In Papers Saying Papadopoulos Lied, FBI Reveals It’s Also Lying Or Incompetent

To say that George Papadopoulos’ lies (or inaccurate memory of the events, as his wife puts it) prevented the FBI from questioning, detaining, or arresting Joseph Mifsud is unbelievable.

On Friday, Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office filed a sentencing memorandum in its pending criminal case against former Donald Trump campaign advisor George Papadopoulos. Papadopoulos, who pled guilty in October 2017 to making false statements to the FBI, is scheduled to be sentenced next month.

In the sentencing memorandum, Mueller’s team provided the court a detailed background of Papadopoulos’ criminal offense and suggested Papadopoulos’ lies justified a sentence of 0 to 6 months of incarceration. While much of the ten-page memorandum merely rehashes facts previously known, one passage includes a significant new admission and proves the FBI is either incompetent, or incompetent at lying.

Let’s Run Through the Context First

Before we get to why, a quick refresher. In early March 2016, Papadopoulos learned he would serve as a foreign policy advisor for the Trump presidential campaign. Later that month, Papadopoulos met a professor while traveling in Italy, Joseph Mifsud.

According to court filings, Mifsud seemed uninterested in him until after Papadopoulos told the professor he was joining Trump’s campaign team, at which point Mifsud took a great interest in Papadopoulos. Papadopoulos stated in the same filing that in late April, Mifsud, after purportedly returning from a trip to Moscow, told him the Russians had obtained “dirt” on then-candidate Clinton.

Papadopoulos reportedly repeated that claim to an Australian diplomat, Alexander Downer, in May over drinks in a London bar. Then, following the WikiLeaks release of the hacked Democratic National Committee emails, the FBI launched Crossfire Hurricane on July 31, 2016, to investigate any collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

From text messages between former FBI agent Peter Strzok and his mistress, former FBI attorney Lisa Page, we know one of the first things the FBI did after officially launching the probe into the Trump campaign was send Strzok and another trusted agent to London. Strzok’s texts reveal he arrived in London on August 1 and flew back to the District of Columbia on August 3, following at least one meeting and several interviews, bringing with him a slew of documents.

Two-plus months later, the DOJ filed its first of four Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act applications for a court order to wiretap a different Trump campaign advisor—Carter Page. (The DOJ recently released heavily redacted copies of the applications.) The FISA court issued its first surveillance order in...Read More HERE