Free Republic

US Attorney John Durham is running an investigation into the Russia hoax that has been almost airtight. A fragment of information on his activities, however, comes our way via Australian media.Alexander Downer’s meeting with George Papadopoulos at the Kensington Wine Rooms in 2016 played a key role in providing a rationale for an FBI investigation of the Trump campaign, including FISA warrants allowing wiretapping.  At the time, Downer was the Australian High Commissioner (ambassador) to the UK, and had been Australia’s foreign minister earlier, a very senior diplomat to be entertaining a young Trump campaign volunteer. The meeting, also...

Newly released notes taken by high-level Department of Justice (DOJ) officials during a March 6, 2017, meeting with FBI leadership expose some of the lengths the FBI engaged in to cover up its spying on the 2016 campaign of President Donald Trump. The notes were released on May 8 by lawyers representing former Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann as part of an effort to clear him on charges of having lied to the FBI. The notes, in reality, appear to do little to exonerate Sussmann but do provide quite a bit of information on the FBI. The meeting at...

Fired FBI special agent Peter Strzok’s latest claims about the events leading to the bureau’s opening of the Trump-Russia investigation are contradicted by the timelines presented in reports by special counsel Robert Mueller and DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz. In a new interview ahead of the release of his book, Strzok claimed that Australian diplomat Alexander Downer was spurred to inform the U.S. government about a May 2016 conversation he had in a London wine bar with George Papadopoulos, in which the Trump campaign associate mentioned that Russia might have dirt on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, after hearing...

(Text from e-mail, Source Link to status video) After driving all night and half of the next day, I sat in the car, looking out at the scene of the People’s Convoy; dirt parking lots, lots of wind in excess of 45 mph, making whatever efforts I made to record or evaluate the crowd meaningless. When people can’t hear each other talk for the whistling of the wind, it’s difficult to do an interview and if I were like the others, who were only going to be there that day, I would have gotten the interviews anyway, but I’m with...

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...

Sometimes the obvious just slips by you. This is one of those times. Crowdstrike reportedly didn’t determine that ‘Russia’ hacked Hillary’s emails until June 2016. So how could Australia’s Alexander Downer know that ‘Russia’ hacked her emails in May 2016? The dates just don’t add up. In May 2016 George Papadopoulos was contacted by Australian Alexander Downer and told you that Russia had Hillary’s emails. But Crowdstrike didn’t investigate Hillary’s emails until June 2016 when they somehow claimed that the Russians had hacked into the DNC.

A review launched by Attorney General William Barr into the origins of the Russia investigation has expanded significantly amid concerns about whether the probe has any legal or factual basis, multiple current and former officials told NBC News. The prosecutor conducting the review, Connecticut U.S. Attorney John Durham, has expressed his intent to interview a number of current and former intelligence officials involved in examining Russia’s effort to interfere in the 2016 presidential election, including former CIA Director John Brennan and former director of national intelligence James Clapper, Brennan told NBC News. Durham has also requested to talk to CIA...

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., criticized a report by the New York Times that claimed President Trump "pressed" the prime minister of Australia for information to discredit the probe conducted by former Special Counsel Robert Mueller, calling it an "effort" to shut down Attorney General William Barr's investigation. "This New York Times article about Barr talking to Australia is the beginning of an effort to shut down Barr's investigation to find out how this whole thing started," Graham said on "Hannity" Monday. A Justice Department official told Fox News on Monday that Barr asked Trump to make introductions to foreign countries...

If you read the newspapers, tuned into the cable TV pundits or received an email from one of the Democrats running for president, you’d swear Donald Trump was back to his treasonous ways. All that was missing was an annoying OMG text exclamation punctuating the unfounded claims that Trump might violate the law in 2020 by accepting intelligence on a political rival from a foreign country. The inference, of course, is that it would come from a hostile power such as Russia or North Korea or Iran. Actually, what Trump told ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos was that he’d consider taking...

Today’s Campaign Update, Part II (Because The Campaign Never Ends) You seriously just cannot make this stuff up. – In the minds of any thinking and honest and well-meaning person, an effort to declassify a bunch of documents so that the American people can judge for themselves the truth about any matter is an admirable, even patriotic act of public transparency. But for Democrat politicians in Washington, DC, and Adam Schiff specifically, that’s not the narrative. Not the narrative at all. I kid you not, the bug-eyed, pencil-necked Congressman from California (because where else would he be from?) actually told...

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.

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).”...

Australian diplomat and intelligence player has long been linked to — guess who! — Clintons and the FBI Former Trump campaign volunteer George Papadopoulos (shown above center) may need look no further than the Clinton Foundation to explain why former Australian diplomat Alexander Downer (above left) just happened to meet up with him in a London bar two years ago. “The notion that Downer randomly reached out to me just to have a gin and tonic is laughable,” Papadopoulos tweeted late Monday. “Some organization or entity sent him to meet me. For the sake of our republic and the integrity...

...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...

...the Daily Caller reported that George Papadopoulos’s wife, an Italian lawyer named Simona Mangiante, said her husband had pleaded guilty in July to lying to the FBI to avoid charges by special counsel Robert Mueller’s team that he was an agent of the Israeli government.... ...Is George Papadopoulos actually not a Russian agent of influence, but an Israeli spy? In an April, 2018 article in The Australian, Downer explained that he had reached out to Papadopoulos through an “Israeli contact.” According to a story from the Daily Caller, the Israeli contact is Christian Cantor, an official at the Israeli embassy...

The “thousands of Clinton’s emails” story told by GEORGE PAPADOPOULOS, which is critical to “Trump/Russia collusion”, still doesn’t add up. ALEXANDER DOWNER just blew a major hole in it. And: I think Special Counsel Robert Mueller has known this for months too. THREAD In this thread I’m going to show you three NEW pieces of info: 1: First relevant interview with ALEXANDER DOWNER (H/T @ChuckRossDC) 2: A new analysis of @RepAdamSchiff Feb 2018 memo in light of that interview 3: A new, not yet reported Jan 2018 interview with JOSEPH MIFSUD This will be controversial, so I’m going to keep...

To hear the Federal Bureau of Investigation tell it, its decision to launch a counterintelligence probe into a major-party presidential campaign comes down to a foreign tip about a 28-year-old fourth-tier Trump adviser, George Papadopoulos. The FBI’s media scribes have dutifully reported the bare facts of that “intel.” We are told the infamous tip came from Alexander Downer, at the time the Australian ambassador to the U.K. Mr. Downer invited Mr. Papadopoulos for a drink in early May 2016, where the aide told the ambassador the Russians had dirt on Hillary Clinton. Word of this encounter at some point reached...

To hear the Federal Bureau of Investigation tell it, its decision to launch a counterintelligence probe into a major-party presidential campaign comes down to a foreign tip about a 28-year-old fourth-tier Trump adviser, George Papadopoulos. snip We are told the infamous tip came from Alexander Downer, at the time the Australian ambassador to the U.K. Mr. Downer invited Mr. Papadopoulos for a drink in early May 2016, where the aide told the ambassador the Russians had dirt on Hillary Clinton. snip When Mr. Downer ended his service in the U.K. this April, he sat for an interview with the Australian,...