Perhaps one reason the Aussies didn’t bring it to their Five Eyes allies is because it was a vague report and didn’t include anyone claiming the Trump campaign was actually colluding with Russians. Also, given the many scandals related to Clinton Foundation fundraising, including violations of conflict-of-interest rules adopted when Hillary Clinton became secretary of state, people with damaging information about the Clintons were not exactly rare.
It’s worth reflecting on the Obama FBI’s conspiracy theory to assess whether FBI leadership was acting in good faith at the start. Neither at the opening of Crossfire Hurricane nor at any time during the campaign did the FBI ever tell Donald Trump about its investigation. When questioned later by the inspector general, senior FBI officials would justify their decision to keep the candidate in the dark by claiming that they couldn’t know who in the campaign might potentially be involved in wrongdoing. We’re supposed to believe they sincerely thought not only that Donald Trump might be colluding with Russians but also that he would share details of the plot with a twenty-something volunteer who had just joined his campaign.
As for the young newcomer to the Trump campaign, Papadopoulos says that he doesn’t remember sharing the story with Downer.57 But Papadopoulos says he did indeed hear the claim about Russia having information on Hillary Clinton. He says he heard the story from a Maltese professor named Joseph Mifsud who was introduced to him after Papadopoulos had signed on with the Trump campaign. Papadopoulos says it was all a setup to create a pretext for the FBI to go after Trump. The inspector general found no record of Mifsud as a confidential human source for the FBI58 and Papadopoulos ended up spending eleven days behind bars after striking a plea agreement for lying to the FBI about the timing and extent of his interactions with Mifsud. He says it was entrapment.
But before you dismiss Papadopoulos as paranoid or not credible, it should be noted that the inspector general found that, beginning in the fall of 2016, the FBI did send a number of confidential informants wearing wires to engage Papadopoulos in conversation and record his comments. Asked several times about the idea of getting help from Russians to put out damaging information on Hillary Clinton, Papadopoulos was recorded repeatedly rejecting the idea as wrong, illegal, treasonous, and not something anyone on the Trump team would do. He directly contradicted the FBI’s probable cause claim by saying that, to his knowledge, no one associated with the Trump campaign was collaborating with Russia or with WikiLeaks or with any other group in the release of emails. These recorded comments were never disclosed to the FISA court. This exculpatory evidence is among the material U.S. Attorney John Durham is examining in his criminal investigation of FBI abuses committed during the Russia inquiry.
In the series of applications for Carter Page wiretaps, judges were told the Downer story about Papadopoulos to bolster the FBI’s collusion narrative. As with Carter Page, significant exculpatory information about Papadopoulos was never shared with the court. After the FBI began interviewing him in 2017, Papadopoulos again rejected the FBI’s collusion tale, and some comments from these interviews were included in later renewal applications, but the judges were never told that he had repeatedly rejected the FBI’s Russia story in 2016 in a series of conversations recorded without his knowledge.59
“The person that bags your groceries at the supermarket has the same number of contacts with Russia and the Russian government as Mr. George Papadopoulos, which is zero,” said then-congressman John Ratcliffe in 2018 as he was investigating FBI abuses. He added, “One of the troubling things that came out of my questioning is why, if I have seen classified documents that lend support to Mr. Papadopoulos’s contention that he had no knowledge or intent to collude with the Russians or anyone on the Trump campaign having that, why he hasn’t seen those documents or why his lawyers haven’t seen those documents, or why the judges at the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court haven’t seen those documents?”60
Papadopoulos suspects that the series of confidential sources the FBI admits deploying against him is just the tip of the iceberg. He believes the government was seeking to create evidence against him via a series of bizarre characters who made contact with him overseas. The FBI acknowledges using confidential sources to engage Papadopoulos in what appeared to be intriguing international business ventures as a way of creating situations where he would feel comfortable speaking candidly. One case agent said the hope was that Papadopoulos might “feel a little freer to talk outside the confines of the United States” and perhaps repeat the comments attributed to him by Downer. The strategy involved plying Papadopoulos with drinks and encouraging discussion about politics.61
Among the strange interactions the FBI hasn’t claimed as its own—at least not yet—was a trip to Israel after Papadopoulos had begun talking to the FBI in 2017. Papadopoulos says “there had been a lot of discussion with the FBI during my first interview with them about the Israelis and my connections to the Israelis and what I was up to in the energy business over there.” Sometime after this conversation with the FBI, Papadopoulos says that an “individual who describes himself as an Israeli-American businessman wants to talk to me about the energy business” and “I go to Israel with him and then all of a sudden he’s dropping ten thousand dollars in cash in my hands.” Papadopoulos says he has no idea why the man discussing possible business was suddenly giving him a stack of U.S. currency but adds that he found it suspicious enough that he quickly turned the money
