on the Trump campaign and being sent to Link Univ. (House interview transcript):
ReplyDeleteBY MR. SOMERS
Q
Okay. So you have no Russia contacts going in. How do you, you know, set out to make the contacts or accomplish your goal of connecting the campaign with Russia?
A
Well, call me a, you know, I guess blissfully, ignorant, of, you know, like I said, the U.S.-Russia relationship and kind of maybe a little too ambitious at the time.
So I'm working for an organization named the London Centre for International Law Practice at the time of my interview with Sam Clovis. And I believe I notify them shortly after that I'm going to be leaving and I'm going to go back to the United States and focus exclusively on working on the campaign, but for some reason that I cannot remember to this day, they decided to invite me to go to Rome with them to this university or college named Link Campus.
At the time, as far as I remember, I just thought I was going
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to Rome for 3 days, have a quick vacation, and then tail it out from London and then go back to the U.S. And I'm attending a conference there at this Italian university, which I now have researched, and it seems to be some sort of western intelligence spying training center, where they had opposition members of the Libyan Government at the time at some conference with Italian officials and Joseph Mifsud was there. And I was introduced to Joseph Mifsud at Link Campus, and he took a liking to me, immediately once he knew that I would be working on the Trump campaign.
And we started to discuss many topics. And one of them was how he could become some sort of intermediary between the campaign, myself, and Russia -- and other governments too, by the way -- and think tanks in Europe, and, you know, other, I guess, other organizations that he purportedly was connected to.
Q
And at that point when Mifsud approached you, was it publicly known that you were on, like, a foreign policy team with the Trump campaign?
A
I believe it was publicly known around March 21st, it's my understanding. And I met Mifsud, according to the court documents, I believe, on March 14th or 15th or 16th, so it wasn't public, that's my understanding.
But, of course, I had finished my interview with Sam. I knew I would be joining the campaign, I'd meet with this person, but I don't think it was public, per se.
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Mr. Breitenbach.
When did you know you would be joining the campaign?
Mr. Papadopoulos.
I believe Sam made it clear to me that I would be joining, but nothing was public at that point. So it was you're on, but, you know, I wasn't officially appointed, I guess, publicly, until around March 21st.
Mr. Breitenbach.
Is there any paperwork that you might have indicating when you actually began on the Trump campaign?
Mr. Papadopoulos.
I believe we might have, we might have those emails.
Ms. Polisi.
We have emails. We don't have any official documentation.
Mark -- I did a little more research on (bad) Mike Rogers. Seems at one point he was a 'Distinguished Fellow at a DC think tank called the Hudson Institute. See: https://www.hudson.org/research/13424-rogers-trump-is-feeding-conspiracy-meter. Intereesting comments by Rogers in the video. Guess who else was associated with the Hudson Insitute? George Papadopoulos...His wikipedia entry says "Papadopoulos was an unpaid[13] intern at the Hudson Institute from 2011 to 2015." Coincidence? Is anything ever a coincidence in the world of counter-intelligence? Cassander
ReplyDeleteHe had to have come to their attention somehow. Papadopoulos has said that "everyone" knows who the spy in the Trump campaign was. We'll see.
DeleteMueller claims, "[o]n May 6, 2016, Papadopoulos suggested to a representative of a foreign government that the Trump Campaign had received indications from the Russian government that it could assist the Campaign through the anonymous release of information that would be damaging to candidate Clinton."
ReplyDeleteAccording to Papadopoulos that meeting was with Downer's assistant, Erika Thompson on May 6. Papadopoulos then met with Downer, along with Thompson, on May 10. But the NYT dispatch from December 31, 2017 establishes that, "[Papadopoulos] opened up to Mr. Downer, the Australian diplomat, about his contacts with the Russians [inaccurate]. It is unclear whether Mr. Downer was fishing for that information that night in May 2016."
Downer's account of the evening:
"[Papadopoulos] mentioned the Russians might use material that they have on Hillary Clinton in the lead-up to the election, which may be damaging.”
Downer's recollection jibes with the statement in the Mueller Report, but Downer also said, "We didn’t know anything about Trump and Russia, and we had no particular focus on that." If Papadopoulos had already gossiped to Thompson four days prior, as Mueller claims, it's unfathomable that Thompson wouldn't have relayed that information to Downer before he met with Papadopoulos. Further, Downer would have known about "Trump and Russia," which would have then been a focus.
I can't comprehend the import of Mueller claiming that Papadopoulos gossiped on a different day and to a different witness than had been established in prior IC media leaks. The information didn't make it to the FBI until July 28, 2016, which led to the opening of the full investigation, so I don't think the insistence on May 6/Thompson would have anything to do with investigative techniques (like FISA).
My best guess is that must relate to Downer somehow; Mueller felt it necessary to shift, for some reason, from Downer to Thompson as the source of the information. What do you make of it?
Apologies if you've already touched on this, but I searched through the archive and didn't see anything related.
I'm speculating, but it may be that they didn't want to reveal that Papadopoulos was being targeted by intel organizations at that point. Downer status as an FBI/CIA informant would not have been as apparent to the world as Thompson's status as an Aussie intel operative. The fact that an Aussie diplomat was serving as an informant for the US might have been something they wanted to hide, so they had the reporting done through so-called diplomatic channels to our State Dep. rather than through normal intel channels. To make it look more like Papa-d was going around London yakking about Russia rather than being set up.
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