484

Right now Papadopoulos is spinning yarns on Fix Fox News about how the Deep State set him up.

As we see in (Chapter A) while he’s been telling these fantastical stories on Twitter and on Fox-really? the Russia probe started because you criticized Cameron and Obama didn’t like your energy ties to Israel?-he’s not willing to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee without immunity. What’s pretty interesting is that before Devin Nunes’ GOP House Intelligence Committee prematurely shut down the Russia probe they didn’t even bother to interview the collusive Coffee Boy.

Now that he’s telling these wild Trumpian Deep State tales-you suspect he got from his wife-though you also wonder to the extent that GOP lawyers are whispering these stories to him-the GOP House wants to interview him. Even now, however, behind closed doors. Telling you they’re still not all that confident that Papadopoulos really has the goods. The plan is clear: just like with Strozk, Glenn Simpson, etc. they are going to selectively leak a few snippets that sounds helpful to Trump’s counternarrative claims to favored Trump loyalist media outlets.

Papadopoulos is spinning all these wild conspiracies about Mifsud-the Russian professor who told him of the incriminating emails the Russians had while in Rome.

Parenthetically, in (Chapter D) I discuss Marcy Wheeler’s very helpful guide to the ‘known universe of the various weaponized emails of the 2016 election.’ What we still don’t know at this point-though Mueller may well know-is which emails Mifsud was actually referring to. Seth Abramson plausibly argues that the Trump campaign at that time were mostly focused on finding Clinton’s deleted 33,000 from her server. But what was Mifsud referring to? The DNC emails? The Podesta emails? That is not yet public knowledge though in the future it hopefully will be.

FN: Nine months after the Mueller Report-premature?-release we still don’t know. It does seem likely the Coffee Boy-and Jeff Sessions who he did tell according to what Papadopoulos told Jason Wilson (Chapter A-assumed it was the Clinton’s deleted emails.

End FN

Mifsud’s a Western intelligence agent! Papadopoulos quotes from Mifsud’s former lawyer approvingly, leaving out the part where Stephen Roh claimed in his book that Papadopoulos is the Western intel agent. (For more on this see Chapter C).

But it’s important to remember that Papadopoulos is a confessed perjurer who lied specifically about when he spoke to Mifsud and this lie was to protect the Trump campaign. He tried to represent his meetings with Mifsud as being unrelated and prior to his work on the Trump campaign.

What’s clear from his recent tweets, is Papadopoulos remains an arch Trump loyalist, so if he lies you can bet it’s to protect Trump just as when he lied to Mueller.

FN: This is a recurring theme among Trump loyalist and co-conspirators like the Coffee Boy: few have really turned; only Michael Cohen really did in the campaign. What’s clear over the last few years is that a GOP partisan is someone that puts party ideology and fealty above all other interests-national, agency-you think of GOP hacks like Bill Barr, Mike Pompeo, and Rick Perry who show loyalty only to partisan interests not to the agencies they supposedly serve, Congressional-all the GOP co-conspirators in the House and Senate who have abdicated their oversight role- indeed often as in the case of Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, and apparently Michael Flynn-loyalty to Trump and the GOP is placed above even their own freedom.

And then you remember Cohen wasn’t a Republican he was just Trump’s fixer. So when things got hot for him he didn’t have the GOP partisan loyalty to put fealty to the party and Trump over his own freedom. He had said he would take a bullet for Trump-turns out that was just big talk.

But those who are real GOP partisans don’t turn very easily.

End FN

The claim that he told the Greek Defense Minister-but no one in the Trump campaign-about Mifsud;s Russian emails-never really passed the laugh test and as we see in (Chapter D) it’s not what he told a Chicago bar patron back in March, 2018. Indeed, what’s clear is alcohol is his truth serum. In this Chicago bar he admitted telling Jeff Sessions about the emails. Since his sentencing, Papadopoulos’ preferred narrative-again his spin is always about protecting Trump-is that Alexander Downer set him up-for criticizing Cameron?!

According to Papadopoulos’-very questionable-version of events, always very self serving-for Trump-he now claims Downer came up to him and started demanding what he knew about Clinton’s emails. Note that in (Chapter C) we’d looked at the fact that while Sam Clovis  presented the informant Stephan Halper one way, Papadopoulos has him as very aggressively demanding that he admit right on the spot that he and the Trump campaign was colluding with Russia.

