The Mueller report recounts that Mifsud also maintained some “Russian contacts” while living in London, including a “one-time employee” at the Internet Research Agency—which Mueller’s prosecutors note is “the entity that carried out the Russian social media campaign.” But this mention of the troll farm operation that peddled often inane 2016 campaign propaganda is bush league innuendo: Mueller does not allege that the “one-time employee” himself had anything to do with “the Russian social media campaign,” much less that Mifsud did.7
Nevertheless, the Trump–Russia narrative holds that Mifsud actually is a well-placed Russian agent who became interested in Papadopoulos upon discovering that he was a key (yup …) Trump adviser. According to this story, Mifsud introduced the younger man to a woman presented as Vladimir Putin’s niece. The professor also hooked Papadopoulos up with Ivan Timofeev, whom prosecutors pregnantly described as “the Russian MFA connection” (as in the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs—Lavrov’s office) when they eventually charged Papadopoulos with making false statements. Timofeev and Papadopoulos had fevered discussions about setting up a Putin-Trump meeting in Russia. Finally, at their April 26 breakfast in London, Mifsud let slip that Russia had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton in the form of “thousands” of “emails of Clinton”—which, the narrative holds, must have been a reference to the DNC emails that Russian intelligence hacked and WikiLeaks disseminated during the Democratic party’s convention in July.
The story is bogus through and through. There is no proof that Mifsud is a Russian agent—Mueller never alleged such a thing, either when Papadopoulos was charged or in the special counsel’s final report, which concluded that there was no Trump–Russia conspiracy. The woman in question was not Putin’s niece; she was eventually identified as Olga Polonskaya, the thirty-two-year-old manager of a St. Petersburg wine company, who (the Mueller report suggests, based on a “Baby, thank you” email) may have been romantically involved with Mifsud.8 Timofeev is actually a young academic researcher who runs a Russian think-tank, the Russian International Affairs Council. The RIAC has some sort of tie to the MFA, but no discernible connections to Russian intelligence. Like Mifsud, Timofeev is an academic; he was in an even less likely position to schedule a meeting for Putin than Papadopoulos was to do so for Trump. The hypothetical Putin–Trump summit was an inchoate idea senior Trump officials shot down even as Papadopoulos and Timofeev were dreaming it up.9
What about those “emails of Clinton”? Other than the word of Papadopoulos, a convicted liar and palpably unreliable raconteur, there is no evidence—none—that Mifsud told him about emails. The professor never showed him any emails. And in his February 2017 FBI interview, Mifsud denied saying anything to Papadopoulos about Clinton-related emails in the possession of the Kremlin. Of course, Mifsud could be lying. But there is no evidence that he would have been in a position to know the inner workings of Russian intelligence operations.
It is not enough to say that Mueller never charged Mifsud with lying to the FBI. In Mueller’s report, when prosecutors have evidence that Mifsud gave inaccurate information, they say so. For example, they allege that Mifsud “falsely” recounted the last time he had seen Papadopoulos. But Mueller never alleges that Mifsud’s denial of knowledge about Russia’s possession of emails is false.10 And if we learned anything from Mueller’s investigation, it is that he knows how to make a false-statements case.
In any event, Mifsud’s supposed email comment obviously made little impression on Papadopoulos. The day after he met the professor, Papadopoulos sent two emails to high-ranking Trump-campaign officials about his meeting with Mifsud. In neither did he mention emails. Papadopoulos instead focused on the possibility—farfetched, but apparently real to Papadopoulos—that Mifsud could help arrange a meeting between Trump and Putin. Prior to being interviewed by the FBI in January 2017, Papadopoulos never reported anything about Russia having emails—neither to his Trump-campaign superiors, to whom he was constantly reporting on his conversations with Mifsud, nor to Alexander Downer, the Australian diplomat whose conversation with Papadopoulos was the proximate cause for the formal opening of the FBI probe.
