By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY
George
Papadopoulos (image via LinkedIn)
Is the former campaign adviser accused of misrepresenting
his subjective state of mind, not objective reality?
Congress should be taking a very hard look at the
prosecution of George Papadopoulos.
To these eyes, the harder one looks, the
more the Papadopoulos case appears to be much ado about nothing. That is no
small thing: The “much ado” here is a purported Trump–Russia conspiracy to
subvert a presidential election.
There has always been something fishy about the charge
filed by Special Counsel Robert Mueller against Papadopoulos, who was a
green-as-grass 28-year-old when he made the big primary-season move from Ben
Carson–campaign novice to Trump-campaign novice.
Peruse the “Statement of the Offense,”
filed by Mueller’s lead prosecutor on the case, Jeannie S. Rhee (who is fresh
from a stint representing the Clinton Foundation — and donating
$5,400 to the Hillary Clinton campaign).
You find that there is collusion
with Russia pouring off every one of the document’s 13 pages — meetings with
shadowy figures portrayed as Kremlin operatives, apparent schemes to undermine
Mrs. Clinton, ambitious plans for pow-wows between candidate Trump and
strongman Putin.
Yet . . . there is no charge having anything to
do with “collusion” — in the criminal-law sense of conspiracy between the Trump
campaign and the Kremlin to commit “cyber-espionage” or otherwise sabotage the
2016 election.
Instead, after the big 13-page wind-up, Papadopoulos ends
up pleading guilty to a minor false-statements charge — one that is convoluted
and, in the scheme of things, trivial.
In essence, Papadopoulos is said to have
lied about the timing and scope of his contact with the Maltese academic Joseph
Mifsud. Mueller, Rhee & Co. allege that Papadopoulos falsely claimed that
the contacts started before he joined the Trump campaign.
It turns out that they
started on March 14, 2016; this was some time after he “learned he would be a
foreign policy advisor for the campaign” (page 3, paragraph 4) but a week
before the campaign’s March 21 announcement that he was a campaign “policy
advisor” (page 4, paragraph 6).
In concluding that this seems picayune, it is not my
purpose to challenge the technical legal sufficiency of the charge.
The
requirement to prove a false statement was “material” (see Section 1001 of
the federal penal code) is a very low hurdle.
My point is — and has been —
that, since allegations of “collusion” have roiled the nation and threatened a
presidency for nearly two years, a ho-hum false-statements charge is a strange
way to treat the one and only guy who, according to the special counsel,
colluded up a storm.
But this only scratches the surface of strangeness.
While much that has gone on in the Mueller investigation
is curious, I have assumed the candor of the special counsel’s portrayal of the
Papadopoulos case:
The young man was approached by an agent of Russia, who
eventually informed him (on April 26, 2016) that the Kremlin had “dirt” on the
Democratic party’s nominee, Hillary Clinton, in the form of “thousands” of
“emails of Clinton” (pages 3–7).
To my mind, then, the only questions involved are:
(a) the nature of Mifsud’s relationship to the Putin regime and
(b) whether the
emails in question were the hacked DNC emails (which Democrats have suggested)
or the thousands of emails Clinton deleted from her homebrew server (which
seemed to me more likely).
Yet, important reporting by the Daily Caller’s
Chuck Ross, the Wall Street Journal’s Kim Strassel, and Lee Smith
at Real Clear Investigations calls for a more exacting perusal
of Mueller’s allegations. Specifically:
(1) Is Mueller really claiming that
Papadopoulos was approached by an agent of Russia and
(2) did this agent
actually claim that the Russians’ “dirt” involved emails — and if so, is there
reason to believe he knew what he was talking about?
When one looks carefully at Mueller’s statement of the
offense, and at the one-count criminal-information to
which Papadopoulos pled guilty, one realizes Mueller is not claiming that
Mifsud and his associates truly were Kremlin operatives — only that Papadopoulos
was under the impression that they were.
The information legalistically
accuses Papadopoulos of lying about his “interactions with certain foreign
nationals whom he understood to have close connections with
senior Russian government officials” (emphasis added). That is, Papadopoulos is
accused of misrepresenting his subjective state of mind, not objective reality.
Mueller is not saying Mifsud and his associates really
have close connections to Putin’s regime.
And as Lee
Smith details, it is highly unlikely that they do.
Mifsud himself has
denied that he is a Russian operative, and those who know him well describe him
as tied to Western intelligence agents.
As for the Russian
associates he introduced to Papadopoulos, they are:
(1) a woman who falsely claimed
to be Putin’s niece, and who falsely promised to introduce Papadopoulos to
Russia’s ambassador to Britain; and
(2) Ivan Timofeev, whom Mueller and Rhee
pregnantly describe as “the Russian MFA connection” (as in Ministry of Foreign
Affairs) but who is actually a young academic researcher running a think tank
that has some sort of tie to the MFA but no discernible connections to Russian
intelligence.
Two of Smith’s sources, German lawyer Stephan Roh and
French political analyst Thierry Pastor, are friends of Mifsud’s who have
written a book called The Faking of Russia-gate:
The Papadopoulos Case,
an Investigative Analysis. According to them, Mifsud denies that he told
Papadopoulos anything about emails related to Clinton — and, indeed, denies
that he was told anything by Russians about such emails.
