According to the report filed by Russia investigation special counsel Robert Mueller and available online via The Washington Post , the investigation into possible collusion between the 2016 Donald Trump campaign and Russia began when a young foreign policy adviser to the campaign revealed to an Australian diplomat that a mysterious professor from Malta had passed him some explosive information.
That adviser, George Papadopoulos, claimed that the Russia-linked professor Joseph Mifsud had told him in April of 2016, as The Inquisitr has reported, that Russia possessed “dirt” on Democrat Hillary Clinton in the form of “thousands” of emails.
But who was Mifsud? The mysterious professor has disappeared, remaining unseen since November of 2017 when he gave an interview to an Italian newspaper, proclaiming his innocence in the Russia collusion affair, according to The Malta Independent newspaper.
Without Mifsud around to speak for himself, Trump allies such as Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani — as Media Matters reported — have sought to portray the mysterious academic as an operative of a western intelligence agency, possibly the United States CIA, who was “planted” in a plot to set up Papadopoulos.
But according to a bombshell report Sunday by The Washington Post , U.S. intelligence agencies believed that Mifsud was a Russian agent at least “several years” before Mifsud met Papadopoulos.
In his November 2017 interview with the Italian newspaper La Reppublica , Mifsud acknowledged that he met with Papadopoulos on three or four occasions, but claimed, “the Russians didn’t ask me to meet Papadopoulos.”
Mifsud also denied that he discussed stolen Clinton emails possessed by Russia with Papadopoulos, in the interview. But after the publication of the interview, Mifsud disappeared.
The Post investigation found other links between Mifsud and Russia, reporting that “Mifsud visited Moscow just weeks before the U.S. presidential election,” and that after the election, in December of 2016, Mifsud “welcomed a Kremlin-linked academic to speak at Rome’s Link Campus University.”
According to what Stephan Roh, the Swiss lawyer who claims to represent Mifsud, told The Post , the academic has been residing “mainly in Rome but moving in Europe.” But Roh himself has business ties to Russia, according to a report by BuzzFeed . Roh also claims that a conspiracy of western intelligence agencies framed Trump in the Russia collusion scandal, and has authored a book, The Faking of RUSSIA-GATE: The Papadopoulos Case .
In the book, Roh claims that he was detained by Mueller, but his name does not appear in the Mueller report. He also told The Post that Mifsud had been interviewed by Mueller in 2019, but provided no evidence to support the claim. Mifsud’s name is mentioned in the Mueller report 103 times.