It was only when he was interviewed by the FBI in late January 2017, nine months after his conversation with Mifsud, that Papadopoulos is alleged to have claimed that Mifsud said the Russians had “thousands” of “emails of Clinton.” There is no known recording of this FBI interview, so there is no way of knowing whether (a) Papadopoulos volunteered this claim that Mifsud mentioned emails, or (b) the email claim was suggested to Papadopoulos by his interrogators’ questions. We have no way of knowing if Papadopoulos is telling the truth (and therefore hid the possibility of damaging Clinton emails from his Trump campaign superiors for no fathomable reason) or if he was telling the FBI agents what he thought they wanted to hear (which is what he often did when reporting to the Trump campaign).
Collusion with Australia
The email component, however, is only half the concocted story that spawned “Crossfire Hurricane.”
There is no evidence, including in the 448-page Mueller report, that Papadopoulos was ever told that Russia intended, through an intermediary, to disseminate damaging information about Clinton in a manner designed to hurt Clinton’s candidacy and help Trump’s. There is, furthermore, no evidence that Papadopoulos ever said such a thing to anyone else—including Australian High Commissioner Alexander Downer, whom he famously met at the Kensington Wine Rooms in London on May 6, 2016. The claim that Papadopoulos made such a statement is a fabrication, initially founded on what, at best, was a deeply flawed assumption by Downer.
Let’s get to the curious story of the Euro-celeb High Commissioner’s outreach to the unknown, unpaid Trump adviser.
Early in his candidacy, in a characteristically over-the-top reaction to jihadist terrorism, Donald Trump proposed a temporary ban on all Muslim immigration to the United States. The candidate later clarified that he wanted to explore ways to vet immigrants in order to exclude Muslims adherent to jihadism, not all Muslims.11 But the legend of Trump the Islamophobe was born. Like most things Trumpian, it rubbed Great Britain the wrong way. England has a rambunctious fundamentalist Islamic community in its midst, and its politicians—one is tempted to say, its Tory politicians in particular—are hypersensitive to “Islamophobia” (which is not actually a phobia but an epithet developed by the Muslim Brotherhood to discourage inquiry into sharia-supremacist ideology).12 If anything, Britain’s then–Prime Minister David Cameron was the model for this Blairism of the center-right. Reflecting the distaste for Trump common among EU leaders, Cameron described Trump’s remarks as “divisive, stupid and wrong,” adding that a visit to England by the GOP candidate would unite Britons against him. Typically, Trump shrugged his shoulders and snorted that, if elected, he might not have a “very good relationship” with Cameron. Not unreasonably, Papadopoulos calculated that the quickest way to vault into Trump’s good graces was to defend him publicly. So the tyro took it on himself to demand that Cameron apologize—which the British press ate up even if it rankled senior Trump campaign officials.13
It is unknown whether Trump noticed this attention-grabbing stunt, but Downer did. Constantly networking, Papadopoulos had struck up an acquaintance with Israeli embassy official Christian Cantor, through whom he had met Downer’s counselor, Erika Thompson in April 2016. After his remarks about Cameron were reported on May 4, Downer had Thompson reach out to Papadopoulos for a sit-down with him. It was an odd request: Papadopoulos was a relative nobody working for a candidate reviled in Europe, while Downer was among Australia’s top diplomats, having had a long, distinguished foreign service career in which he dealt at the highest echelons of international relations. Plus, Papadopoulos had run off at the mouth about the British prime minister; of what concern was that to an Australian diplomat?
Well, Downer has an interesting background. He is a former foreign minister who, in that role, helped arrange a $25 million contribution by Au
stralia to a Clinton Foundation initiative to fight HIV and AIDS—in 2006, when Hillary Clinton was a powerful U.S. senator with White House aspirations.14 Downer also has eye-catching ties to Britain—in particular, to its intelligence services. He served on the advisory board of Hakluyt & Co., a secretive private U.K. intelligence firm founded by British spies. Top officials and advisory board members of Hakluyt include veterans of MI6 and GCHQ.15 The board has also included such global movers and shakers as Louis Susman, a Democratic Party fundraising heavyweight who is close to the Clintons and who was Obama’s American Ambassador to the Court of St. James while Secretary Clinton ran the State Department. John Brennan appeared at an event hosted by Hakluyt’s New York City office in 2018. Hakluyt’s U.S. representative was Jonathan Clarke, a career British diplomat who eventually relocated to Washington. What’s Clarke’s relevance to this tale? Not much—except that he has co-authored two books with none other than Stefan Halper, who—we shall soon see—is a longtime asset of U.S. and British intelligence, and who was tasked to spy on Papadopoulos and other Trump campaign surrogates. Halper and Downer travel in the same circles. In fact, they appeared together on a Cambridge University panel in 2010.16
Small world.
