The anti-Trump conspiracy began with Josef Mifsud

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Part 1: George Papadopoulos and Josef Mifsud

Inaction.



It’s been rattling around my head for a long time. Why was there no action? Why didn’t obama do something?

barack obama was warned about Russian meddling in 2014.

The Obama administration received multiple warnings from national security officials between 2014 and 2016 that the Kremlin was ramping up its intelligence operations and building disinformation networks it could use to disrupt the U.S. political system, according to more than half a dozen current and former officials.

As early as 2014, the administration received a report that quoted a well-connected Russian source as saying that the Kremlin was building a disinformation arm that could be used to interfere in Western democracies. The report, according to an official familiar with it, included a quote from theRussian source telling U.S. officials in Moscow, “You have no idea how extensive these networks are in Europe … and in the U.S., Russia has penetrated media organizations, lobbying firms, political parties, governments and militaries in all of these places.”

That report was circulated among the National Security Council, intelligence agencies and the State Department via secure email and cable in the spring of 2014 as part of a larger assessment of Russian intentions in Ukraine, the official said.

There was no explicit warning of a threat to U.S. elections, but the official said some diplomats and national security officials in Moscow felt the administration was too quick to dismiss the possibility that the Kremlin incursions could reach the United States.

The meddling could have been stopped:

A former Obama White House official says the US government could have thwarted a Russian troll group’s attempts to meddle in the 2016 US presidential election.

The Kremlin-linked troll group, known as the Internet Research Agency, was charged last month by special counsel Robert Mueller.
Brett Bruen, who served as the White House director of global engagement from 2013 to 2015, said he warned colleagues on President Barack Obama’s National Security Council in 2014 that America would be targeted by Russian trolls. His warnings came after he saw how the Russians used the same methods — social media meddling and propaganda — to sow discord during Ukraine’s election in 2014.

The goal of the plot?

By the time Bruen had made his proposal to the National Security Council, the Internet Research Agency’s plans to meddle in American life through social media were well underway. According to Mueller’s indictment, in the spring of 2014, the agency, which was run by a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, had set up a group that would use social media platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to target the 2016 US presidential election.

The stated goal: Spread “distrust towards the candidates and the political system in general.”

But it wasn’t stopped. It wasn’t taken seriously:

But even by October 2016, a month before the election, the US government did not appear to take the threat seriously.
“We fully recognized Russians were using social media. We believed their use of it was largely based on trolls and probing acts to get information. At that point, we didn’t really see it as a calculated and willful effort to use social media to communicate with groups and do a call for action,” a highly placed intelligence source told CNN.

Of course, it was expected that hillary would win. There was no way she could lose. The excuse for not doing anything?

The Obama administration feared that acknowledging Russian meddling in the 2016 election would reveal too much about intelligence gathering and be interpreted as “taking sides” in the race, the former secretary of homeland security said Wednesday.

But what if it was more than that? democrats scream on a daily basis that the Russians were “hacking” the election and wanted Trump to win. They scream collusion day after day without a shred of evidence while obama knew the Russians were attempting to meddle but seemed not to regard protecting the vote as something important. It’s almost as if he wanted the issue to live on.

What if he let it live on in order to frame a candidate? What if he ordered someone to direct Josef Mifsud and Stefan Halper to seed George Papadopoulos with gossip about hillary’s emails, asked Alexander Downer to fortuitously “bump into” Papadopoulos and ask him about the emails and nail young George in a perjury trap and then try to suborn perjury from George to use against Trump?

Initially it was thought that the plot formed when Trump met with the WaPo board on March 21, 2016

And that has taken them back to March 21, 2016, when candidate Donald Trump met with the editorial board of the Washington Post.

At the time of that meeting, Trump had been under criticism for not having the sort of lists of distinguished advisers that most top-level campaigns routinely assemble. That was particularly true in the area of foreign policy. A frustrated Trump ordered his team to compile a list of foreign-affairs advisers.

