The Atlantic's Natasha Bertrand previews George Papadopoulos' testimony before House Judiciary and Oversight Committee members Thursday, noting the Trump campaign advisor – who will serve two weeks in prison for lying to the FBI – intends to encourage GOP allies' unfounded conspiracy theories about an FBI and British intelligence plot to sabotage the president.
“I didn’t want to have to expose the biggest political scandal in modern history,” Papadopoulos tweeted last week. “I was happy living on the Greek islands. But, guess life works in mysterious ways and I am happy I was called.”
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On Thursday, Papadopoulos will testify to what he believes was an operation designed by the FBI, in coordination with Britain’s intelligence services, to “infiltrate” and “sabotage” the Trump campaign. (Congress is in recess, so it is not clear which members will show up and which will send their staff.) He plans to detail the interactions he had with at least nine people during the election, according to a letter his attorney Caroline Polisi wrote to the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees last week, which I obtained. Those include the foreign professor Joseph Mifsud, who first told him in the spring of 2016 that Russia had dirt on Hillary Clinton in the form of thousands of emails; Sergei Millian, a Belarus-born businessman who was reportedly in regular touch with Papadopoulos in 2016 and has described himself as an exclusive broker for the Trump Organization’s potential real-estate dealings in Russia; and Stefan Halper, a Cambridge University professor who approached Papadopoulos in August 2016 while secretly working for the FBI.
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After Papadopoulos was sentenced in early September, he was freer to speak for himself ... After telling a judge that he “made a terrible mistake” in not being forthcoming with the FBI, Papadopoulos took to Twitter, where he has maintained that Mifsud—a Maltese professor whose interactions with Papadopoulos in April 2016 purportedly triggered the FBI’s Russia investigation—was actually a deep-state plant working for Western intelligence agencies hoping to entrap the Trump campaign. (Papadopoulos’s former lawyer, Thomas Breen, told reporters last month that he believed that Mifsud was working for the Russians. Papadopoulos, who considered taking back his guilty plea over the summer but decided against it, has since hired new attorneys.) Mifsud, meanwhile, apparently believes that Papadopoulos set him up. In a book co-written by Stephan Roh, a German multimillionaire with ties to Russia who now calls himself Mifsud’s lawyer, Mifsud was quoted as calling Papadopoulos an “agent provocateur.”
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... [A]ccording to the charging documents that Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to, he met Mifsud three times from March to April. They continued to email through April, with Papadopoulos expressing consistent interest in a Trump-Russia relationship that Mifsud said he could facilitate. And on April 26, over breakfast in London, Mifsud told Papadopoulos that he had just returned from a trip to Moscow where he had learned from high-level Russian-government officials that Moscow had “dirt” on Clinton in the form of “thousands of emails.”
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Despite keeping the campaign apprised of his conversations with Mifsud and efforts to set up a Trump-Putin meeting, Papadopoulos says he has “no recollection” of telling the campaign about the Russian “dirt.” Democrats on the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees will likely challenge him on that—one of the biggest lingering mysteries of the 2016 election is whether the Trump campaign knew anything about the stolen emails before agreeing to meet with Russian nationals at Trump Tower, on the promise of obtaining dirt on Clinton, in June 2016.
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It remains to be seen whether Papadopoulos walks into the hearing armed with theories about double agents and the deep state. But one thing is clear: Papadopoulos will be leaving sympathetic lawmakers a road map that he hopes they will follow. “We are hoping and anticipating that the interview will be mutually beneficial,” Polisi, Papadopoulos’s lawyer, told me. “George hopes to provide the committees with facts regarding his encounters with certain individuals that warrant more scrutiny. To the extent that fact-finding members of the committee are looking with a critical eye at the inner workings of this investigation, we hope to be able to point them in the right direction.”
George Papadopoulos Hopes to Fuel Republicans’ Suspicions About the Russia Probe (The Atlantic)