Contributing Author: Brian Cates
OpEd by Brain Cates:
The Return of Professor Joseph Mifsud, International Man of Mystery!
The night before Robert Mueller’s long awaited Congressional testimony, reporter John Solomon of The Hill broke a very important story.
Several different sources have related to the veteran reporter that the team of investigators assembled by US Attorney John Durham - who has been tasked by Attorney General William Barr with looking into how the FBI handled it's investigation of the Trump/Russia collusion allegations - had reached out earlier this summer to a key figure at the center of the SpyGate scandal : Professor Joseph Mifsud.
"While most of the political world focused its attention elsewhere, special prosecutor John Durham’s team quietly reached out this summer to a lawyer representing European academic Joseph Mifsud, one of the earliest and most mysterious figures in the now closed Russia-collusion case."
Mifsud's key role in the Trump/Russia Collusion hoax that gripped the country for much of the past three years has been largely overlooked and under-reported, and I believe this to be deliberately so. Very power forces have worked very hard to keep Mifsud out of sight for all of this time. And their hard work just came to naught this past week.
Mifsud is the academic that reached out to Trump campaign advisor George Papadapoulos in early 2016 in London. Mifsud made a claim to Papadapoulos about the Russian government having 'dirt' on Hillary Clinton that they were willing to share with the Trump campaign. When details of this conversation between Mifsud and Papadopoulos was brought to the attention of the FBI more than two months later, it directly led to the agency launching its “Crossfire Hurricane” counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign on July 31, 2016.
So there's no doubt whatsoever about Mifsud's central role in launching what became the Crossfire Hurricane investigation run by former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and former agent Peter Strzok and later morphed into the Mueller Special Counsel probe.
Solomon's multiple sources tell him this 'reaching out' to Mifsud by the Durham investigative team occurred 'this summer'. It is already late July, so I surmise this contact occurred sometime in early June, and it did not leak and only becomes public now because at least two DOJ sources got the green light to hand this information to Solomon.
Why Has Misfud Been Largely Overlooked Until Now?
To anyone who's researched the SpyGate scandal, Mifsud's central activity to it all becomes readily apparent. According to the Trump/Russia collusion narrative, he's the only real bona fide Russian agent involved in all of this.
It was alleged early on that Carter Page was a definite Russian agent – after all, the FBI had gone to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court [FISC] to get a warrant to spy on him by proffering to the court was the agency claimed was solid and verified evidence that Page was working for the Russians. Much of that evidence turned to be the Steele Dossier and press clippings based on it.
The popularly accepted MSM narrative about Page took a big hit when the Mueller Special Counsel's office closed its doors for the final time without having charged Page for being a Russian agent...or for anything else, for that matter. He didn't even get the usual lame process perjury charge that Mueller's team seemed to hand out like candy to anybody it went after.
Is Papadapoulos a Russian agent? If so, it's most curious that all he got hit with in all of this was a minor process perjury charge that got him a mere 14 days in jail. Besides that, nothing.
How about the two former Trump-related people who have gotten serious jail time, Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen? Well both got that prison time for their own personal financial crimes – bank and tax fraud. It's true that Manafort was hit with additional Foreign Agents Registration Act [FARA] violations for illegally lobbying on behalf of foreign clients, but those clients weren't the Russians; they turned out to be the Ukrainians.
After two years of watching the MSM relentlessly hawk the often absurd allegations found in the Steele Dossier against Page, Manafort, Cohen and Lt. General Michael Flynn and most especially Donald J. Trump, the entire country was stunned when Mueller ended his investigation without charging a single person based on anything alleged in that dossier.
At this point the only person involved in this entire lengthy SpyGate drama where the popular MSM narrative insists the person simply MUST be a Russian agent is Professor Joseph Mifsud.
So why has the Mueller Special Counsel let Mifsud walk away without laying a finger on him?
During the Mueller testimony to Congress this past Wednesday, both Reps. Devin Nunes [R-CA] and Jim Jordan [R-OH] demanded to know why other people were charged for lying to the FBI and the Special Counsel investigators – even for minor, petty things – while Mifsud has been allowed to walk away. Mueller not only had no answer to their questions, he seemed to barely be aware of or remember who Mifsud is.
