Trump ‘Coffee Boy’ George Papadopoulos Helped Prof Who Knew Of Hacked Emails Get Away From FBI, Mueller Says
The FBI would have arrested or at least questioned an elusive Maltese professor who claimed to know in April of 2016 that Russia had “dirt” on Democrat Hillary Clinton, in the form of “thousands” of stolen emails, but the investigators missed the professor because George Papadopoulos lied to them repeatedly. That is the scenario spelled out by Russia investigation Special Counsel Robert Mueller in a sentencing memorandum for Papadopoulos filed Friday in a Washington D.C. federal court. The Mueller court filing has been made available online by Politco.
Papadopoulos was a foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign. The FBI investigation into the 2016 Trump campaign’s possible collusion with Russia was set off by Papadopoulos, when he revealed during a night of drinking with an Australian diplomat in May, 2016, that the professor, Joseph Mifsud, had told him that Russia had the hacked emails three weeks earlier, according to reporting by the New York Times.
But according to Mueller in the court document, when the FBI sat Papadopoulos down for a two-hour interrogation on January 27, 2017, the former Trump adviser “repeatedly lied throughout the interview in order to conceal the timing and significance of information the defendant had received regarding the Russians possessing ‘dirt’ on Hillary Clinton, as well as his own outreach to Russia on behalf of the campaign,” according to a report by Politico.
In fact, the lies told by Papadopoulos, “undermined investigators’ ability to challenge the Professor or potentially detain or arrest him while he was still in the United States. The government understands that the Professor left the United States on February 11, 2017 and he has not returned to the United States since then,” the sentencing memorandum stated, according to Bloomberg News.
Not only has Mifsud made no known trips to the United States since February of 2017, as the Inquisitr reported earlier, he has simply disappeared and his whereabouts remain unknown, even to a woman saying that she was his fiancee.
Mifsud was scheduled to appear in an Italian court on July 11, 2018, in a criminal case unrelated to the Russia investigation, but according to the Malta Independent, the Maltese academic failed to show up there as well, leading Italian prosecutors to describe him as “a ghost.”
A lie by Papadopoulos set Maltese Professor Joseph Mifsud free from being investigated further in Russia’s link with Trump campaign probe https://t.co/PYrZBekhEg pic.twitter.com/MK9KcnH6zA
— Saliba Jes (@SalibaJes) August 18, 2018
The prosecutors, calling Mifsud a “peculiar subject,” said that they have tried to track him down, but have been unable to find any trace of him. When they tried to contact at him at his last known address in Rome, they said no one was present, his name was not on the doorbell, and neighbors said that they had never seen him.
In the sentencing memorandum, Mueller said that the lies told by Papadopoulos were so damaging to the Russia investigation that the former Trump adviser once dismissed by a top Trump aide as a “coffee boy,” as Inquisitr reported, should spend up to six months in a federal penitentiary.
