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In response to media inquiry and FOIA demands, the government of Australia formally admitted today to the role of High Commissioner Alexander Downer and his engagements with George Papadopoulos in 2016. The timing coincides with the Mueller Report (released today), which states it was information about this engagement from Alexander Downer that opened the FBI counterintelligence investigation in July 2016. The Australian government cited the conclusion of the Robert Mueller special counsel investigation as the background for their willingness to comply with an 15-month-old FOIA request from Buzzfeed News.

When Attorney General William Barr stated "spying did occur" against the 2016 Trump campaign, most attention was focused on the FBI's surveillance of former junior foreign policy aide Carter Page. But the spying Barr was thinking of, and which he said may or may not have been legally authorized, is more likely to be that carried out by Stefan Halper, a former Republican operative and White House aide who became a foreign policy academic with close ties to both American and British intelligence. One could be forgiven for believing Halper was a creation of the spy novelist John Le Carré....

Full title EXCLUSIVE: Disgraced FBI Officials Claimed ‘Insurance Policy’ Text Was About Whether To ‘Burn Longstanding Sources’ Peter Strzok and Lisa Page told Congress that a text they exchanged referring to an “insurance policy” against a Trump presidency was a reference to a discussion about potentially “burning” a longtime FBI source in the event of an aggressive investigation of the Trump campaign. Page described the unnamed source as “sensitive and reliable.” Strzok said the source was “very sensitive.” Both told lawmakers that they and FBI officials were concerned that ramping up an investigation of the Trump campaign might expose the...

Bill and Hillary Clinton were and are up to their eyeballs in Russian collusion. All of the roads to the Trump dossier lead directly to them: Christopher Steele: Paid by the Clinton campaign and the DNC and who paid Kremlin operatives for the dirt on Trump (Steele shopped the dossier to numerous journalists in the summer of 2016 after calling his buddies in the Kremlin for dirt on Trump. He ever went to Russia for the information) Michael Isikoff: Wrote the Yahoo article based on the information fed to him be Steele. Sid Blumenthal: Fed information to Christopher Steele via the...

President Trump on Wednesday threatened to declassify documents related to the Russia investigation that he claimed would be damaging to Democrats if they decide to investigate him when they take control of the House next year. Trump's comments, made in an interview with The New York Post, come two months after he walked back his original plans to declassify and publicly release the documents as a result of concerns from U.S. allies and his own Justice Department. “If they want to play tough, I will do it,” Trump told the Post. “They will see how devastating those pages are.” He...

John O. Brennan @JohnBrennan Your feelings of inferiority, insecurity, vulnerability, and culpability are loud & clear. You remind me of how many corrupt authoritarian leaders abroad behaved before they were deposed. Bob Mueller’s name will be revered in the annals of U.S. history; your name will be scorned.

“FISA declassification will assure all the actors who tried to harm America are finally exposed,” George Papadopoulos wrote on Twitter last week. “Alexander Downer, the Australian government, UK, and GCHQ (British intelligence). If FISA is not declassified, these foreign governments will try to interfere again in 2020 to hurt Trump and the movement.” ... “MI6 chiefs are secretly battling Donald Trump to stop him publishing classified information linked to the Russian election meddling investigation,” according to the story. “The UK is warning he will undermine intelligence gathering if he releases pages of an FBI application...” “British spy chiefs have ‘genuine...

The Democratic National Committee (DNC) said in a court filing Friday that the London-based Maltese professor who told former Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos that Russia had "dirt" on Hillary Clinton may be dead. Joseph Mifsud vanished from the public eye late last year after his name surfaced in stories about the Russia investigation. The DNC, which is suing Russia, the Trump campaign, and WikiLeaks for interfering in the 2016 election, said that it believes that all the defendants in the case had been served with the complaint, “with the exception of Mifsud (who is missing and may be deceased).”...

A top lawyer working with the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign contacted the FBI’s general counsel in late 2016 and provided documents for the Russia probe as federal investigators prepared a surveillance warrant for Trump campaign aide Carter Page, sources close to a congressional investigation told Fox News, citing new testimony. The FBI official who was contacted, James Baker, revealed the exchange to congressional investigators during a closed-door deposition Wednesday. He said Perkins Coie lawyer Michael Sussmann initiated contact with him and provided documents as well as computer storage devices on Russian hacking. The sources said Baker described the...

George Papadopoulos, the Trump campaign volunteer targeted by the Deep State and foreign spies let loose on Twitter this week and claimed he was targeted by US allies and “Obama knew!” Papadopoulos tweeted on September 13th that the Brits met with him often before the 2016 campaign – While I have never met a Russian official in my life knowingly, the British government liked to meet me quite often throughout the campaign. Including Tobias Ellwood, who was right under Boris Johnson, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.— George Papadopoulos (@GeorgePapa19) September 14, 2018 Papadopoulos notified the FBI that he thought...

