Fbi and Mifsud. The in-depth analysis by Federico Punzi, editorial director of Atlantico Quotidiano
Two days ago, Joseph Mifsud’s “302”, the report drawn up by the FBI on the interrogation of the Maltese professor held in Washington in February 2017, finally came out. Two pages which confirm all the contradictions that we have highlighted in Atlantico Quotidiano in recent months about the conduct of the Mueller team and the entire Russiagate investigation system.
We have always wondered, in particular, why, considering him a Russian agent or otherwise a person with high-level contacts in Russia, and believing that he had actually reported to Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos that the Russians were in possession of “dirt” material on candidate Clinton, the FBI and Special Attorney Mueller have not arrested, indicted, or tried to track down Mifsud after the February 2017 interrogation. Now, from 302, it also emerges that that one interrogation was not even so thorough.
The Maltese professor, according to the report, denied the FBI agents of having known in advance any emails from the Democratic Committee in possession of the Russians and, therefore, having made proposals or provided information to Papadopoulos.
In the interrogation Mifsud confirmed the first meeting with Papadopoulos in Rome, at Link Campus University, and also a second meeting, in London, but he omitted the next two meetings.
A very brief and superficial interrogation for one suspected of being a Russian agent tasked with getting in touch with the Trump Campaign to help it win the election.
Mifsud himself told agents that he put Papadopoulos in contact via email with Ivan Timofeev of the Russian International Affairs Council, linked to the Russian Foreign Ministry. Still, there is no question from the agents about his relations with Timofeev or with other personalities of (or close to) the Russian government. But it was precisely starting from his relationship with Timofeev that the narrative of the liberal media and the Mueller team was built according to which he is a Russian agent.
In short, there is no indication, in the February 2017 interrogation, that could suggest that the FBI considered Mifsud a Russian agent, contrary to how he would have been presented throughout the Russiagate investigation and in the final report of the special prosecutor itself. Mueller.
The FBI got hold of the key figure, from whose meetings with Papadopoulos the Crossfire Hurricane investigation had started, and let him go after a brief interrogation without even asking him about his ties to Russia. In his report, Mueller argues that Papadopoulos’ misrepresentations to the FBI prevented agents from effectively questioning Mifsud in February 2017, and specifically from harassing him about his “inaccurate claims”. Yet, in fact, none of the false statements contested to Papadopoulos could have hindered the investigation, much less compromised the interrogation. He had declared that at the time of the meetings with Mifsud he was not yet part of the Trump Campaign, but the FBI already knew that it was false, as evidenced by the FISA surveillance request submitted in October 2016. It is also indifferent that Papadopoulos has downplayed the importance of his communications with Mifsud and the professor’s contacts in Russia, since at the basis of the investigation, since its opening, there was a revelation that a Russian agent had reported to Papadopoulos some “dirt” material about Clinton in Russian hands. Hence, Mifsud’s Russian contacts should have been the focus of the February interrogation anyway.
Furthermore, when Mifsud denied the agents that he had revealed anything, the FBI already knew that Papadopoulos had instead confirmed the circumstance. And when I deny further meetings, the FBI already knew there were two more in April 2016 after the two admitted by the professor. Inaccuracies that the agents could have accused Mifsud immediately in the February interrogation.
But in the two pages of Mifsud’s 302 we also find the confirmation of the role of another figure in which the Mueller team seems not to have been interested. In their second meeting, the first in London, the professor arrives accompanied by a beautiful girl, Olga Polonskaya, a student of the Link Campus master’s degree in intelligence, presented to Papadopoulos as linked to Putin or even his “niece”. Mifsud agents will tell the agents not to believe that she was a relative of Putin, but someone in Papadopoulos must have made him believe it, because as the FBI reports, the same day of the meeting he rushes to search for confirmation on Google. Mifsud will also suggest to the agents that the two may have been in a relationship, but in his report Mueller writes that from the tone of the emails a personal relationship seemed to exist rather between the girl and the professor. Mifsud also failed to tell agents that he himself prepared the draft or edited an email from Polonskaya addressed to Papadopoulos. It is therefore an attempt at sexual solicitation
The fact remains that even Polonskaya has been lost: other questions to ask the Link and the Rome prosecutor’s office…
Not only that. From the “302” reports of Papadopoulos’ interrogations it emerges that the former Trump campaign consultant actually expressed his willingness to actively help the FBI locate Mifsud. In the February 1 interrogation, for example, he told officers that the professor “had recently contacted him” and had “indicated that perhaps he would go to Washington in February”, as we know from a conference sponsored by the State Department (!). Just the occasion the FBI managed to interrogate him. But Papadopoulos’ availability was omitted from the deeds filed by the Mueller team against him.
