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Saturday, May 4, 2019

"The Professor Shall Disappear"

Here's a link to a good translation of the Il Foglio article that revealed where Professor Mifsud has been hanging out for at least parts of the past year or two: Missing Mifsud was hidden in Rome Exclusive – The Maltese professor involved in the Russiagate investigation secretly lived in a flat in Rome for seven months. The rent was paid by Link Campus, the Five Star Movement's favourite university.

Five Star Movement? Read about it here:

The M5S is variously considered populist, anti-establishment, environmentalist, anti-globalist, and Eurosceptic. The party has also been described as New Right and described by some as being right-wing due to its anti-immigration stance despite its promotion of policies usually advocated by the Italian left-wing, such as citizen's income and green-inspired policies. Grillo himself once provocatively referred to the movement as "populist". Its members stress that the M5S is not a party but a "movement", and it may not be included in the traditional left–right paradigm. The "five stars" are a reference to five key issues for the party: public water, sustainable transport, sustainable development, right to Internet access, and environmentalism. The party also advocates e-democracy, direct democracy, the principle of "zero-cost politics", degrowth and nonviolence.

Well, OK, it is an Italian political party. Or movement.

Anyway, here are the final paragraphs of the story. You need to know that Link Campus was founded by Vincenzo Scotti, a former Italian Minister of Home Affairs:

Moreover, another witness sheds light on this story. The book “The Faking of Russia-gate” is co-written by Swiss lawyer Stephan Roh, who owns 5 per cent of GEM (the company which manages Link Campus) and is Mifsud’s lawyer. Roh writes that he spoke to Mifsud over the phone on the “advice of the professor’s friends” on 13 January 2018, while visiting Link's main campus in Casale San Pio V, in Rome. In a conversation-interview reported in the book, Mifsud rejects all the accusations. When asked about why he disappeared, Mifsud said that “the head of the Italian secret services contacted the president of Link Campus, Vincenzo Scotti, and recommended that the Professor shall disappear and stay for some time in a safe location”. The authors write that the “Professor and his friends feared for his life”. It is unclear why the Italian secret services hid Mifsud and why they asked for Scotti's help. Everyone can make their own speculations. But the important issue is that, according to a Link shareholder, who also happens to be Mifsud's lawyer, the university played an active role in the disappearance of the Maltese professor, as part of an operation that has more to do with secret services than with academia.

Nobody knows where Mifsud currently is, and many suspect he is no longer alive. The last time anyone saw him was last May, according to the Associated Press, which was sent a photo of Mifsud by his lawyers. There has been no news since. The Italian government should probably be more transparent about an international spy story that has disrupted an allied country such as the US. Clarification should come from Defence Minister Elisabetta Trenta and Deputy Foreign Minister Emanuela Del Re, who come from Link Campus. Ever since the scandal broke out and Mifsud disappeared, all roads lead to the university in Rome. Whoever wants to solve the Russiagate enigma – whether they believe that Mifsud plotted with the Russians to help Trump or that he conspired with Western intelligence services to weaken Trump – should look for evidence at Link Campus, the small university presided over by Vincenzo Scotti.

I like that: "the Professor shall disappear and stay for some time in a safe location." Wanna bet that Mifsud got a very similar message from the FBI/CIA after he was interviewed in February, 2017? John Solomon has an excellent article (What professor really told FBI about Trump, Russia and Papadopoulos) providing quite a bit of detail regarding that interview and later events involving Papadopoulos and Team Mueller. The article was written 8/29/18, and it holds up very nicely when read in tandem with Devin Nunes' latest remarks regarding Mifsud. Some excerpts:

Documents I obtained from sources show Mifsud told the FBI in February 2017 that his contacts with Papadopoulos a year earlier, during the 2016 presidential campaign, were mostly innocuous. He made that point both in an FBI interview and a follow-up email to agents. 
He described the contacts as an academic exercise in pursuit of peace, not a global plot to hijack the election. And he went out of his way to say there was no talk of sinister cybersecurity intentions such as a plot to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails. 
“I reaffirm that the content of our conversations was always on wide geo-strategic issues,” he wrote FBI agents on Feb. 11, in an email that was quickly sent to the very top of the FBI’s counterintelligence division. Mifsud sent the email just hours after agents interviewed him. 
He said the conversations mostly centered around “how the Trump then-campaign team looked to develop a conversation on Europe/UK … and with Russia” and “the fallout in policy in the deteriorating relationship between the major countries in the world today.” 
... 
The mere fact Mifsud felt compelled, after his FBI interview, to write a follow-up email — repeatedly insisting that his contacts with Papadopoulos were innocuous — is an indication he didn’t like the way the FBI portrayed events. 
In fact, at one point in his email, he bold-faced a single sentence for emphasis: “Cybersecurity was never the direct object of any of our communications.” 
“A ‘new’ possible relationship of the U.S. with Europe, the UK, Russia, the Middle East and energy diplomacy was always the focus of our discussions as international affairs experts,” he wrote in the final line of an email to the FBI. 
Mifsud even told the FBI that, after his interview, he went back to his documents to make sure there wasn’t something more sinister: “The issues that you specifically asked me about in your questions this morning did not feature in any of our email conversations as far as I can see.” 
The Mueller team’s indictment paints this very differently.

