Editor’s note: This is the second of a three-part series, featuring an exclusive interview scheduled to air Sunday, June 9, on Liberty Nation Radio with George Papadopoulos, former Trump campaign operative and author of Deep State Target: How I Got Caught in the Crosshairs of the Plot to Bring Down President Trump. In Part 1, Papadopoulos described how he was first set up by a mysterious professor in London.
As a young upstart foreign policy analyst hired in 2015 by a presidential campaign openly scorned by the political establishment and desperate for foreign policy expertise, George Papadopoulos thought he was living the dream.
He had no idea it would actually turn into a nightmare he could never have imagined.
In his ongoing efforts on behalf of candidate Donald Trump to network with officials from institutions and governments around the world, Papadopoulos was situated in London in the summer of 2015 and was introduced to one Joseph Mifsud, a professor from Malta working at a university in the British capital.
Joseph Mifsud
Mifsud told Papadopoulos that the Russians had the goods on Hillary Clinton, that they had stolen thousands of her emails. What happened next would change the course of history.
Tim Donner: Shortly after your meeting with Mifsud, where he said that the Russians had dirt on Hillary Clinton, about two weeks later on May 10, 2016, you have a fateful meeting in London which changes your life, with another man whose name is sure to be in the news in the days ahead, an Australian named Alexander Downer, who is very confrontational with you. Take it from there.
George Papadopoulos: Sure. So, after Joseph Mifsud had told me that the Russians have thousands of Hillary Clinton emails, I never told anyone on the Donald Trump campaign. I never told Donald Trump or Steve Bannon or anyone, even though I was in a daily communication at that time with Stephen Miller, Corey Lewandowski, and others when I was living in London. So I never told anyone. First of all, I wasn’t there to discuss hacked emails. It’s not my business, first, and I’m not involved in any illegal behavior and neither is the campaign. So clearly when I met Joseph Mifsud and he told me this information, I had no idea that that’s why he was wanting to meet with me.
Alexander Downer
So then, as you stated, I met an Australian diplomat very suspiciously ten days after Joseph Mifsud told me this information. Alexander Downer is one of Hillary Clinton’s and Bill Clinton’s best friends in the world. When he was Australia’s foreign minister he donated $25 million of hard-earned Australian taxpayer money to the Clinton Foundation. Clearly during my encounter with him, he was very hostile to Donald Trump and his policies and expressed the views of the Australian government that they clearly preferred Hillary Clinton and viewed Donald Trump as a pariah.
This individual, who I reported eventually to the FBI, to Congress, because I thought he was recording my conversation with his phone, ended up somehow giving some information to somebody that was passed along to the corrupt FBI under Jim Comey to help launch an investigation, which apparently was part of why they launched this investigation. I don’t buy that story. I don’t think William Barr buys that story. During his interview on CBS recently he openly debunked that the investigation was launched in July. It was launched much earlier than that, and it’s my firm belief, and I’ve been very open about this, and the president has been supporting my contention, that the Australians were clearly in on this operation against us from the beginning.
Tim: Now, the story that’s been told and retold in the media was that when you met with Alexander Downer, the Australian, the pro-Hillary Clinton Australian diplomat, that you were plied with liquor, you were drunk, and that you told tales out of school. But you deny that you had too much to drink at that infamous meeting, and that you ever told Mr. Downer that the Russians had damaging material related to Hillary Clinton, right?
George Papadopoulous
Papadopoulos: You’re absolutely right. Downer himself has gone public, and I even wrote it in my book, we had one light gin and tonic, and I was so disturbed by Alexander Downer’s behavior that, as I explained, I actually reported him to both Congress and the FBI for spying on me because he was holding his phone in a manner that I thought was recording my conversation. And I didn’t understand, quite frankly, what he was doing until later on. Of course, Bob Mueller’s own prosecutors told me that he was basically recording my conversation. He was obviously part of an operation.
This information had never been told before. I’ve just recently come out with my story, and I testified about this behind closed doors to Congress. That testimony has just now come out, but when the president talks openly about the need for William Barr to investigate the U.K. and Australia, he’s not simply, you know — these are not off-the-cuff remarks. There’s a reason he’s suggesting it. There’s also a reason why William Barr wants to actually look into the origins of this investigation and to understand why these foreign governments were spying on us themselves.
Tim: Yes. And those investigations by the attorney general and by the Inspector General are, of course, well underway, and we’ll start getting results soon. But that meeting with Downer was in May of 2016. Let’s fast forward four months to Sept. 2, 2016, about two months before the election. You get an email from a man you describe as a morbidly obese American professor at Cambridge University in England who sweats profusely and was nicknamed the Walrus — Stefan Halper. What transpires after that message that came seemingly out of the blue in what you describe as “Halper Hell”?
Stefan Halper
Papadopoulos: Yes. That’s a great point and question. Besides the foreign government interference, which includes Alexander Downer and Joseph Mifsud, who were working clearly with the British and the U.S. intelligence services to spy on us, Stefan Halper actually took it one step further. He had been trying to set up Michael Flynn as early as 2015 with this Russian woman named Svetlana Lokhova, who has recently sued Stefan Halper. Halper has a history of spying on rival campaigns and worked with the CIA. So when I got this email I didn’t know who this person was, except that he had worked for a couple of U.S. administrations, and he worked at Cambridge, and he wanted to pay me some money to write a report on the energy business in Israel, which I was an expert on at the time.
So I flew to London, and I was expecting just to have a normal business meeting, until he introduces me to this assistant of his, who The New York Times obviously wrote about, this Azra Turk, who clearly was an agent, and I was very suspicious about her. I don’t think she was working with the FBI. I think she was probably a foreign asset working with the CIA. And he basically, as I explain in my book, Deep State Target, is there to spy on me for my political and business ties in the Middle East and to assure that I’m not advising Donald Trump on those issues, then to record my conversations, which he was doing over the three days we were there. That’s what Donald Trump has declassified. That’s what members of Congress now are openly discussing regarding transcripts of my meetings with informants, and we’re going to get to the bottom of who actually was handling this guy and why he was trying to entrap Flynn and me.
–
In the final part of this series, Papadopoulos reveals the details of his arrest and imprisonment and what Attorney General William Barr is likely to uncover in his escalating investigation into FBI surveillance of the Trump presidential campaign.
~
At Liberty Nation, we love to hear from our readers. Comment and join the conversation!