Clovis ‘explained’ this by arguing that Halper chose a very different tactic with Papadopoulos. But it’s interesting that Papadopoulos’ Halper sounds very much like his Alexander Downer. So maybe it’s more spin to hide what really happened to protect Trump.

Indeed, the very glorified Coffee Boy who Colluded With Russia won’t even admit to telling Downer about the emails. But he was drunk with Downer just like he was drunk with the patron at a Chicago bar so the pattern is very clear-when he drinks he tells the truth about the emails.

You wonder what Michael Flynn would say about Papadopoulos first asking for immunity before the Senate-which unlike the House has an investigation that at least is somewhat on the level. After all, Flynn was the one who said when you plead the 5th it means your guilty. 

Yet Flynn was very interested in Papadoupoulos’ emails to him back in December, 2016. Papadopoulos in his own words admits to telling one Greek Defense Minister about the emails-while claiming not to have told the Trump campaign. 

“On This Week, Papadopoulos did not mention Kotzias by name, but referred to him as the “Greek Foreign Minister,” admitting he told him about Hillary Clinton’s emails allegedly held by the Russians and though he met with Australian diplomat Alexander Downer in London he could not recollect sharing the information about the emails with Downer. The Australian diplomat’s name is not included in the memorandum filed by Papadopoulos’ lawyers.”

It is unknown whether Greek Foreign Minister Kotzias shared the information elsewhere. The fact that Papadopoulos remembers telling Kotzias about the information from Mifsud and meeting with Downer but not sharing the information with any official of the Trump campaign raises many questions.

But his relationship with another Greek Defense Minister -one who’s name he remembers-Panos Kammenos-is also of great interest. And Flynn himself was interested in it during the transition period. Indeed, Kammenos met with many Trump officials during the transition period:

“Key Trump Officials Met With A Putin Ally During Inauguration Weekend

“European counterintelligence officers say Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos’s meetings with Greek Defense Minister Panos Kammenos before and after the election should alarm US investigators. And Papadopoulos isn’t the only official he managed meetings with.”

UPDATE: The latest on Papadopoulos is after serving his 14 days in prison he is again being actively investigated by the FBI again. 

Certainly his big mouth hasn’t helped him in any way and he now claims to be running for Congress in CA-quite a resume-I conspired with the Russians to help ‘President Trump’ rig the election,  and am now about to publish a fake news book about ‘Spygate’ a Kremlin style counternarrative’ vote for me.

If nothing else the Glorified Coffee Boy is hungry for cash.

“Federal authorities out of Washington DC, working in coordination with Robert Mueller’s team, have in recent days sought to arrange an interview with the author of a letter sent to Congress last month that claimed that ex-Trump adviser George Papadopoulos coordinated with Russians in the weeks following the 2016 election. The person who wrote the letter is expected to travel to DC for an interview with the FBI about the claims, per two U.S. officials involved and the author of the letter. All three have requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the topic.

“The memo sent to Congressman Adam Schiff by a former confidant of Papadopoulos on November 19, as first reported by this reporter and Natasha Bertrand of the Atlantic, made a series of allegations against the ex-Trump campaign adviser. First and foremost, the letter claimed that in December 2016, Papadopoulos said “that he was doing a business deal with Russians which would result in large financial gain for himself and Mr. Trump. Mr. Papadopoulos told me that this deal with Russians would set him up for life.” The author also says that (s)he witnessed a phone call between Trump and Papadopoulos. None of the claims have been substantiated, though Congress plans to dig into the specific allegations.”

Was this very lucrative business deal that the Coffee Boy claims would make him ‘set for life’ the very same Trump Tower Moscow deal of Michael Cohen and Felix Sater? Cohen, of course, recently admitted to perjuring himself previously before Congress about when they gave up on the Trump Tower Moscow deal. Cohen had initially told Congress it ended before the Iowa primary in January, 2016 but now admits it went on until June-only ending after the Washington Post reporting on hack of the DNC.

So the deal supposedly ended in June, 2016 but this was in December, 2016 after Trump ‘won’ the election.