None of this fits in at all with the Mueller/Weissmann claim that Mifsud was/is a Russian intelligence operative. However, we can see the problem for the Deep State and, in particular, for the FBI/CIA. The interview took place less than a month after Trump's inauguration, with the Deep State and Establishment DC--having failed to prevent the inauguration--scrambling for ways to undo it. And here was a key party to the whole Russia Hoax, Mifsud, clearly way off narrative. If Mifsud should go blabbing to the media or, worse, to Trump, well, the consequences would be unthinkable. Put all that in the context of events between the inauguration and the appointment of Mueller on May 17, 2017: Comey's machinations, his firing, McCabe and Rosenstein colluding regarding obstruction and even the 25th Amendment. I think it's a cinch that if Mifsud's story gets out, there's no way we end up with a Special Counsel.

So that explains why our Deep State might recommend to Mifsud--and recommend to their Italian counterparts that they recommend to Mifsud--that "the Professor shall disappear and stay for some time in a safe location”. Mifsud and his off narrative interview represented an existential threat to the Deep State.

In fact, Mifsud still does represent an existential threat--to Team Mueller and the entire Deep State, to the FBI and everyone who knew about this, and, as Kim Strassel puts it, "many powerful people in Washington." Small wonder, then, Nunes' interest in Mifsud, if explanation were needed. It seems clear that this entire episode of the FBI's dealings with Mifsud and all its particulars--who knew what, when--should be a top priority for Barr and everyone working for him.

12 comments:

  1. Very nice summary that gets into a lot of the issues we've been discussing lately:

    HERE THEY ARE: The 10 Biggest Lies in the Mueller Dossier

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  2. Great work. Isn't Mueller solely relying on Papadopoulos's testimony to establish that Mifsud mentioned "dirt" on Hilary Clinton "in the form of thousands of emails?" Mifsud denied saying any such thing. Downer recollects that Papadopoulos mentioned "material that would be damaging to [Clinton]." In the Solomon piece, Mifsud appears to foreclose the possibility that his offer of "dirt" could have been swept up in 702 surveillance. Also, if that had happened, surely such communications would have been produced in a Papadopoulos court filing. So to cover for Western Intelligence tasking Mifsud to compromise Papadopoulos, Mueller must rely on the testimony of the person subject to said compromise, whom he convicted of lying to the FBI. Yep, they've no choice but to lean on the thinnest of reeds as the storm begins to blow.

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    1. Right. You can see it in the timing and method in which they went after Papadopoulos--they did it solely because they needed to shut him up.

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    2. Hence the violation of Papa D's constitutional rights when he was arrested at the DC airport and whisked away with no attorney.

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    3. For example. See my response to Titan 28 below.

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    4. You are always one step ahead of me. (smile)

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  3. All of this makes perfect sense if you start with the premise that an attempted coup was ongoing and anything that could interfere with the coup must be neutralized. That meant disappearing Mifsud, silencing Papadopalous, and forcing Nunes to the sidelines with a phony ethics complaint in 2016. Brennan, Comey, and the other coup conspirators were fighting a battle that they could not afford to lose, and used every power at their disposal to neuter any opposition. There were desperate men and they resorted to desperate measures. And they did serious tangible harm to many innocent people; particularly Mike Flynn and his family. That alone is reason enough to put dirty cop Comey behind bars.

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    1. "All of this makes perfect sense if you start with the premise that an attempted coup was ongoing"

      Exactamundo. Well put.

      And it's all becoming ever more clear--out in the open. Ironically, the Mueller Dossier appears to be helping in that process--contrary to the intent of its authors.

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    2. Slightly off topic, but is there any chance the charges against Gen Flynn get dropped?

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    3. That's a really interesting topic, and one that I've been trying to follow. Actually, the Flynn and Papadopoulos cases are basically identical: in both cases the investigations were started on highly suspect predication (to put it mildly), no substantive crimes were found, but guilty pleas to extremely suspect "process" crimes were coerced. In both cases it's looking increasingly possible that prosecutorial misconduct (withholding information that the defense was entitled to, in Papa-d's case a possible right to counsel problem, etc.) could be shown. My suspicion is that Barr, probably through Horowitz at OIG, will be taking a very hard look at those issues as a means to fundamentally discredit the entire Mueller inquisition. The Flood letter was the opening salvo, but I hope to see that effort expand and deepen. The Nunes demand for Mifsud info fits into that framework, as well--it's all interrelated.

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    4. I may be off base here but it seemed to me that Judge Sullivan was telling Lt General Flynn, "Come on man, fight for yourself. I know that you were framed. Sullivan goaded and cajoled Flynn and threatened him. He half accused him of treason.

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    5. Yeah, I think the judge was initially confused about a few things but that the realization dawned on him that there was something seriously wrong going on in his courtroom. The judge, of course, was in a difficult position, dealing with a defendant who adamantly insisted he was guilty.

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