Thread by @usacsmret

Schiff Document Raises New Question About FBI’s FISA Court Evidence lidblog.com/george-papadop… via @yidwithlid

If Papadopoulos is telling the truth, the FBI possessed a critical piece of exculpatory evidence by September 2016 that called into the question the legitimacy of its Trump-Russia collusion probe.

Papadopoulos says that with Downer, he didn’t discuss the Mifsud overture about dirt and thousands of emails at all.
He didn’t discuss it with Stefan Halper either.

These statements by Papadopoulos are eminently credible since if he had had those discussions and used those words, Mueller would have done something with that information that we’d know about by now.

Instead, tellingly, there is no record from Mueller’s prosecution of Papadopoulos about either the contact with Downer or the communication with Halper.

The plea agreement documents on Papadopoulos recount a number of his contacts and conversations with members of the Trump campaign, both before and after the 26 April 2016 meeting with Mifsud.

None of those contacts makes reference to the dirt/emails information at all. If there had been such conversations, we’d know about it.
So why the big build-up, on this business with the “dirt” and “thousands of emails” references?

Because...“In evidence before the FISA Court, the DOJ also revealed that the Russians previewed the release of this information [“dirt” in the form of “thousands of emails”] to Mr. @GeorgePapa19 at that time [April 2016]”

Here is what the Democrats’ summary says on page 4. Note the passage down in the paragraph highlighted in boldface: In evidence before the FISA Court, the DOJ also revealed that the Russians previewed the release of this information to Mr. Papadopoulos at that time.

The minority summary appears to be indicating that at least one of the FISA applications used information the FBI apparently had about the April 2016 meeting – but did not obtain from Downer or from Halper.

The Democrats in fact emphasized in their summary that the date of Mifsud’s disclosure to Papadopoulos was “significant,” because it meant Mifsud was telling Papadopoulos about the email heist before the Clinton campaign knew about it.

The principal takeaway from this passage is that what went into the FISA application looked, almost word for word, like what was in the NYT article from December 2017.

Yet the FBI, according to the official version of events, had no way of knowing, when it first presented the FISA application, that Mifsud had spoken to George Papadopoulos in the terms outlined in that article.

Not only had Papadopoulos not said such words to Downer or Halper; he hadn’t even told others in the Trump campaign.

The FISA applications are too redacted for us to be sure what was included in the first one filed, in October 2016. Obviously, it’s an essential question whether that initial application contained the dirt/emails reference. If so, we need to know how the FBI was aware of that.

This history gives fascinating context, meanwhile, to the statement of offense for the Papadopoulos plea agreement (on a false statement charge), filed 5 October 2017.

The statement refers to two interviews the FBI did with Papadopoulos. It was in the January 2017 interview – conducted on 27 January – that the FBI finally had official notice that Papadopoulos had been told by Mifsud about “dirt” and “thousands of emails.”

As John Solomon pointed out, the FBI could have had – months earlier – the exculpatory comments Papadopoulos made to Stefan Halper in September 2016.

If Halper was reporting to the FBI on his contacts with Papadopoulos, those comments should have been included in whatever FISA applications contained a reference to the dirt/emails discussion.

Since Papadopoulos was also mentioned in the initial October 2016 application, moreover (he appears by name on page 8) — whether it included language about “dirt” and “thousands of emails” or not — the exculpatory comments should have been included in that one as well.

I continue to have a serious question as to the vague, hearsay, and unverified nature of the information from Alexander Downer, which is the only basis for including Papadopoulos in the FISA justification,

Everything else Mueller records about Papadopoulos involved his attempts to arrange meetings with Russians for Trump or members of his campaign. There is nothing inherently nefarious about that, even if the FBI was tracking it.

But beyond those considerations: with all this for hindsight, the false statement charge against Papadopoulos, written up in the statement of offense, takes on a peculiar aspect.

The statement of offense makes quite a bit of the fact that in the 27 January 2017 interview, Papadopoulos misstated when he had been told about “dirt” and “thousands of emails.”

In that interview, he apparently said he was told about them before joining the Trump campaign. That would have put the disclosure sometime in or before the middle of March 2016.

Eventually, George Papadopoulos copped to having received the dirt/emails confidences from Mifsud on 26 April 2016.

But the question is: how did the FBI know to press that issue and get Papadopoulos to admit to a different date? They didn’t know it, they didn’t have the information in its now-identifiable outlines from Downer in July 2016, and they didn’t know it from Halper in September 2016.

One possibility, which may or may not be the likeliest one, is that once the first Carter Page FISA authorization was obtained, the FBI did a complete dump of George Papadopoulos’s communications.

It is not unlikely at this point, given everything else we’ve seen, that the FBI knew – or someone else involved knew – everything Joseph Mifsud knew about the 26 April 2016 meeting, because Mifsud was working for them.