Even smaller than you think. Another traveler in British intelligence circles is, yes, Joseph Mifsud. As Lee Smith relates, Mifsud has also long been associated with Claire Smith, a prominent British diplomat who served for years on Britain’s Joint Intelligence Committee, which answers directly to the Prime Minister. Ms. Smith was also a member of the United Kingdom’s Security Vetting Appeals Panel, which reviews denials of security clearances to government employees. During her career in the British foreign service, Smith’s postings included Beijing and Islamabad; more significantly for our purposes, she worked with Mifsud at three different academic institutions: the London Academy of Diplomacy (which trained diplomats and government officials), the University of Stirling in Scotland, and Link Campus University in Rome. Link, you may recall, is where Mifsud first met Papadopoulos. The campus is a well-known draw for diplomats and intelligence officials—the CIA holds conferences there, the FBI holds agent training sessions there, and former U.S. intelligence officials teach there. As Lee Smith observes, if Mifsud had actually been a Russian agent, he was situated to be “one of the most successful in history.”17 Not likely.
In any event, on May 6, Ms. Thompson escorted Papadopoulos to the rendezvous with Downer at the Kensington Wine Rooms. It was a pleasant conversation over drinks, though the seasoned Aussie diplomat did advise the green Trump adviser that lashing out at Cameron was strictly de trop. During the course of the encounter, Papadopoulos confided that he’d heard the Russians had information about Mrs. Clinton that could prove damaging. Importantly, Papadopoulos did not describe the purported information—he did not mention emails, he did not call it “dirt.” Downer later described this topic as a vague reference in what was a fairly short conversation.18
On July 22, 2016, the eve of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia and two months after the Papadopoulos–Downer tête-à-tête, WikiLeaks began disseminating thousands of hacked DNC emails to the global press. From this occurrence, Downer suddenly drew the unfounded inference that these hacked emails must have been what Papadopoulos was talking about when he said Russia had damaging information about Clinton. The High Commissioner decided that, rather than just letting whatever he’d fleetingly reported to his government gather dust in the archives, he’d better raise it directly with his American counterparts—his friends at the U.S. embassy, then being run by U.S. Ambassador Matthew Barzun, the mega-fundraiser for President Obama and then-Secretary of State John Kerry, who had labored to retire the campaign debt from Hillary Clinton’s first White House run, clearing the way for her to become Obama’s Secretary of State.19
The FBI and Justice Department, as well as Australian authorities, have been suspiciously vague about how Downer’s information about Papadopoulos was transmitted to the U.S. government. Special Counsel Mueller continues the obfuscation.
As The Wall Street Journal’s Kimberley Strassel has reported, Downer claimed, in an April 2018 interview by The Australian, that he reported the May 6, 2016, meeting to his government a day or two after it happened. The paper then hazily reports that after some unspecified “period of time, Australia’s ambassador to the US, Joe Hockey, passed the information on to Washington.” Similarly, The New York Times reported that “Australian officials passed the information about Mr. Papadopoulos to their American counterparts, according to four current and former American and foreign officials with direct knowledge of the Australians’ role.”
An unlikely story.
Rep. Devin Nunes chaired the House Intelligence Committee when it investigated Russia-gate (he is now the committee’s ranking member). Nunes has reviewed the FBI case-opening document (referred to as an “EC,” as in “electronic communication”), and he has told Fox News, “We now know that there was no official intelligence that was used to start this investigation.” That is, there is no indication that the investigation was commenced based on intelligence that passed through the “Five Eyes” channels (i.e., the five countries in the world’s most important intelligence-sharing alliance—the United States, Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada).