Trump was preparing to announce his advisory board when he met with the Post. The paper’s publisher asked Trump if he would reveal the names of his new team.

“Well, I hadn’t thought of doing it, but if you want I can give you some of the names,” Trump said. He then read a brief list, among them Page and Papadopoulos.

Page. Papadopoulos. The plot grows.

That meeting was in March. In April, obama begins funneling nearly a milllion dollars into Fusion GPS via Perkins and Coie. In March 2016 the Clinton campaign and the DNC began paying Fusion GPS and indirectly, Christopher Steele.  They fail to report the reason for the spending to the FEC as was required..

Coincidentally, on April 26 2016, Josef Mifsud meets with Papadopoulos and feeds him gossip about the Clinton emails.

A court document filed by the special counsel says Mifsud told Papadopoulos in April 2016 that Russia had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton in the form of “thousands of emails.”

Mifsud poured it on:

In the US affidavit, Papadopoulos claims Mifsud — referred to as “Foreign Contact 1” — told him in April 2016 that the Russians had “thousands of emails” relating to Hillary Clinton.

An associate also told CNN that he repeatedly bragged about how Moscow had “compromising material” on the Clinton campaign in spring 2016, contradicting Mifsud’s assertion that he never talked about Russian “dirt” on the Democratic presidential bid.

And then Mifsud vanished from the face of the Earth.

Here’s what FactCheck.org says about Papadoplouos’ meetings:

April 2016 –– Papadopoulos “sent multiple emails to other members of the Campaign’s foreign policy team regarding his contacts with ‘the Russians’ and his ‘outreach to Russia.’”

And Vox:

Papadopoulos: Back in April 2016, Papadopoulos got a tip from a foreign professor he understood to have Russian government connections that the Russians had “dirt” on Clinton in the form of “thousands of emails.” He then proceeded to have extensive contacts with the professor and a Russian woman, during which he tried to plan a Trump campaign trip to Russia.

Politico says the first time Papadopoulos’ name is mentioned is on March 21, 2016, but Newsweek reported this:

Within two weeks of joining Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, George Papadopoulos met a professor while traveling in Italy. Their encounter took place on March 14, 2016, after Trump had named Papadopoulos a foreign policy adviser earlier that month. The London-based professor apparently told Papadopoulos he had ties to Russian officials, and over the next weeks and months, the adviser spoke with campaign leaders about arranging a meeting with those officials.

From the Mueller indictment:

and

 

The “Russians” consisted of Mifsud and an unidentified “Russian national.”  That “Russian national” appears to be one Olga Polonskaya. More on her later.

Then the month after that, May 2016, the Clinton-connected Alexander Downer is asked to run into Papadopoulos in a London bar where he peppers young George with questions about the Clinton dirt. As I previously wrote:

Really- what are the odds that a Clinton ally would, on the same night and in the same wine room, just happen to sidle up to a Trump adviser who was fed information the month before by a “professor”, ply him with alcohol and get him to blather something about Russia having dirt on Hillary?

Of all the wine joints in all the towns in all the world, Downer happens to walk into George’s?

The answer is zero.

Downer goes through the motions of telling his bosses about Papadopoulos, who then relay the info to the obama regime, who then turn to Comey and McCabe, who then hand it off to Strzok. Strzok, fresh off making sure hillary was free of any legal jeopardy, opens a counter intelligence op in late July against Trump. There is evidence that a lot of people knew about it.

Newly uncovered text messages between FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page suggest a possible coordination between high-ranking officials at the Obama White House, CIA, FBI, Justice Department and former Senate Democratic leadership in the early stages of the investigation into alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, according to GOP congressional investigators on Wednesday.

The investigators say the information provided to Fox News “strongly” suggests coordination between former President Barack Obama’s Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, then-Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid, and CIA Director John Brennan — which they say would “contradict” the Obama administration’s public stance about its hand in the process.

Page texted Strzok on Aug. 2, 2016, saying: “Make sure you can lawfully protect what you sign. Just thinking about congress, foia, etc. You probably know better than me.”

