Former Australian ambassador to the UK Alexander Downer has denied that the purpose of his 2016 meeting with George Papadopoulos, then-adviser to the presidential campaign of Donald Trump, was to entice the aide to talk about Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Papadopoulos has alleged that the Downer meeting was a set-up.
In his book, “Deep State Target: How I Got Caught in the Crosshairs of the Plot to Bring Down President Trump,” Papadopoulos argues that Trump’s opponents tied to the U.S., Australian, and UK intelligence community orchestrated for Papadopoulos to receive a rumor of Kremlin’s having “dirt” on then-candidate Hillary Clinton, and then dispatched operatives, including Downer, to extract the rumor from him and use it as evidence of supposed conspiracy between Trump and Russia.
Downer denied that the FBI or any intelligence service asked him to meet with Papadopoulos.
“Somebody who is a former foreign minister and Australian high commissioner, or ambassador, in London is hardly going to be somebody who’s used by intelligence services to collect information,” Downer said, with a chuckle. “That would never happen. That simply isn’t how those kind of operations work.”
Downer, later in the interview, even called himself “somebody who is part of the Five Eyes intelligence community.” Five Eyes is the agreement on sharing signals intelligence between the United States, the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The alliance has been criticized for opening a way for the countries’ foreign intelligence agencies to spy on their own citizens by outsourcing the task to each other and then sharing the results.
Downer also is connected to the intelligence community through the private sector.
Between 2008 and 2014, he sat on the advisory board of London-based Hakluyt, a security firm founded and staffed by former UK intelligence officials.
Origins Story
The Downer-Papadopoulos meeting is allegedly the crucial moment that prompted the FBI to begin a counterintelligence investigation of people in the Trump campaign, which only ended in March. As concluded by special counsel Robert Mueller, who took over the probe in 2017, investigators didn’t establish that any collusion between Trump and Russia occurred.In his final report, Mueller said that “on May 6, 2016, Papadopoulos “suggested to a representative of a foreign government 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 candidate Clinton.”
The foreign government, presumably Australia, “conveyed this information to the U.S. government on July 26, 2016,” the report stated, four days after Wikileaks started to release emails allegedly hacked by Russians from the server of the Democratic National Committee (DNC).
Alarmed by Papadopoulos’ supposed foreknowledge of the Wikileaks release, the FBI launched the probe.
Issues
First, Downer described the meeting to the media multiple times and never mentioned any “indications” of Russians offering assistance to Trump.He said that “there was no suggestion that there was collusion” between Trump or his campaign with Kremlin, neither in what Papadopoulos said, nor in what he reported to Canberra. “All we did was report what Papadopoulos said and that was that he thought the Russians may release information—might release information—that could be damaging to Hillary Clinton’s campaign at some stage before the election.”
Different Date
Another issue is that both the Australian government and Papadopoulos said the meeting took place on May 10, not May 6. He has said this on many occasions long before the Mueller report came out, and told The Epoch Times via Twitter that his lawyers will look up the relevant records.For all Downer knew, Papadopoulos could have just mentioned what he heard on the news.
Papadopoulos said Thompson reached out to him on May 6 to arrange the Downer meeting, but he denied mentioning to her anything about information “damaging” to Clinton and there hasn’t been any public information suggesting otherwise. Moreover, he said he didn’t meet Thompson that day. The meeting was arranged through messages, he said. Thompson would, therefore, have had a record of the communication. The Mueller report doesn’t refer to any such record.
Joseph Mifsud
In early March 2016, right after landing his job with the Trump campaign, Papadopoulos was urged by his employer at the time, the London Centre of International Law Practice (LCILP), to attend a conference at the Link Campus University in Rome. There, on March 14, he met Maltese academic Joseph Mifsud, whose job was to attract foreign students for the university and who was also listed on the LCILP website as a board adviser.Mifsud invited Papadopoulos to London under the pretext that he could help him arrange an official meeting between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Papadopoulos thought such a meeting would be a boon to Trump’s campaign promise to improve relations with Russia.
During their second meeting in London on April 26, 2016, Mifsud, who had just returned from a trip to Russia, said to Papadopoulos, “I have information that the Russians have thousands of Clinton emails,” Papadopoulos later told CNN.
Yet Mifsud told the FBI that was a misunderstanding.
The Mueller report states that when the FBI questioned Mifsud on Feb. 10, 2017, he “denied that he had advance knowledge that Russia was in possession of emails damaging to candidate Clinton, stating that he and Papadopoulos had discussed cybersecurity and hacking as a larger issue and that Papadopoulos must have misunderstood their conversation.”
Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) questioned this apparent omission in a May 3 letter to the heads of the FBI, CIA, NSA, and the State Department.
If, on the other hand, Mifsud wasn’t a counterintelligence threat, Nunes said, “then that would cast doubt on the Special Counsel’s fundamental depiction of him and his activities, and raise questions about the veracity of the Special Counsel’s statements and affirmations.”
The Mueller report says that Mifsud “falsely stated” that he hadn’t seen Papadopoulos since March 24, 2016.
Yet there’s no sign the FBI tried to reinterview Mifsud or charge him with lying. The report says that the agents couldn’t question Mifsud effectively because Papadopoulos lied to them.
Papadopoulos indeed lied about his contacts with Mifsud in a January 2017 FBI interview. But after he was arrested on July 27, 2017, he has extensively cooperated with the Mueller probe.
It’s not clear where he’s been since.