One rainy night in May
2016, a Trump campaign advisor named George Papadopoulos walked into a posh
wine bar in affluent West London.
It is still hard to believe that former Howard Government minister and Liberal MP for Mayo Alexander John Gosse Downer AC, as High Commissioner for Australia in the United Kingdom - a man who once posed like this (left) - actually managed to alert the US government which triggered the Federal Bureau of Investigation examination of Donald J. Trump's presidential election campaign and Russian interference in US electoral processes.
However, the Mueller Report indicates at a number of points that this is the case.
In late July 2016, soon after
WikiLeaks's first release of stolen documents, a foreign government contacted
the FBI about a May 2016 encounter with Trump Campaign foreign policy advisor George
Papadopoulos. Papadopoulos had suggested to a representative of that foreign government
that the Trump Campaign had received indications from the Russian government that
it could assist the Campaign through the anonymous release of information damaging
to Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. That information prompted
the FBI on July 31, 2016, to open an investigation into whether individuals
associated with the Trump Campaign were coordinating with the Russian
government in its interference activities……
July 2016 was also the
month WikiLeaks first released emails stolen by the GRU from the DNC. On July
22, 2016, WikiLeaks posted thousands of internal DNC documents revealing information
about the Clinton Campaign. Within days, there was public reporting that U.S. intelligence
agencies had "high confidence" that the Russian government was behind
the theft of emails and documents from the DNC. And within a week of the
release, a foreign government informed the FBI about its May 2016 interaction with
Papadopoulos and his statement that the Russian government could assist the
Trump Campaign. On July 31, 2016, based on the foreign government repo11ing, the
FBI opened an investigation into potential coordination between the Russian
government and individuals associated with the Trump Campaign…..
In late April 2016,
Papadopoulos was told by London-based professor Joseph Mifsud, immediately
after Mifsud's return from a trip to Moscow, that the Russian government had
obtained "dirt" on candidate Clinton in the form of thousands of
emails. One week later, on May 6, 2016, Papadopoulos suggested to a
representative of a foreign government that the Trump Campaign had received
indications from the Russian government that it could assist the Campaign through
the anonymous release of information that would be damaging to candidate Clinton…..
Further
reading
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