So, if the “Crossfire Hurricane” foreign-counterintelligence investigation was commenced by the FBI without intelligence routed through a Five-Eyes channel, what information could have started it? Of course, it was the Papadopoulos information, informally passed from High Commissioner Downer to the Obama State Department … and then on to the FBI.
On this, Australia was smoked out by Ms. Strassel’s investigative reporting. Relying on “a diplomatic source,” she asserted that Downer himself conveyed the information about Papadopoulos to the U.S. embassy in London. Downer subsequently confirmed that this is the case. On July 26, 2016, he personally visited the American embassy in London. With Ambassador Barzun away on vacation, Downer verbally reported his the two-month-old Papadopoulos conversation to Elizabeth Dibble, the chargée d’affaires, in what is said to have been a brief meeting.20
Well, okay then, but what did Downer tell the State Department Papadopoulos said? How did the United States government describe the young Trump adviser’s statements in its official documents, such as the FBI’s case-opening report? We haven’t been told. Although Papadopoulos is extensively quoted in the Mueller report, the prosecutors avoid attributing any quote to him based on what Downer claims he said. This mirrors Mueller’s slippery false-statements charge against Papadopoulos: the prosecutors’ fourteen-page “Statement of the Offense” studiously omits any reference to Papadopoulos’s May 6 meeting with Downer, notwithstanding that it was the most consequential event in Papadopoulos’s case. The chronology simply skips from May 4 to May 13, as if nothing significant happened in between.21
The government does not want us focusing on the Papadopoulos–Downer meeting because the FBI’s investigation was formally opened on false pretenses—based not on what Papadopoulos actually said to Downer, but on the untenable inference that Downer and the State Department chose to draw from Papadopoulos’s blather. Mueller’s report gives us not what Papadopoulos said, but what Downer understood Papadopoulos to have “suggested,” namely 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 Hillary Clinton.”
Think about that. What is called the “Trump Campaign” here is Papadopoulos, who was about as low-ranking as it got in that organization. What’s preposterously referred to as the “Russian government” is Mifsud. But the Maltese professor—the source of the “indications”—was not part of the Russian government at all. More to the point, even if it were mistakenly assumed that Mifsud was a Russian-government operative (notwithstanding that the FBI could easily have established that he was not), there is no evidence that Mifsud eve
r told Papadopoulos that the Russian government was planning to assist the Trump campaign by anonymously releasing information damaging to Clinton.
Obviously, if Downer had actually believed Papadopoulos had information from authentic Putin regime sources, and if Papadopoulos had told him the Kremlin was planning to release damaging information about Clinton, timed to harm her and help Trump, Downer would not have ignored these statements at the time they were made. But there was no reason to believe that Papadopoulos had such Russian contacts, and there is no basis to believe Papadopoulos made any such statement to Downer.
But we’re not supposed to ask what Papadopoulos said. We’re to content ourselves with what Downer thought—or, actually, with his dramatically revised thinking two months after the fact. The Mueller report repeatedly stresses the “suggestion” that Papadopoulos purportedly made—as if what matters is the operation of Downer’s mind rather than the words Papadopoulos actually used. For example, prosecutors acknowledge that Papadopoulos’s conversation with Downer is “contained in the FBI case-opening document and related materials.”22 But Mueller’s five-line footnote—the report’s passing mention of the commencement of the probe of a presidential campaign—does not quote from these materials, though it elsewhere makes quoting a habit. And here is how the Special Counsel explains why Papadopoulos was interviewed in late January 2017 (my italics):
Investigators approached Papadopoulos for an interview based on his role as a foreign policy advisor to the Trump Campaign and his suggestion to a foreign government representative that Russia had indicated it could assist the Campaign through the anonymous release of information damaging to candidate Clinton.
The “suggestion” that Papadopoulos said such a thing is sheer invention. Plainly, it is based on the wayward deduction by Downer and the State Department that Russia’s anonymous publication (via WikiLeaks) of the hacked DNC emails must have been what Papadopoulos was talking about. But that is not what Papadopoulos was talking about.
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