But recently during yet another round a trainwreck of interviews by Rudy Giuliani he asserted that the Moscow Trump Tower deal went on through to the election and beyond. Rudy later was forced to walk this back without explaining how he made such a ‘mistake’-bad memory is one thing-you forget things you did-but how do you ‘remember’ things you didn’t do?

FN: Of course, now Giuliani himself is now being investigated by SDNY-will he join Cohen in his prison cell? 

 

Rudy’s modus operandi seems to be to blurt things out-perhaps thinking he should get out yet more bad news  before it’s brought out by the media elsewhere and then when it causes a huge firestorm Trump reams him out and demands he go back out and deny it.

In any case it still hasn’t been explained why he would say such a thing if it weren’t true. Now we also have this lucrative deal that the Coffee Boy was raving about-so lucrative it would set him for life. 

“The FBI’s interest in the letter and its writer signals that federal authorities are taking the allegations seriously and continue to investigate Papadopoulos even after he served 12 days in a federal prison for lying to investigators about his interactions with a Maltese professor who claimed that Russians had dirt on Hillary Clinton in the form of thousands of emails.”

“Patrick Boland, A spokesman for Congressman Schiff and Caroline Polisi, a lawyer for Papadopoulos did not immediately return a request for comment. Peter Carr, a spokesman for Mueller’s office declined to comment.”

“Separately, this reporter has in recent weeks communicated with the author of the letter in which evidence was shared that proved their proximity to Papadopoulos in late 2016 and early 2017. The evidence includes messages and photos and the person’s identity was independently corroborated by a family member of Papadopoulos who confirmed that they had been aware of Papadopolous’s association with the person. Though none of the major claims in the letter have been substantiated, some of the underlying details have. Messages from Papadopoulos to the confidant included the phrase “I am set for life.” The Papadopoulos associate said that this message was in reference to a Russian business deal.

Just before the phrase ‘set for life’ is the phrase ‘he’s stupid enough to do it.’

Who’s he?

Note that Papadopoulos’ name was among Nadler’s 81 Trump associates looped into the House Judiciary investigation. Schiff most certainly is going to want to hear from him and knows a lot more about it than what we have through this public information-as does to an extent, Scott Stedman.

Then there’s Papadopoulos’ relationship to the elusive Sergei Millian-who some have conjectured is the famous Source E in the Steele dossier.

Based on what Papadopoulos had previously said about Milan that could explain what this lucrative deal that would set him for life was about:

The story surrounding the interactions between Millian and Papadopoulos has changed numerous times in recent months. On a podcast with Dan Bongino in early November (timestamp 43:35), Papadopoulos says that Millian reached out on LinkedIn in July 2016 and the two met in Chicago. In October 2016, Millian once again asked Papadopoulos to meet, saying that he had an interesting private sector offer. According to Papadopoulos, Millian said, “I have a deal for you for $30,000 a month, a great office in Manhattan, it’s simply PR…for some ex-Minister in Russia, but the qualifier is that you have to work for Trump at the same time and you can’t tell anybody.”

However, George’s very suspicious wife had a different and parallel narrative that would link the story to: his co-worker on the Trump campaign NatSec team: Carter Page.

This version of events conflicts with the story told by Mrs. Papadopoulos. Speaking to the Daily Caller, Mrs. Papadopoulos stated that Millian “offered her husband a job working for the Russian energy company Bashneft.” Bashneft is a subsidiary of Rosneft, the Russian conglomorate that Mr. Steele alleged was involved in a quid-pro-quo with Carter Page and other members of the Trump team.

Without meaning to, then her story has the advantage of possibly corroborating the Steele Dossier.

FN: It’s true I have since come to agree with EmptyWheel’s take that the Dossier contained some Russian disinformation regarding the whole Cohen went to Prague to pay off Russian hackers thing-it’s clear in retrospect that Paul Manafort was the point man on Russian collusion-coordination-while the late GOP operative Peter Smith was the one to actually pay Russian hackers-and it was he, working with Michael
Flynn, who engaged in conspiracy to commit computer crimes.

However, the Carter Page side of the Dossier still looks pretty good.

