George Papadopoulos, once a campaign adviser to Donald Trump, is hinting that he was a target of an intelligence operation that put him at the center of an FBI investigation.
In a series of tweets late on Sept. 10, Papadopoulos detailed his suspicions about a meeting with Alexander Downer—then-Australian High Commissioner to the United Kingdom—that occurred several months before the 2016 U.S. presidential election. He expressed a belief that Downer was sent to the meeting by somebody, perhaps British intelligence.
It was that conversation with Downer that allegedly prompted the launch of an FBI investigation into the campaign of then-candidate Donald Trump in 2016. It was that conversation that didn’t smell right to Papadopoulos. He said it was odd to him that Downer would want to talk, since Papadopoulos had no expertise in U.S.–Australia relations. Papadopoulos seems to suspect the meeting with Downer was a setup.
Downer reported the conversation to Canberra “a day or two after,” as “it seemed quite interesting,” he told The Australian.
After July 22, 2016, when Wikileaks started publishing emails that had been stolen from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) server, Joe Hockey, Australian ambassador to the United States, passed the info from Downer to the FBI. The bureau suspected that Papadopoulos knew about the DNC leak in advance and opened the investigation into Trump–Russia links on July 31, 2016, based on reports in The Sydney Morning Herald and The New York Times.
He, nonetheless, told the FBI in January 2017 that he was in possession of similar knowledge. In April 2016, he was told by Maltese academic Joseph Mifsud that Russians had thousands of Clinton’s emails.
Downer’s Links
Downer, indeed, had some intelligence connections.From 2008 to 2014, he sat on the advisory board of London-based Hakluyt, a security firm that employs a number of former UK diplomats and former MI6 (British intelligence) operatives.
Downer also is personally linked to Clinton, as he once arranged a $25 million donation to the Clinton Foundation from the Australian government for AIDS prevention and education efforts.
Christopher Steele was the former MI6 spy credited with authoring the anti-Trump dossier paid for by the Clinton campaign and the DNC. The unverified claims in the dossier were used by the FBI and Justice Department officials to obtain a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant to monitor Carter Page. A group of Republicans in Congress are investigating whether the officials misled the court and Page’s rights were infringed upon.