‘This meeting was anything but random. Intelligence operatives engineered it…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) In a book due to be published next month, former Trump campaign staffer George Papadopoulos is expected to go even farther than the Justice Department inspector general’s report in revealing the lengths to which anti-Trump operatives in the FBI sought to ensnare the future president.
Papadopoulos, despite having had only a minor role as a campaign adviser, became an FBI patsy in the deep-state effort to sow the seeds of Russian collusion that grew into the two-year-long Mueller investigation.
His claim during a casual conversation with an Australian diplomat to know about Russian dirt on Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton—prior to the disclosure of Clinton staffers’ private emails on Wikileaks—ostensibly triggered the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation.
But according to Papadopoulos, it was all a set-up.
“[T]his meeting was anything but random. Intelligence operatives engineered it,” Papadopoulos writes in Deep State Target: How I Got Caught in the Crosshairs of the Plot to Bring Down President Trump, according to a preview of the book by American Greatness.
Papadopoulos eventually served two weeks in jail after he admitted lying to the FBI about his conversations.
However, others caught up in the investigation have noted that the agency—corrupted by the influence of biased, deep-state “resistance” fighters like Peter Strzok and Kevin Clinesmith—purposely laid perjury traps to coerce witnesses into making false statements.
Papadopoulos confirms in his new book that Clinesmith—who allegedly falsified an official government document in order to secure a FISA warrant for spying on the Trump campaign—had an even bigger role in the conspiracy.
Clinesmith, a low-level FBI line attorney, was later revealed to have sent a series of damning anti-Trump text-messages, including one that said “Viva la resistance!”
He resigned two months before DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz‘s report recommended him for criminal prosecution over his altering of an email to suggest that Trump adviser Carter Page was a Russian plant rather than a CIA asset.
Papadopoulos writes that Clinesmith “seem[ed] to be leading a lot of this inquisition” and that the FBI had used Maltese professor Joseph Mifsud, as well as other FBI assets outside the U.S., in a bid to plant the rumors about Russian dirt, hoping they would spread virally within the campaign.
“Papadopoulos paints a picture of an attempt to make him a typhoid Mary of the Mifsud Russian hacking rumor” says American Greatness.
“Once Papadopoulos had the information, he was supposed to infect the entire Trump campaign with a tantalizing promise of Russian dirt on Clinton,” it continues. “But he didn’t take the bait and never passed on the information.”
Moreover, Papadopoulos asserts that he never brought up the Russian dirt in his conversation with Australian diplomat Alexander Downer.
Rather, he suggests that Clinesmith sought to implant the false memory during his interrogation. Despite reports that he was drunk, Papadopoulos says he had only a single gin and tonic.
He also recalls in the book his surprise that the FBI seemed so disinterested in Mifsud, who told him of the Russian hacking rumors, although he was asked repeatedly in interviews about others within the campaign whom he might have shared the information with.
“I keep waiting for someone to ask me about Mifsud himself. But nobody seems to care about him,” Papadopoulos writes. “I can’t believe these people are not interested in the source of this information.”
Mifsud was reportedly interviewed in Rome last year by special prosecutor John Durham, whose ongoing investigation into the FBI conspiracy, many hope, will offer decisive answers—and prosecutions—to bring closure to the saga.
After serving his sentence, Papadopoulos seems ready to move on, translating his unjustly bestowed notoriety into a positive by running for the congressional seat in California left open by disgraced Democratic “throuple” Rep. Katie Hill.