Millian has some very interesting associates as well-they’re virtually a who’s who of Russian Collusion-Conspiracy and Coordination.

“Millian spent mid April 2016 in Moscow as part of the Russian government sponsored Oil&Gas Industry Week and the Russian-Chinese Energy Investment Forum. Photos of the events show Millian alongside Russian officials, including Deputy Energy Minister Kirill Molodtsov. Among the featured speakers at the opening of the Oil&Gas event included Alexander Torshin, then-Deputy Chairman of Central Bank of Russia and handler of admitted Russian agent Maria Butina.”

“One panel in which Millian spoke included the most senior Russian government officials and business leaders, including the Vice Presidents of Rosneft, Lukoil, and Gazprom. The moderator for the event was Sergey Belyakov, a Russian intelligence-trained former Deputy Minister of Economic Development.”

As I discussed in Chapter A one of the big problems with MSM analysis of Russian Conspiracy and Coordination is it’s use of the Ostrich Theory-anything that has had no new MSM reporting in a couple of months and that Mueller hasn’t discussed is presumed to be a dead lead.

But, Mueller has coated his memos thick with redactions beyond which there’s no basis to presume that, for instance, all he has on Manafort is the tax evasion and bank fraud-to illustrate, Manafort’s own lawyer helpfully revealed the 75 pages of detailed polling data Manafort gave to Kililmnik in the same dinner they discussed both Russian sanctions and Wikileaks and the hacks of the DNC-the date of this-August 2, 2016-just happened to be the day Jerome Corsi got back to Roger Stone with the details on Wikileaks’ next email dump-Podesta in October.

Similarly we know very little of what Flynn told Mueller-no doubt there’s a lot more to his role than lying to the FBI and failing to register as a foreign agent.

“In June 2016, Millian returned to Russia and attended the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum. There, he was pictured with Oleg Deripaska and Alexander Novak, the current Russian Minister of Energy and member of President Putin’s inner circle. Novak also sits on the Board of Rosneft and Gazprom.”

“Millian’s proximity to the powers-that-be in Russia in the weeks leading up to his outreach to Papadopoulos and other Trump campaign members raises new questions about why Millian attempted to communicate with members of the Trump team. The lack of clarity surrounding Millian’s interactions with Papadopoulos are expected to be of interest to Congressional investigators, who plan to talk to the ex-Trump aide after Democrats regain power in early January.”

FN: I don’t believe the Dems ever had the Coffee Boy over. Indeed, as David Corn notes after all the criticism the Dems-rightly-levied at the GOP for it’s half assed Russia investigation, they pretty much dropped the issue once they got in delegating the entire thing to Mueller-who at least based on what we’ve seen of the redacted report left many hanging, dangling threads.

However, Pelosi’s recent words about Ukraine give us some reason to believe the Dems impeachment investigation will not be as narrow as previously contemplated-she recently declared that all roads lead to Russia and she has made the crucial point that in the bird’s eye view this is not about Ukraine but Russia.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi is connecting the dots — “all roads lead to Putin,” she says — and making the argument that Trump’s pressure campaign on Ukraine was not an isolated incident but part of a troubling bond with the Russian president reaching back to special counsel Robert Mueller’s findings on the 2016 election.

“This has been going on for 2 1/2 years,” Pelosi said Friday.

“This isn’t about Ukraine,” she explained a day earlier. “‘It’s about Russia. Who benefited by our withholding of that military assistance? Russia.”

This would suggest that Mueller and Russian Collusion will also be part of the articles of impeachment as John Stoehr argues persuasively. 

End FN

Certainly looking forward to the Coffee Boy laying out the ‘truth’-Spygate and all that he has in his book. What are the odds Mark Meadows and Jim Jordan complain about Papadopoulos’ book deal?

UPDATE: In the Great Minds Think Alike category: I’m very happy to see my own conjecture that this deal that would leave the Coffee Boy set for life is also shared by EmptyWheel aka Marcy Wheeler. She certainly has a great mind and I’m happy to see my mind was on same track. She conjectures that the Cohen-Sater Moscow Project got handed off to Papadopoulos-Milan. 

This would certainly explain Giuliani’s blooper.

