Downer gave an interview on Australian television a couple of weeks ago about this. That interview matches what I've heard from a number of different sources. It also matches common sense.
His Excellency the Honourable Alexander Downer, Companion of the Order of Australia, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary, High Commmisioner of the Commonwealth of Australia to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, is not going to be somebody who is used to entrap a young lawyer, working as a minor adviser to a Republican Presidential candidate. Downer isn't an intelligence agent - he's way too high profile for that including his time as Australia's longest serving Foreign Minister (equivalent to your Secretary of State).
What happened is fairly simple - Papadopoulous was friends with somebody working at the Israeli embassy in London. That man was the boyfriend of a relatively junior staffer at the Australian High Commission (the two are now engaged). He introduced Papadopolous to his girlfriend and when Papadopoulous found out where she worked, he asked if she could arrange a meeting between himself and the High Commissioner Alexander Downer. He said he worked for Donald Trump, who was that stage likely to be the Republican nominee and therefore was potentially a US President. On that basis, Downer agreed to meet with Papadopoulous on the grounds he might be a useful person to know.
The Australian High Commissioner does not go trawling for people to talk to. That doesn't make any sense.
At the meeting, Papadopoulous - for whatever reason - told Downer the Russians had some sort of compromising information concerning Hilary Clinton. He knew who he was talking to - the representative of the Australian government in the United Kingdom. If he did not expect that information to be passed back to Canberra, he would have to be an absolute moron.
Yes, I just watched it all. He wasn't asked and didn't say who called for the meeting or why they had the meeting. The only interview Downer has given was in this article. His only comment on how/why they met was this...
"We just arranged to have a drink with him on the way home one evening," he said.
That doesn't come close to saying Papadopoulos asked for the meeting.
Papadopoulous asked for a meeting with the Australian High Commissioner.
All I asked for was your source on that not your opinion of the man. Do you have a source for that or not?
Downer was tricked, instructed, or coerced to meet with Papa. That does make sense.
What doesn’t make sense is why would Papa just up and request a meeting with Downer to say “hey mate, I’ve got some dirt on a candidate of a foreign election....”
Something stinks. Both of them were likely corralled into this.
Sorry, the moron would have to be Downer. Let's be honest here. Hillary Clinton had a homebrew server in the basement/bathroom or whatever. The fact that Papadopoulos said the Russians had dirt on Hillary is news? That's laughable. It would be news if he said they didn't.
How terrible must the Austrian Government's Intelligence Service have to be to take gossip and blow it out of proportion? They would have to be the stupidest intelligence service on the planet.
The FBI started it's the investigation into Clinton's bathroom server nearly a year before. It's absurd to think that the Russian's didn't have this information and didn't hack the server. Hell, the emails were also on creepy Wiener's laptop.
Papadopoulos wasn't providing groundbreaking news. News so important that Downer had to report it to the intelligence services immediately. What a joke. It was widely speculated that her wide-open unsecured server had to have been hacked by every intelligence service in the world.
Downer expects everyone to believe that he was shocked, dumbfounded when he heard this gossip from a low-level Trump aid. He must have peed his pants when heard Russians want to interfere in an election (shocking, I tell you). Something that was common knowledge to anyone with two braincells.