Kevin Clinesmith And The Papadopoulos Interrogation

A few days ago we took a look at recently released FBI 302s reporting on the FBI interviews of George Papadopoulos: Devin Nunes Looking At Team Mueller Lying Re Papadopoulos. Our conclusion was that when those 302s are compared with the sentencing memo re Papadopoulos, the picture that emerges is that the FBI really had no interest at all in the substance of what Papadopoulos had to say about his conversations with Joseph Mifsud. They knew that Papadopoulos was telling the truth--that Mifsud had told him about the Russians supposedly having Hillary's emails--because Mifsud had told Papadopoulos exactly what the FBI had told him to tell Papadopoulos. Instead, the whole point of the lengthy interrogations of Papadopoulos was to get him to change what he had said about the timing of his conversations with Mifsud.

There's a review of Papadopoulos' book, Deep State Target, at American Greatness: The FBI Considered Joseph Mifsud an Asset. The concluding portion of the review recounts a portion of Papadopoulos' recollection of his interrogation by the FBI, which bears directly on our earlier discussion of what motivated the FBI:

... when the FBI interviewed Papadopoulos, the FBI interrogators showed very little interest in the source of Mifsud’s information.  

“One of the investigators is an FBI lawyer named Kevin Clinesmith,” Papadopoulos writes. “And he seems to be leading a lot of this inquisition.” 

Papadopoulos was asked over and over to name anyone in the Trump campaign with whom he may have shared the Mifsud emails story. “I keep waiting for someone to ask me about Mifsud himself. But nobody seems to care about him. I can’t believe these people are not interested in the source of this information.”  

In a later exchange, Papadopoulos is subjected to another round of questioning that becomes so repetitive and suggestive that Papadopoulos asks, “I don’t know if you are trying to implant a memory in my mind, or what. But I cannot sit here and tell you I told [the Trump campaign] about emails when I don’t have a memory of doing that.”  

That didn’t stop the Mueller team. They continued for seven hours, suggesting Papadopoulos had indeed told the Trump campaign about the hacked email rumor that Mifsud fed to him.  

“Unfortunately,” Papadopoulos writes, “the truth was not what they wanted to hear. No matter how much Robert Mueller and his team of FBI agents and prosecutors wished I had told the campaign members about Mifsud’s claim, I hadn’t.” 

The interesting aspect to this, of course, is that Kevin Clinesmith has already admitted to submitting fraudulently altered documents to the FISC. IG Horowitz referred Clinesmith's case to John Durham for consideration of criminal prosecution of Clinesmith. I assume that when Clinesmith was selected to interview Papadopoulos, there was more to that decision than Weissmann popping into Clinesmith's office and saying, 'Hey, why don't you go talk to Papadopoulos, OK?' This was an interview that could have potentially led to Trump's impeachment and removal from office, so I assume that many hours of preparation went into that interrogation. I further assume that Durham and his team want Clinesmith to tell them all about that preparation, in excruciating detail. They will want to know who made the decisions, who led the discussion of tactics, goals, etc. What they hoped to obtain from Papadopoulos.