That Russia Thing: Unanswered Questions

There are many questions for which we still don’t know the answers regarding the Russian collusion hoax. Here are four critical questions about its origin which, if answered, would fill in a lot of the blanks and tell us if this fiasco involved "just" unethical conduct, bias, gullibility, gross negligence and incompetence or also included illegality.  After the Mueller report was issued I posted a much longer list of questions (which you can read here), some answered by the December 2019 IG report. At this point we can only hope Durham answers the questions below.

Who was Joseph Mifsud acting on behalf of and what was said in his meeting with George Papdopoulos?

The alleged content of the Mifsud-Papadopolous and Downer-Papadopoulos conversations was the predicate for the FBI opening of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation on July 31, 2016.

Mifsud was the Maltese academic, publicly connected with Western intelligence services (particularly British), who approached the young, naive wannabe and newly appointed Trump foreign policy advisor George Papadopolous in March 2016. On April 26, 2016 they had a conversation in which Papadopolous says Mifsud told him the Russians had “dirt” on Clinton in the form of thousand of emails. Mifsud denied this when interviewed by the FBI.

The Mueller investigation found, no doubt to its frustration, no evidence that Papadopolous informed anyone else in the Trump campaign about any statement made by Mifsud regarding the Russians having dirt or emails regarding Clinton.

Here’s what we know about who Mifsud was not working for:

The Horowitz report found no evidence, including in FBI databases, that Mifsud was an informant for that agency.
The Mueller report found no evidence Mifsud was an asset of Russian intelligence or acting on its behalf.

There are three other possibilities:

Mifsud freelancing on his own behalf trying to enhance his reputation and make connections for the future.
Mifsud acting on behalf of a “friendly” Western intelligence agency worried about the foreign policy of a potential Trump Administration.
Mifsud acting directly, or indirectly, on behalf of an American intelligence agency.

Who was Alexander Downer acting on behalf of and what was said in his meeting with George Papadopoulos?

In early May 2016, Alexander Downer, a senior Australian diplomat with intelligence service experience and with links to the Clinton Foundation, invited Papadopolous to meet him in a London bar. During the conversation, which Papadopolous believes was recorded by Downer, he allegedy mentioned the emails obtained by the Russians – allegedly according to Downer that is, as Papadopolous denies discussing the subject with Downer. On July 26, 2016, Downer reported the conversation to the FBI claiming P had told him the Trump campaign had received indication from the Russian government it could assist the campaign by release of information damaging to Clinton. This report triggered the Crossfire Hurricane investigation.

Note that P’s statement regarding his discussion with Mifsud does not mention any indication that the Russian could assist the campaign, while Downer makes that specific claim. Further, Downer stated he decided to report the conversation ten weeks after it occurred after hearing about the hacking and public release of the DNC emails which occurred in July. Both the Mueller report and the Horowitz IG report place the alleged Papadopolous-Mifsud conversation in the context of the DNC email hack while the more obvious context is Hillary Clinton’s emails that she had destroyed to thwart the investigation, an event which was publicly known in April. Most people, myself included, assumed the Russians and/or Chinese had the missing Clinton emails and would have assumed that was what Mifsud was referring to.

Why was a senior Australian official contacting a junior Trump staffer?

Was it on his own initiative or at the request of others?

Was his conversation recorded? If so, does it support the claims he made when later reporting it to the FBI?

Does the connection made by Mueller and the FBI between the conversations and the DNC hacking make sense or was it invented after the fact to justify the initiation of Crossfire Hurricane?

Can the discrepancies between the accounts of Papadopolous, Mifsud, and Downer regarding the Clinton emails be reconciled?

Did this all start with the intelligence community trying to get Michael Flynn?

I originally thought Flynn was a bad appointment, someone who’d made some careless mistakes between the time he left the Obama administration and joined the Trump administration. Looking back I was wrong. Flynn was one of the few people in the administration who was both a Trump supporter, not just someone who wanted to “manage” Trump, and knew how the DC bureaucracy worked. He would have been very helpful to the President in those initial months when he had almost no one around him he could trust and who knew how DC worked. And he was a danger to the intelligence community because he’d made clear that the current structure was inefficient, incompetent, and needed to be slimmed down which meant a loss of power, influence, and jobs for those agencies. He needed to be taken out of action.

There is some evidence this effort to take out Flynn started as long ago as 2015. The travails and smearing of Russian emigre and Cambridge academic Svetlana Lokhova may have been ground zero for this effort, and present at the inception was U.S. intelligence agency asset Stefan Halper who turns up later interacting with Papadopolous, Carter Page, and others in what appears to be efforts to entrap them.

Was there an effort to specifically “get” Flynn and his conversation with the Russian ambassador merely an opportunity to do so?

Was Stefan Halper tasked to do this and, if so, by whom?

What is the background to the January 2017 Intelligence Community assessment regarding Russian interference with the 2016 election?

How was the assessment completed unusually quickly – only a month after being requested by President Obama?

How were the analysts selected and by whom? Was this the normal process?

Why was the assessment limited to three agencies?

What was the underlying evidence for its conclusions? Was any of the underlying evidence part of the now discredited Steele Dossier?

[By the way, the appendix to the intelligence assessment asserts the Kremlin supports the anti-fracking movement in the U.S. – Putin must be very pleased with the Democratic candidates for the 2020 election.]

And as long as we are talking about Russia . . . two more things

One of the factors in the recently announced DOJ decision not to charge Andrew McCabe for making false statements in connection with his leaks regarding the investigation of the Clinton Foundation is the difficulty in successfully prosecuting anyone seen as a opponent of Republicans in the District of Columbia (for some good analysis on the decision read this and this).  Donald Trump received 4% of the District's vote in 2016.  Voters, and potential jurors, don't just dislike Trump, they hate him and view his administration as an illegitimate occupying force that has no business being in control of THEIR government.

With the ongoing investigations and the likelihood that most indictments would need to be filed in the District we are faced with a true challenge for democracy.  Is it possible to successfully prosecute opponents of Donald Trump in the nation's capital?  If not, we are in big trouble as a country.

Secondly, I'd been meaning to write about this but an article in Red State beat me to it.  It's about Dana Boente of DOJ, who is now General Counsel of the FBI and has been neck deep in dubious activities regarding the Russia probe.  The chronology outlined in the piece is accurate and yet another illustration of how difficult it is to untangle the efforts to try to unseat Trump and why those only relying on the anti-Trump advocacy of the media don't even begin to understand what happened.