#this is why i hate russiagaters

[antoine-roquentin]

But the most important reason may be that the figure of Joseph Mifsud, so central to the prosecution of Papadopoulos and to the investigation of Trump’s 2016 campaign, makes little sense in the stories laid out by Robert Mueller’s team or by the Democrats in Congress. Far from being a Russian cutout, as people like Congressman Adam Schiff and various U.S. news outlets have suggested, Mifsud seems to be a figure who was tied to high government officials in the west. So far, few of those associated with him have opened up public inquiries or otherwise retraced their steps, which you would expect if they felt they had been victims of Russian infiltration. The FBI spoke to Mifsud in early 2017 when he was in the United States and let him go, allegedly because Papadopoulos had misled them, but they don't seem to have gone hunting for him during the months that followed, even after the arrest and charging of Papadopoulos, nor do they seem to have alerted European allies. Mifsud continued to live and work in Europe as normal. Mifsud went into hiding shortly after the statement of offense against Papadopoulos was made public, in October 2017, but Italian media has since reported that Mifsud spent some of those months in a Rome apartment that was paid for by one of his erstwhile employers, Link Campus University, a small organization with ties to Italian intelligence. In short, with Mifsud, the rabbit holes are endless, and even the truth will be prove to be twisted.

To solve such mysteries, then, is why Barr and others are so interested in going to Rome and Australia. And, whether or not you trust Barr and team, there is reasonable cause for them to be taking their actions. If they’re expecting Papadopoulos’s narrative to bear fruit, however, they’re going to come up dry. I spent weeks trying to square Papadopoulos’s memories with various theories of the case, and I began to notice that those recollections kept changing or contradicting the available paper trail. Even the Trump campaign was on the receiving end of a number of false boasts from Papadopoulos, such as a claim of having met with the Russian ambassador to the United Kingdom, when no such thing had happened. Most important, I realized that there was very little basis for a linchpin of countless narratives concerning Papadopoulos: namely, that Mifsud had mentioned Russian hacking. It’s a claim that nearly everyone, including the Mueller team, has embraced, but the only person making it is Papadopoulos himself. Why would he make such a claim? As the lawyer and blogger Hans Mahncke has laid out in more detail, it may well have been a panicked attempt to deflect trouble growing out of still more untrue claims. (Papadopoulos did not respond to a request for comment.)

Unfortunately for Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani seems to embrace Papadopoulos’s version of the story, in which Alexander Downer and Joseph Mifsud were co-conspirators. Last spring, mentioning the case of Papadopoulos, Giuliani told Fox News’s Bret Baier, “If that’s not a counterintelligence frame-up, I will eat my hat.” And if that’s how Giuliani feels, then it is likely that he has persuaded Trump to feel the same way. That’s why Giuliani has been globetrotting on Trump’s behalf and, it seems, bullying people and making a fool of himself. In short, he appears to be as obsessed with a wrongheaded theory of the case as any Russiagater on MSNBC.

At the same time, those who view investigations of the origin of Russiagate as nothing more than partisan attempts to discredit the work of honorable civil servants may want to brace themselves for unsavory findings. Even looking only narrowly at one element of Russiagate, the case of Papadopoulos, we can see questionable behavior by his prosecutors, notwithstanding his guilt. Here is one small but revealing example. In the summer of 2016, Papadopoulos wrote to Trump campaign official Sam Clovis about some “requests from the U.K., Greek, Italian, and even Russian government for closed door workshops/consultations” at a London venue. (In reality, no such requests had been made, but that’s beside the point here.) Clovis wrote back, “I have too much to do that requires me to be in the states” and encouraged Papadopoulos and another foreign policy advisor to “make the trips, if it is feasible.” The prosecution edited this exchange in order to make it look much more sinister. They described it as the culmination of “several weeks of further communications regarding a potential ‘off the record’ meeting with Russian officials” and quoted Clovis as saying that Papadopoulos should “make the trip[], if it is feasible.” In other words, the original suggests a series of London-based workshops that might include Russians, while the prosecution’s version suggests a concerted effort to link up with Russian officials and taking a trip to make it happen. I was able to see the difference only because I had the original emails. This sort of elision, which ran throughout the case against Papadopoulos, gave me an unfavorable impression of the Mueller team.

More broadly, we all have a stake in finding out whether U.S. authorities proceeded by the book when they began to investigate the campaign of Donald Trump in 2016. The FBI had a FISA warrant on Trump advisor Carter Page that lasted for months and kept being renewed, yet we know it relied in part on the infamous “pee-tape” dossier that had been put together by someone who was paid by the Clinton campaign. That this dossier’s author, Christopher Steele was working with the wife of a Justice Department official connected to the investigation was, at the very least, a glaring conflict of interest. Returning to the case of Papadopoulos, a vague statement to Alexander Downer that, according to Downer, didn’t mention “dirt” or “email” but merely Papadopoulos’s belief that the Russians had “material that could be damaging” to Hillary Clinton hardly seems like an adequate justification for a major FBI investigation of a presidential campaign. As for the case of Ukraine, officials in that country were open in their opposition to Trump in 2016, and the Financial Times reported on a Ukrainian and MP and other “political actors in Kiev [who] say they will continue their efforts to prevent a candidate—who recently suggested Russia might keep Crimea, which it annexed two years ago—from reaching the summit of American political power.” It’s not as crazy as it looks that Trump, in light of Russiagate, wants to figure out what was going on back then.

Now, none of this is to give a pass to Donald Trump. He deserves to be investigated, and possibly impeached, for his behavior toward Ukraine over the past several months, and if you want to get a sense of how much power the president has to turn the screws on weaker parties, few recent stories have been better reported than a recent one from The Wall Street Journal showing how things looked from the Ukrainian side. Sending a henchman like Giuliani over to Kiev and dropping strong hints to Ukraine’s leaders of what you’re hoping to find is a recipe for lies and corruption.

But probing Trump’s misbehavior cannot be an underhanded instrument for shutting down investigations into what happened in 2016. Uncovering that part of the story may be unhelpful to the impeachment narrative in the coming months, but it is no less important than investigating this president. Trump represents the flouting of rules by one man, but the origins of Russiagate represent the potential flouting of rules by many people. If the FBI and the intelligence community can overstep their bounds in pursuit of a president many of us hate today, they can do so against a president we like tomorrow. So, no, Trump’s or Giuliani’s pet theories won’t bear fruit. No, there’s no DNC server in Ukraine, or whatever the hell Trump believes. No, Joe Biden didn’t try to fire a prosecutor for going after Biden’s son. No, George Papadopoulos isn’t the key to an international anti-Trump conspiracy. But the belief that Russiagate grew out of partisans overstepping their bounds—well, that’s still awaiting the jury. With or without Trump in office, we owe it to ourselves to figure out whether it’s true.

this is why it’s so tough to believe in either russiagate or the counternarrative that russiagate was a us intelligence honeypot intended to destroy trump. the people who are saying this shit are professional brown-nosers, bullshitters who get paid to slather on the praise until they manage to convince whoever’s in power to take on a business deal (and for that they get paid millions). the idea that these imbeciles could be co-conspirators on anything other than a dinner party is frankly absurd. the fact that the FBI will run roughshod over proper investigative procedure if it prejudges that someone is guilty is not in doubt because we see it happen to its much poorer victims all the time, so the notion that it might have done so here is not unfathomable.