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Robert Mueller soon may be exposed as the 'magician of omission' on Russia thehill.com/opinion/white-…
Special prosecutor John Durham’s team quietly reached out this summer to a lawyer representing European academic Joseph Mifsud, one of the earliest and most mysterious figures in the now closed Russia-collusion case.
An investigator told Swiss attorney Stephan Roh that Durham’s team wanted to interview Mifsud, or at the very least review a recorded deposition the professor gave in summer 2018 about his role in the drama involving Donald Trump, Russia and the 2016 election.
The contact, confirmed by multiple sources and contemporaneous email, sent an unmistakable message: Durham is taking a second look at one of the noteworthy figures and the conclusions of former special counsel Robert Mueller’s final report.
Evidence reviewed suggests Mueller’s handiwork may be exposed for glaring omissions that, when brought to public light, leave key questions unanswered, especially about how the FBI’s unprecedented probe of the Trump campaign started.
Durham is focused on determining whether any government or private figures who came in contact with the Trump campaign in 2016 “were engaged in improper surveillance,” a U.S. official told John Solomon when asked about the Mifsud overture.
Mueller’s team alleges that Mifsud is the person who fed a story in spring 2016 to Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos about Moscow possessing purloined emails from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
It was the earliest known contact in the now-debunked collusion narrative and the seminal event that the FBI says prompted it on July 31, 2016, to open its probe into the Trump campaign.
Mueller concluded that Mifsud was a person with extensive Russia ties who planted the story about the Clinton emails in Moscow and then lied about his dealings with Papadopoulos when interviewed by the FBI in 2017.
But unlike others accused of misleading Mueller — including Papadopoulos, former Trump adviser Michael Flynn and former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort — Mifsud was not charged with a crime.
There is now compelling evidence Mueller omitted or misrepresented important facts about Mifsud and Papadopoulos that could change the public’s understanding of events. And those aren’t the only omissions and factual errors to emerge.
Mueller never disclosed in his report that Manafort business partner Konstantin Kilimnik, identified in the final report as having ties to Russian intelligence, actually was a regular informer for the State Department from 2012-2017.
The report also incorrectly identifies an American citizen from the former Soviet republic of Georgia as a Russian.
Such omissions and mistakes add to the mistrust of the final product. And as the Durham team’s overture to Mifsud makes clear, Mueller’s testimony before Congress may not be the final verdict for his findings.
