Free Republic

[SNIP] Joseph Mifsud, a former Maltese official who co-directs the London Academy of Diplomacy at the University of Stirling, was identified in media reports after details in the documents pointed to his attendance at a conference in Russia last year. He told the Daily Telegraph Tuesday that he is the professor in the documents, but said that the acquaintance in Moscow with government connections who he introduced Papadopoulos to was only an academic. Mifsud also told the paper that he did not know anything about Russian “dirt” on Clinton, and said that he was upset by the “incredible” claims. He...

The British Guardian posted a report on April 13 claiming that its sources now admit that the British spy agency GCHQ was digitally wiretapping Trump associates, going back to late 2015. This was presumably when the December 2015 Moscow meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Lt. General Michael Flynn took place. This runs contrary to the blanket nature of the denial insinuated in GCHQ’s carefully-crafted statement of March 17 claiming it was all “nonsense” and “utterly ridiculous” that they conducted surveillance of “then president-elect” Donald Trump (emphasis added). The surveillance went back a year before he became “president-elect.”

John F. Kerry was late to his own party. Staffers, journalists and other officials were gathered in the ornate Benjamin Franklin salon at the State Department on Dec. 14 for early Christmas festivities. But the secretary of State was nowhere to be seen. Kerry was on the telephone to various world leaders, trying to find out about a major diplomatic meeting — from which the United States had been excluded. The gathering, which sought to broker a resolution to the devastating Syrian conflict, took place six days later in Moscow and involved the foreign ministers of Russia, Iran and Turkey.