The Senate Intelligence Committee met with George Papadopoulos' wife Simona Mangiante Papadopoulos on Monday, and according to her, the closed-door meeting focused largely on the man through whom she and her husband met.
The panel asked Mangiante Papadopoulos about her former employer Joseph Mifsud, a London-based professor with suspected ties to the Kremlin, she told The Washington Post in a brief interview. Mifsud, prosecutors have said, offered to help her husband, George Papadopoulos, broker meetings between the Trump campaign and Russian officials — a subject of intense interest to special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.
George Papadopoulos, who also worked for Mifsud, spent two weeks in jail for lying to federal investigators about his contacts with Russians. Mifsud has told The Post he has no ties to Russia outside of academia.
“I was happy to provide information,” Mangiante Papadopoulos said, noting that congressional investigators sought her testimony because she has substantive knowledge of Mifsud. “Definitely not because I am a Russian spy,” she added, a reference to accusations made on social media.
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Mifsud ran an organization, the London Center of International Law Practice, where Mangiante Papadopoulos and her husband had worked. Mangiante Papadopoulos was hired after working for the European Parliament but left after three months. She has since suggested that Mifsud’s operation was a “facade for something else” and that neither she nor her husband ever fully understood Mifsud’s work. She told the Guardian newspaper last year that Mifsud never paid her.
As The Post previously reported, Mifsud claimed in private to have several Russian contacts — and to have even met with Russian President Vladimir Putin. In March 2016, according to court documents, he introduced George Papadopoulos to a woman he identified as “Putin’s niece” — though she was not — to discuss arranging a meeting and “U.S.-Russia ties under President Trump.” Papadopoulos later disclosed the exchange to Trump’s national campaign co-chairman Sam Clovis, according to court documents.
The next month, Mifsud told Papadopoulos that Russia had “dirt” on Clinton, including “thousands of emails,” according to court documents.
Senate investigators question Simona Mangiante Papadopoulos as part of Trump-Russia probe (WaPo)