A text message from Strzok to Page on Aug. 3 described former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe as being concerned with “information control” related to the initial investigation into the Trump campaign. According to a report from the New York Times, Brennan was sent to Capitol Hill around the same time to brief members of Congress on the possibility of election interference.

Apparently not having enough on poor George, someone dispatched Stefan Halper to seal the deal. September, 2016:

Halper first contacted Papadopoulos by email. In a Sept. 2, 2016, message sent to Papadopoulos’s personal email account, he offered the Trump aide $3,000 to write a policy paper on issues related to Turkey, Cyprus, Israel and the Leviathan natural gas field. Halper also offered to pay for Papadopoulos’s flight and a three-night stay in London.

Papadopoulos accepted the proposal, flew to England, and met with Halper and one of his assistants. He delivered the paper electronically Oct. 2 and received payment days later, according to documents TheDCNF reviewed.

George didn’t give Halper all Halper sought:

According to a source with knowledge of the meeting, Halper asked Papadopoulos: “George, you know about hacking the emails from Russia, right?”

Papadopoulos told Halper he didn’t know anything about emails or Russian hacking, said the source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the investigations into Russian meddling in the 2016 campaign. The professor did not follow up on the line of inquiry.

Didn’t matter. Mueller wanted his ass and got it.

January 2017: Papadopoulos is interviewed by the FBI

July 27, 2017: Papadopoulos was arrested by the FBI.

October, 2017: Papadopoulos accepts plea deal.

That “Russian national” who got George in such trouble? Her name is Olga Polonskaya. As for her being a spy for Putin:

Polonskaya’s brother, Sergei Vinogradov, told the Times that she has never worked for the Russian government, and was introduced to Papadopoulos while discussing an internship with Mifsud. She didn’t speak English well enough to fully follow the conversation between Papadopoulos and Mifsud, he added.

“It’s totally ridiculous,” he said. “She’s not interested in politics. She can barely tell the difference between Lenin and Stalin.”

The mystery man in all of this is not Stefan Halper. We know that he was a US IC asset. It is all but certain that Halper was acting on behalf of the obama regime when he lured Papadopoulos to England and then pressed him for information about hillary clinton’s emails.

The mystery man is Josef Mifsud.

 

That’s Boris Johnson in the middle, who now has no memory of meeting Mifsud.

That’s Mifsud on the left. CNN describes him this way:

For an academic with modest credentials and few publications to his name, he had surprisingly high-profile connections among Russian officials.
Mifsud’s former assistant has told CNN that she set up meetings between Mifsud and Russian academics and officials. They included Ivan Timofeev, who is on the Russian International Affairs Council, and Evgeny Bazhanov, President of the Foreign Ministry’s Diplomatic Academy.

One might be tempted to think Mifsud is a Russian liaison, but that might just be a ruse. Mifsud might be a UK asset:

A particularly compelling factor indicating that Mifsud’s working relationship with Claire Smith suggests his direct connection with UK intelligence is Smith’s membership of the UK’s Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), a supervisory body overseeing all UK intelligence agencies. The JIC is part of the Cabinet Office and reports directly to the Prime Minister. The Committee also sets the collection and analysis priorities for all of the agencies it supervises. Claire Smith also served as a member of the UK’s Cabinet Office.

In summary, Mifsud’s appearance with Claire Smith at the LINK campus, in addition to her discussion on intelligence at yet another university where Mifsud was also employed, as well as her long-standing role in UK intelligence vetting and her position as a member of the UK Joint Intelligence Committee, would suggest that the roving scholar is not a Russian agent, but is actually a UK intelligence asset. The possibility that such a high-ranking member of this extremely powerful intelligence supervisory group was photographed standing next to a “Russian” asset unknowingly is patently absurd. This finding knocks the first pillar out from under the edifice of the Trump-Russia allegations. It provides an initial suggestion of the UK’s involvement in procuring the ‘evidence’ that fueled the debacle.