Anatomy Of An FBI Set Up: Mifsud Plants The Offer
As Solomon relates in his bombshell report, sources inside the DOJ are saying far from being a real Russian agent, Mifsud was actually working for the FBI as an asset. In fact, both Mifud's lawyer, Stephen Rho, and Solomon's multiple sources say Mifsud was direct by his intelligence colleagues at Link Campus to avidly pursue Papadapoulos and make fake overtures to him. Mifsud was also encouraged to take a woman long with him to one of these meetings with Papadopoulos where he was to tell him the woman was the niece of Russian President Vladmir Putin.
As Solomon reports:
"A May 2019 letter from Nunes to U.S. intelligence officials corroborates some of Roh’s account, revealing photos showing that the FBI conducted training at Link in fall 2016 and that Mifsud and other Link officials met regularly with world leaders, including Boris Johnson, elected today as Britain’s new prime minister.
A few days after the March dinner, Roh added, Mifsud received instructions from Link superiors to “put Papadopoulos in contact with Russians,” including a think tank figure named Ivan Timofeev and a woman he was instructed to identify to Papadopoulos as Vladimir Putin’s niece.
Mifsud knew the woman was not the Russian president’s niece but, rather, a student who was involved with both the Link and LCILP campuses, and the professor believed there was an effort underway to determine whether Papadopoulos was an “agent provocateur” seeking foreign contacts, Roh said."
From what Solomon relates in that last paragraph, it could be that Mifsud thought he was role playing here to help test this young man; to see how eager he was to commit treason against his own country…and then much to his horror later discovered the FBI had burned him to the FISA Court as being a genuine Russian agent. This could explain why Mifsud has been in hiding ever since his role in this was made public.
Downer Makes His Approach To Entrap Papadapoulos
Shortly after Mifsud had approached him with that offer of Rusian help, Papadopoulos was contacted by Erika Thompson, an Australian official from that country's UK embassy and asked to take a meeting with Austrailia's then-UK ambassador, Alexander Downer.
Papadopoulos had never met Downer before. Downer and Thompson both sought him out for this meeting, and the young man’s suspicions were instantly aroused when the diplomat kept trying to turn the discussion to Russia.
Papadopoulos has insisted many, many times both on his social media accounts and in numerous interviews, that he could see Downer was recording their conversation on his cell phone. In fact, in several tweets he wrote, Papadopoulos claimed he saw that Stefan Halper was also attempting to use his phone to record his conversation with him.
And now evidence is surfacing that the key conversation in that UK bar between Papadapoulos and Downer that launched what has become a three year nightmare was actually recorded and transcripts of it exist. And it appears investigators have been pursuing these transcripts for some time.
It’s been assumed by many in the media that Papadopoulos and his attractive wife, Simona Mangiante, are both starstruck attention whores, loving all the fame and simply saying whatever wild and outrageous things that will keep them in the limelight.
There was a time many people also made these claims about Carter Page – that he was a nobody who somehow stumbled into 15 minutes of fame and then took to inventing convoluted conspiracy theories about the FBI and the Clinton campaign to babble to the media so as to keep from having shuffle off stage at last.
Both the Papadopoulos’ and Page have been derided and mocked and dismissed by mainstream media reporters for the past several years. But it’s been starting to look for some time now that an awful lot of people are going to have some crow to eat if the stories Page and Papadopoulos have been telling all this time actually turn out to be true.
Is The Fake Russian Spy About To Come In From The Cold At Last?
I’ve had a working theory for almost two years now that the SpyGate plotters needed at least ONE actual, real, live Russian agent in all of this, and they picked Mifsud to play that role….willingly or not.
I surmise that at the time Mifsud sat for an interview with the FBI back in February of 2017, he had yet to discover his FBI handlers had ‘volunteered’ him for the role of the being the only real Russian agent in the story.
Now its clear Durham’s investigative team has looked at the narrative about Mifsud that was told by the FBI in it’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation and in the Mueller report, and they simply aren’t buying it. They want to talk to Mifsud himself.
And I believe if Mifsud ever does talk and reveal what he knows, this is going to cause a whole set of very real problems for people who’ve bought into the narrative that he was a genuine Russian agent making a real offer of Russian help to a Trump campaign advisor.