...Painting a full picture of Mifsud is difficult because after the 58-year-old professor was first identified by name in a Washington Post article in the weeks following Papadopoulos’ confession, he gave a few interviews to the international press, and then disappeared. Rumors circulated in the press that the Kremlin-linked professor may have been recalled to Russia or was liquidated. A new book by former colleagues of Mifsud’s – Stephan Roh, a 50-year-old Swiss-German lawyer, and Thierry Pastor, a 35-year-old French political analyst – reports that he is alive and well. Their account includes a recent interview with him. Their self-published...

In the shifting narratives of the Trump-Russia probe, a Maltese academic named Joseph Mifsud has remained a linchpin regarding claims of collusion. He is the professor who allegedly told Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos that the Russians had emails related to the Clinton campaign. The FBI says it opened its investigation in late July 2016 after Papadopoulos relayed that information to Australian diplomat Alexander Downer, and the Australians tipped off U.S. authorities. While some news accounts describe Mifsud as an accomplice to Russian clandestine operations or a “cut-out” (intermediary), others contend he is a full-fledged Russian spy. In an official...

Adam Lovinger, a former Defense Department analyst ... a whistleblower, is now battling to save his career. The Pentagon suspended his top-secret security clearance May 1, 2017, when he exposed through an internal review that Stefan Halper, who was then an emeritus Cambridge professor, had received roughly $1 million in tax-payer funded money to write Defense Department foreign policy reports, his attorney Sean Bigley said. Before Lovinger's clearance was suspended he had taken a detail to the National Security Council as senior director for strategy. He was only there for five months before he was recalled to the Pentagon, stripped...

I don't know much about George Papadopoulos. I don't know if he is a good person or a bad person. But it is clear in following this scandal of Trump being spied on by his own country in an election, that Papadopoulos is a key player in this scandal. I wanted to put all that I can see on this aspect of it in one place to make it easier to follow. He is Mueller's Cat's Paw against Donald Trump, the patsy they were looking for to find a way into the campaign, entrap the campaign, and eventually, to crucify...

So many questions, too many coincidences... “ In September 2016, Michael Smith, an Australian investigative journalist and former police detective, reported that this agreement opened the door to the mishandling of millions of dollars by the Clinton Foundation. According to Smith, shortly after the Memorandum of Understanding had been signed, the Clinton Foundation incorporated an entity to fight AIDS in Papua New Guinea. In July 2006, that entity, the Clinton Foundation HIV/AIDS Initiative (“CHAI”), entered into a funding agreement with the Australian government to receive $10,000,000. Under that agreement, CHAI was to begin work in August 2006. Even though CHAI...

s Trump won primary after primary in 2016, a rattled John Brennan started claiming to colleagues at the CIA that Estonia’s intelligence agency had alerted him to an intercepted phone call suggesting Putin was pouring money into the Trump campaign. The tip was bogus, but Brennan bit on it with opportunistic relish. Out of Brennan’s alarmist chatter about the bogus tip came an extraordinary leak to the BBC: that Brennan had used it, along with later half-baked tips from British intelligence, as the justification to form a multi-agency spy operation (given the Orwellian designation of an “inter-agency taskforce”) on the...

he “deep state” is in a deep state of desperation. With little time left before the Justice Department inspector general’s report becomes public, and with special counsel Robert Mueller having failed to bring down Donald Trump after a year of trying, they know a reckoning is coming. At this point, there is little doubt that the highest echelons of the FBI and the Justice Department broke their own rules to end the Hillary Clinton “matter” — but we can expect the inspector general to document what was done or, more pointedly, not done. It is hard to see how a...

President Donald Trump said Sunday that he will “demand” this week that the Justice Department open an investigation into whether the FBI infiltrated his presidential campaign for political purposes and whether any demands or requests for such action originated with the Obama administration. Trump tweeted: “I hereby demand, and will do so officially tomorrow, that the Department of Justice look into whether or not the FBI/DOJ infiltrated or surveilled the Trump Campaign for Political Purposes — and if any such demands or requests were made by people within the Obama Administration!” The Justice Department declined to comment. […] Trump did...

**SNIP** After Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich was murdered in 2016, conservative lobbyist Jack Burkman baffled some people when he paid for a private investigation to find the killer. Then in March, Burkman himself became the victim of a mysterious shooting and was hit by an SUV in a parking garage when he was picking up documents from someone he thought was an FBI whistleblower. Using fingerprints, detectives tracked down the suspect and it turned out to be Kevin Doherty, a man who had worked for Burkman on the Seth Rich case.

The top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee slammed President Trump’s claim that there was an FBI informant spying on his presidential campaign. “The most I can tell you Chuck is that this claim by the president, the suggestion by Giuliani that there is a political spy embedded in the Trump campaign is nonsense,” Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) told NBC “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd. Schiff is referring to Trump’s most recent claim that former President Barack Obama used “an embedded informant” to spy on his campaign. “Wow, word seems to be coming out that the Obama FBI ‘SPIED...