Claire Smith is not the only British official associated with Mifsud. He was a speaker at an event by the Central European Initiative alongside former British diplomat Charles Crawford, whose postings included Moscow, Sarajevo, Belgrade and Warsaw. Crawford is listed as a visiting Professor with the same London Academy of Diplomacy (LAD) where Mifsud served as Director, associated with Stirling University. This adds more weight to the idea that Mifsud is a familiar figure among the upper echelons of the UK intelligence and foreign policy establishment.

The final nail in the coffin of the theory that Mifsud is a Russian spy is this photograph of Mifsud standing next to Boris Johnson, the UK Foreign Secretary, as reported by The Guardian. The photograph, taken in October 2017 – nearly a full year after the US Presidential election and nine months after Mifsud’s name appeared in newspaper headlines worldwide as allegedly involved in Russian meddling in that election – is either highly embarrassing for the hapless Mr Johnson, or it’s not, because Joseph Mifsud is actually a valued and security-vetted asset to the United Kingdom.

There are fascinating suggestions of a connection between Mifsud and the DNC (via Zero Hedge)

Pittella talks about Mifsud thus: “Joseph è un mio caro amico, non posso crederlo coinvolto nel Russiagate” (“Joseph is my dear friend, I can not believe he is involved in Russiagate“) – in an Italian news story here. This is more than people who happen to meet at events.
It is not only academic – Pittella has brought Mifsud campaigning with him – see this pic from a PD rally with him with Mifsud. There are tweets (onetwo) with him and Mifsud.
And so why is this especially significant? Because Pittella went and campaigned for Clinton and attended the DNC in 2016. Him doing so was even written up in Time Magazine here.

And it’s worth nothing that Pitella is emphatically anti-Trump

Rollo shook his head. “I don’t understand the people who support Trump,” he said. “He’s anti-woman, anti-Muslim, anti-Latino. He’s creating a philosophy of hate. He almost sounds like the Nazis.”

Pittella agreed. He’s had some experience with a leader who presented himself as the savior of the country. “In the past [Italian dictator Benito] Mussolini said the same thing, taking advantage from the crisis at that time that Italy was living. The damages made by Mussolini were solved by America,” he said. “Who would solve Trump’s damages?”

Anti-Trump. Just like Hillary. Just like Obama. Just like the DNC. It’s almost all there. Show me the FISA!

Andy McCarthy is right. The Russian collusion thing is a domestic creation and it likely begins with Josef Mifsud. Back in February I wondered whether there were any Russians at all.

I doubt there ever were.

 

UPDATE

Halper has now vanished as well

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Some of Obama’s “flexibility” after his last election?

Add the Professors daddy was in the CIA, the professor worked for Bush a CIA guy himself as an operative in the Reagan election spying on Carter. The Bushs slip in an October pussy grabbing tape. Were silent about Obama but critical of Trump This goes deep very deep, has nothing to do with twitter, facebook trolls and bots. It has to do with a guy who they cannot manipulate with blackmail to further the destruction of the Republic.

During Obama’s presidency, after Lois Lerner testified, an IRS memo was discovered about how NSA information ILLEGALLY obtained by IRS could still be used by the IRS as long as the IRS created a parallel construction of how they might have obtained that evidence so it could be used against someone in court.

The NSA was gathering over 5 Billion records a DAY by 2013.
How easy to create the dots only later to pretend you discovered the dots connecting someone innocent to something nefarious?
And that is what Obama’s Deep State did to the Trump campaign.
They already had all the Russian side.
All they needed to do was cause a few meetings.
Like Carter Page hanging around Trump Tower during the transition time.
Like a mystery man getting one of the transition team members drunk then feeding him a “story.”
Like a false premise to force a meeting between a Trump family member and a Russian woman.
Still, there’s no there there.
And there won’t be.
So, now how does Deep State shift the narrative?
Here’s an idea:
James Clapper Defends Spying On Trump Campaign As ‘A Legitimate Activity’
It kind of reminds me how Hillary played dumb about the dossier for so long, then, when the truth finally came out pouted, sure I paid for it, so what!