My first impression on reading that is: “So what? Mifsud
is probably lying.”
But then, once again, I examine Mueller’s statement of
the offense more carefully. It contains only a fleeting reference in which
Papadopoulos says Mifsud told him that, among the “dirt” they had on her, “the
Russians had emails of Clinton”; “they have thousands of emails.”
There is no
other indication that Mifsud made such a claim to Papadopoulos or anyone else.
Again, so what, right? Papadopoulos is cooperating with
Mueller and has said he heard Mifsud talk about emails. So what more do we need
to know?
Well . . . maybe a lot.
Remember, there is no allegation that Mifsud actually
knew that the Russians had Clinton emails, let alone that he ever showed
Papadopoulos any such emails. The claim is that Mifsud was told by unidentified
Russian officials that the Kremlin had the emails.
So, what happens after Mifsud, allegedly, told
Papadopoulos the Russians had these emails? According to Mueller’s statement of
the offense, the following day Papadopoulos sends two emails to high-ranking
Trump-campaign officials about his meeting with Mifsud, and neither one
of them says anything about emails.
It appears that Papadopoulos was
myopically focused on the possibility — farfetched, but apparently real to
Papadopoulos — that Mifsud could help arrange a meeting between Trump and
Putin.
Now, again, this does not mean Mifsud did not mention
emails to Papadopoulos. But let’s consider the critical events that Mueller and
Rhee omit from the statement of the offense.
On approximately May 10, just two weeks after the April
26 meeting with Mifsud, Papadopoulos has his barroom meeting with the
Australian diplomat Alexander Downer.
Both Chuck Ross and Kim
Strassel note that, in an interview with the Australian press, Downer
recounted that Papadopoulos was not specific about what kind of material he’d
heard Russia was holding. He did not say emails. He did not even say it was
“dirt” on Clinton; only that whatever it was “could be damaging to her.”
As Strassel observes, the New York Times blockbuster report that
touted the Papadopoulos–Downer meeting as the catalyst for the FBI’s Russia
investigation does not actually say that Papadopoulos told Downer the Russians
had emails.
Moreover, Strassel’s reporting contradicts the suggestion floated
by the Times and government officials that Downer reported
Papadopoulos’s statements to Australian intelligence, which then passed them
along to the FBI. Instead, Downer gave his information directly to
. . . wait for it . . . the Obama State
Department (that would be the State Department whose former boss was
the Democratic nominee for president).
This is consistent with House
Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes’s revelation that the FBI’s opening
of a counterintelligence investigation was not predicated on any reporting from
a foreign intelligence service.
Meanwhile, in September 2016, Stefan Halper, a
British-American academic with longtime connections to the CIA, was tasked by
the FBI to approach Papadopoulos.
As Ross has reported,
based on an unidentified source with knowledge of the conversation, Papadopoulos
told Halper he knew nothing about any emails or Russian hacking —
notwithstanding Halper’s aggressive, loaded questioning on the subject.
It is very hard to understand what is going on here.
But
in light of the centrality of Papadopoulos to the Obama administration’s
purported suspicions about Trump-campaign “coordination” in Russia’s
election-meddling — suspicions that are said to have justified the use of the
government’s counterintelligence powers against the administration’s political
opposition — it is essential to nail down what the Papadopoulos prosecution has
established.
Several questions suggest themselves:
• Is Special Counsel Mueller contending that Mifsud and
his associates were authentic agents of Russia, or merely that Papadopoulos may
have thought they were?
• What exactly does the special counsel allege that
Mifsud told Papadopoulos the Russians were hoarding? Did Mifsud really say the
Russians had emails? If so, exactly what emails?
• Lee Smith notes that the FBI interviewed Mifsud in
February 2017, shortly after the FBI interviewed Papadopoulos. Did Mifsud deny
being a Russian operative? Did he admit to telling Papadopoulos that the
Russians had Clinton-related emails, or did he deny it (as he denied it to
Smith’s sources)?
• What if any role did the State Department play in the
transmission to the FBI of Alexander Downer’s account of his meeting with
Papadopoulos? How did the State Department describe what Papadopoulos said? How
does that description square with what Papadopoulos, Mifsud, and Downer told
the FBI?
The nation has been led to believe that Papadopoulos was
interacting with clandestine agents of Russia, who told him the Kremlin was in
possession of thousands of emails that could damage Clinton — emails that media
reporting has implied were the ones hacked from the DNC and published during
the campaign.
There are, however, grounds to believe an alternative version of
events:
(1) A very low-level, inexperienced Trump-campaign adviser was interacting
with a Maltese academic who had no real Kremlin ties and no inside information
about whether Russia actually possessed damaging information about Clinton, in
the form of emails or otherwise and
(2) This young campaign adviser then made a vague
claim to an Australian diplomat, who did not hear him say anything about
emails, and did not report the conversation to his government through regular
channels.
After nearly two years of collusion banter, Congress
needs to find out which of these accounts is closer to the truth.
ANDREW C. MCCARTHY —
Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and a
contributing editor of National
Review. @andrewcmccarthy