Ms. Wheeler also provides a public service in explaining to all the  GOP co-conspirators repeating ‘show me one shred of evidence’ like a mantra how a criminal conspiracy works-and even more to the point, how it doesn’t.

FN: Of course, these same GOP co-conspirators and obstructers of justice on behalf of ‘President Trump’, assiduously avoid coming in contact with any actual evidence-Nunes didn’t even interview Papdopoulos, Flynn, or Manafort before declaring ‘No Collusion!’

Because there’s no shiny tower in Moscow with Trump’s name on it, Maté appears to believe, it is proof that when Don Jr took a meeting in June 2016 at which he (according to the sworn testimony of four people who attended) committed to revisit Magnitsky sanctions if his dad got elected, the possibility of a $300 million payoff didn’t factor in to Junior’s willingness to sign away American policy considerations on behalf of his father.

That’s not how criminal conspiracy law works.

“If you sign up for a deal and take steps to make good on it — as Don Jr did on June 9, 2016 and Paul Manafort appears to have done on August 2, 2016 and Mike Flynn appears to have done, on Trump’s behalf, on December 29, 2016 — then it doesn’t matter if the partner to that deal fucks you over later in the process. And, after all, the Russians did continue to supply Trump with a steady supply of dirt on Hillary Clinton all through the election. They got Trump elected, or at least did what they could to help, even if that payoff wasn’t the one Trump was most interested in.”

“Do you think Oleg Deripaska, a key player in both the deal-making and likely in the cover-up of it, gives a shit if Paul Manafort — who had screwed Deripaska over years earlier — had his life ruined as part of the process of compromising a President and getting sanctions relief? My suspicion is we’ll learn that Deripaska actually magnified Manafort’s hurt, once he had gotten him to compromise himself and the campaign.”

“Do you think Putin really cares whether Trump — to say nothing of the United States — benefits from the stupid choices Trump made during the election? Putin — a far better “deal” maker than Trump — got a win-win either way: Either Trump succeeded in compromising America’s rule of law in an effort to squelch any investigation into what happened, robbing the United States of the claim to idealism that so irks the master kleptocrat, Putin, or Trump would spend his Administration desperately trying to find a way out, all the while Putin connives Trump into dismantling the alliances that keep Russia in check.”

FN: In retrospect what we got was C: both A and B.

She doesn’t explicitly point out that Trump’s North Korea policy certainly also seems to have Putin’s fingerprints on it though she does refer to the spectacularly failed Summit-at least for Trump and the United States at the top of her piece. This is something the (not so) smart savvy set at the MSM has failed to notice-that Trump has gotten a lot of advice from Russia on North Korea and previously stated ending joint exercises with South Korea was Putin’s idea.

FN: To clear any ambiguity when I refer to ‘not so smart’ savvy set, let’s be clear that most certainly doesn’t include her.

But then she closes with a point that is foundational and fundamental when discussing Russian Collusion-Conspiracy and Coordination.

“And let’s be honest, Putin isn’t the only one playing this game. Certainly, Mohammed bin Salman feels the same way, even if his record of ruthless dealmaking is shorter and sloppier than Putin’s. The truth is that Donald Trump and Jared Kushner are easy marks for a whole range of skilled operators willing to stroke their egos and dangle loot, and over and over again they’ve let themselves be bested in foreign policy negotiations, to the detriment of the interests of the United States. That they are so bad at deal making in no way disproves their culpability.

There is no Trump Tower in Moscow. But there never had to be. All that was needed was the promise of a ridiculously lucrative narcissism-stroking deal for the Trump family to agree to shit that would hurt this country. And all the evidence suggests that they did, and continue to do so.

This has been perhaps the most plausible sounding denial-for the superficial, who are well represented among the ‘Church of the Savvy’-Trump and friends are just too incompetent to be guilty. It’s one of the most persistent canards, most persistent zombie ideas for both the Trump’s GOP criminal co-conspirators and the bungling both sides do it MSM.

He’s too incompetent to truly be corrupt at least on the grand scale of conspiracy as if incompetence and corruption don’t often appear hand in hand.

For more on the idea that Moscow Project didn’t end in June see

July 22, 2016: The Sater and Cohen Deal Gets Handed Off To Millian and Papadopoulos?

 

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