The Cost

over to lawyers representing him. Then his story gets even more disturbing: “And as I’m flying back to the United States I am basically, you know, I was grabbed by seven FBI agents looking for money.” Papadopoulos adds, “I thought it was a set-up.”⁶² This may sound like a scene from a movie in which he plays some sort of secret agent. That’s exactly how the FBI wanted FISA judges to think of him and Carter Page.

But did anyone at the FBI ever really believe it? If not, the case goes down as the greatest violation of First Amendment rights in the long, disturbing history of the FBI. If there wasn’t a sincere belief that these men might really be working with Russia to fix an election, then they were simply targeted for surveillance and persecuted for their political beliefs.

For anyone who wants to give every benefit of the doubt to the people who ran the FBI during the Obama administration, it’s very difficult to explain how the government treated Joseph Mifsud. This is the Maltese professor who Papadopoulos says told him the story about Russia having damaging information on Hillary Clinton. Mifsud is the man at the very origin of the collusion story. Special counsel Robert Mueller and the FBI say that on April 26, 2016, at a breakfast meeting at London’s Andaz hotel, Mifsud told Papadopoulos the Russians had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton in the form of emails.⁶³ Ten days later Papadopoulos would have his famous meeting with the Australian diplomat Downer that triggered the creation of the Crossfire Hurricane case at the FBI. So, according to the official history, the Mifsud meeting is what started it all.

In a 2017 interview with the FBI, Mifsud admitted meeting Papadopoulos but said he didn’t have any inside knowledge about emails or Russian information on Clinton or offering to share it with the Trump campaign. He added that Papadopoulos must have misunderstood him, since at one point they were discussing cybersecurity and hacking generally. Mifsud’s denials were not shared with the FISA court, which is appalling given that the FBI’s Papadopoulos story was at the heart of the probable cause section of all four of the Carter Page FISA warrant applications.

But there’s an even larger problem with the Mifsud story as U.S. citizens consider FBI actions in the collusion saga. Both Mueller and the FBI say they don’t believe Mifsud. Mueller and the FBI say that text and email evidence shows that Mifsud told FBI agents falsehoods about the timing and extent of his interactions with Papadopoulos.⁶⁴ Yet the Justice Department has never seemed particularly interested in pursuing Mifsud.

According to the official history from Mueller and the FBI, Mifsud is the man who triggered the entire collusion investigation and then made false statements about it to the FBI. And the government has never charged him with anything. At special counsel Robert Mueller’s July 25, 2019, appearance before the House Intelligence and Judiciary Committees, Representative Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) tried to get an explanation:

JORDAN: Director, the FBI interviewed Joseph Mifsud on February 10th, 2017.… He lied three times. You point it out in the report. Why didn’t you charge him with a crime?

MUELLER: I can’t get into internal deliberations with regard to who or who would not be charged.…

JORDAN: A lot of things you can’t get into.… [Y]ou can charge all kinds of people who are around the president with false statements but the guy who launches everything, the guy who puts this whole story in motion, you can’t charge him. I think that’s amazing.

MUELLER: I’m not certain I—I’m not certain I agree with your characterizations.

JORDAN: Well I’m reading from your report. Mifsud told Papadopoulos, Papadopoulos tells the diplomat, the diplomat tells the FBI, the FBI opens the investigation July 31st, 2016. And here we are three years later, July of 2019, the country’s been put through this and the central figure who launches it all lies to us, and you guys don’t hunt him down and interview him again and you don’t charge him with a crime.⁶⁵

After reviewing the record of FBI abuses committed against Americans by the FBI in the collusion probe, how does one explain the gentle treatment of the foreign actor who, at least according to the FBI, is a dishonest character and the original source of the collusion story? It doesn’t seem to make any sense—unless the FBI leadership was more concerned with taking down Trump than with running down leads on Russian activities. Papadopoulos, for his part, believes Mifsud was a “plant” helping the U.S. government create the pretext to target Trump. As of this writing, Papadopoulos doesn’t have proof to back up his theory, but the question posed by Jim Jordan still demands an answer.

There are also more questions to answer about the roles played in this drama by the Aussie diplomat Alexander Downer and by a consultant to the U.S. government named Stefan Halper, who met Page and Papadopoulos at various points in 2016.

Speaking of Downer, Maria asked Attorney General Barr about the FBI launching Crossfire Hurricane based on Downer’s vague unofficial report. Barr says, “That is the official version of what happened—that that comment in a London wine bar was what the basis really was for going forward. And I’ve said that I felt that was a very slender reed to get law enforcement, intelligence agencies involved in investigating the campaign of one’s political opponent.”⁶⁶

When we asked whether Joseph Mifsud has worked with Western intelligence services, Barr responded, “I can’t get into that.” When asked for more detail on Mifsud, the attorney general said, “No, but I’ll just say that one of the things that takes time is that Mr. Durham is trying to look at all the various allegations and concerns that have been raised. So he has been looking at things pre-July [2016] and trying to run those down. And so there’s a lot to look at throughout this whole episode, both before and after the election. And he’s diligently looking at