The Atlantic's Natasha Bertrand takes a look at the role information pertaining to Joseph Mifsud, a professor, is playing in Special Counsel Robert Mueller's ongoing investigation.
In the spring of 2016, Mifsud told a young Trump campaign aide, George Papadopoulos, that Russia had “dirt” on Clinton in the form of “thousands of emails,” according to the special counsel’s statement of the offense against Papadopoulos, who was indicted for misleading federal agents about his conversations with Mifsud. Russia had hacked the Democratic National Committee months earlier, and would soon break into Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta’s inbox. It is still not clear how Mifsud seemed to know in advance that Russia sought to compromise Clinton’s candidacy.
According to a new book co-authored by lawyer Stephen Roh, a German multimillionaire with ties to Russia, Mueller's investigators stopped and questioned him in October 2017 at JFK airport.
Roh and his co-author Thierry Pastor, who also knows Mifsud, write in the book that, upon arriving in New York City with his family in October 2017, “one of the co-authors” was “fished from the passport control” line at John F. Kennedy airport while his family “was retained with armed police force.” (Photos posted by Roh’s wife on social media in October 2017 suggest she was visiting New York in late October.) He was then interrogated for “hours,” they write, by “a team of Special Counsel Robert Mueller investigating Russia-Gate.” The book alleges that he and his family were then “observed, followed, and taped, at every moment and every place in New York” by the FBI and that his family was assigned to “special rooms at the hotel” while security personnel “patrolled the corridors.”
It is unclear whether Roh was actually surveilled after being interviewed—a spokesman for the special counsel’s office declined to comment.
Bertrand explains why Roh would be of interest to the special counsel.
He hired Mifsud as a “business-development consultant” in 2015, and is Mifsud’s “partner and best friend” and “the money behind him,” Papadopoulos’s wife, Simona Mangiante, who worked for Mifsud briefly, told me. Roh’s wife is Olga Roh, a Russian fashion designer who appeared on the British reality TV show Meet the Russians. He’s also in the nuclear-energy business: He acquired a small British nuclear consulting firm from scientist Dr. John Harbottle in 2005, according to the BBC, and invited Harbottle on an all-expenses paid trip to Moscow shortly thereafter, Harbottle told the outlet. Harbottle declined the offer because he “smelt a rat,” he said, and was then fired. Within three years, Severnvale Nuclear Services’ turnover went from under $100,000 to $44 million, per the BBC.
Roh intersected with Mifsud at two institutions: the now-defunct London Academy of Diplomacy and Link Campus University, a private institution in Rome that Roh co-owns, and where Mifsud taught briefly. In April 2016, Mifsud and Roh spoke on a panel together at the Kremlin-backed Valdai Club—a think tank that is close to President Vladimir Putin and hosts him every year for a keynote address.
Roh and Pastor's book alleges the Russia investigation is all a deep state plot to destroy President Trump. Another book taking the same stance is written by Ted Malloch, "a controversial London-based academic with ties to Trump associates Roger Stone and Nigel Farage," whom Mueller's team also questioned earlier this year.
A third interviewee named in Roh and Pastor's book is Ivan Timofeev, "a program director at a Russian government-funded think tank who Mueller described in court filings as 'connected to the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.”
Mifsud connected Timofeev to Papadopoulos by email in the spring of 2016, according to the filings. Over lunch earlier this year, the book says, Timofeev described being stopped by the FBI at JFK in “mid-2017” and questioned about his relationship with Papadopoulos, the DNC hacks, and about the “thousands of emails with dirt on Hillary Clinton.”
Mifsoud reportedly has been missing since last October.
Mueller's Probe Is Even More Expansive Than It Seems (The Atlantic)