In any case, the professor will lose his tracks only in November 2017, continuing up to that moment to lead his usual public life made up of relationships and conferences, even abroad, without feeling in any way hunted or in danger (few months after the interrogation in Washington, he took part in an international conference in Saudi Arabia with former CIA and MI6 officials). So, the FBI and the Mueller team had 9 months to track him down and investigate. But they did not consider doing it.
In his report, Mueller does not explicitly state that Mifsud was a Russian agent, as claimed by former FBI director Comey at the Washington Post, but alludes to it, highlighting his contacts with Russian government and intelligence figures. The prosecutor completely omits, however, Mifsud’s much closer and more intense relationships with Western academic, diplomatic, political and intelligence circles – NATO military personnel, former American and British intelligence officials, diplomats, ministers and Western politicians, the former Vice President of the European Parliament Pittella, who defined him as a “dear friend”. If Mifsud really worked for the Russians, an incredible number of diplomatic personalities and institutions, Western policies and security with which he had come into contact may have been seriously compromised, a gigantic security breach in the United States and allied governments. Yet, this hypothesis has never raised alarm, it has never been treated as a potential threat, neither by the FBI nor by other agencies.
Despite the fact that during his investigation the special prosecutor indicted many people, even if only for having lied to the FBI, and although in the report he claims that Mifsud also lied about his meetings with Papadopoulos, he never indicted or tried to track down the Maltese professor for question him again. When asked specifically during a congressional hearing, Mueller entrenched himself behind a “I can’t answer this.” And again: if the conversations between Papadopoulos and Mifsud, reported through diplomatic channels by the Australian ambassador Downer on July 26, 2016, are really at the origin of the investigation, as always supported by the FBI, taken so seriously as to motivate, from Sun,
As Chris Blackburn noted on Twitter yesterday, there is a very simple way to verify the good faith of the investigation: find when (and if) British and Italian authorities have been asked to investigate Mifsud, the London Center of International Law Practice) and Link Campus, organizations of which he was a member.
From another key document recently declassified, the “Electronic Communication” (EC) of the FBI with which the counterintelligence investigation called “Crossfire Hurricane” was internally announced on July 31, 2016, among other things emerges the extreme vagueness of the information from which everything would come.
In the same memo that Ambassador Downer had turned to the US diplomatic office in London, in which he referred to the conversation he had with Papadopoulos, it was emphasized that “it was not clear whether he or the Russians were referring to material acquired publicly or by other means” , “It was also not clear how the Trump team reacted to the offer” and, in any case, “the reaction of the Trump team, ultimately, may have little bearing on what Russia decides to do, with or without Trump’s cooperation “.
Downer essentially refers to a “suggestion” he felt more than two months earlier in a bar by Papadopoulos (or even referred to him by another Australian official, Erika Thompson). A suggestion that Papadopoulos had learned from Professor Mifsud, who in turn had learned it in Moscow from Russian officials.
But there were no elements, in Downer’s report, to infer that it was precisely the emails hacked at the National Democratic Committee. Papadopoulos never talked about “email” with the Australians. Neither Downer nor Papadopoulos ever claimed that there was talk of “email”. It does not appear in the Mueller report and, now we know, not even in the memo passed by Downer and quoted in the EC. It should be noted that the Australian diplomat remembers Papadopoulos’ statements in the May meeting only after more than two months, on 26 July. Four days earlier, WikiLeaks had started spreading hacked emails to the DNC. Only then does Downer remember them, perhaps linking them to that fact, even though he had hitherto considered them insignificant. To make you suspicious,
A false premise, therefore, or, worse, a fabricated pretext to give official investigation coverage to a surveillance activity on the Trump Campaign that was already underway.
Therefore, the question regarding Mifsud remains central: who and on behalf of who was acting when I come into contact in a far from casual way with Papadopoulos
If it were a Western intelligence asset, then this would prove that Papadopoulos was lured and already framed in the spring of 2016, long before the opening of Crossfire Hurricane, and would raise suspicions that the Obama administration opened the investigation based on fabricated evidence, for the sole purpose of spying on the Trump campaign.
On Twitter, Papadopoulos recalled that it is “from the information on Mifsud given by Italian officials that the Durham criminal investigation has started. Italy is with us “.
Article published on atlanticoquotidiano.it
