Turns out, it was the coffee boy who spilled the beans

Remember George Papadopoulos, the member of the Trump campaign team who, not too long ago, pled guilt to lying to the FBI? Remember how, Trump, playing it all down, referred to Papadopoulos as a “low level volunteer” and a “liar,” and how members of the President’s inner circle said he was nothing more than a “coffee boy“? Well, it would appear that this inconsequential, little coffee boy may have been the one responsible for the F.B.I. having opened a counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign prior to the election. According to today’s New York Times, it was something said by Papadopoulos to an Australian at the Kensington Wine Rooms in London that set the whole thing in motion. [And, yes, the Trump team, it would appear, was in the practice of sending their coffee boy to London to take meetings at swanky bars.] Here’s how the article begins.

So, the whole thing didn’t start, as Republicans have suggested, with an opposition research dossier funded by Hillary Clinton’s campaign. No, the whole thing started with Papadopoulos, over drinks, bragging to Australian Alexander Downer about how the Trump team would soon be benefiting from Democratic emails stolen by the Russians… And this was months before eight the DNC or the American people became aware of the hack.

And Papadopoulos, as you’ll recall, is now cooperating with the Mueller investigation, ostensibly telling them everything those above him in the administration knew about these stolen Democratic emails, and when they knew it.

So, why is this coming out now? If I had to guess, I’d say that Mueller and his team are slowly laying the groundwork necessary before they initiate their the next wave of their campaign, which will be targeting those in Trump’s inner circle. If I were a betting man, I’d say that next week will be one that we won’t easily forget.

I don’t think they’ll be nearly as popular as the statues of Mueller that will start going up around the country once all of this is over with, but I do suspect, by the time we’re done, there will be at least a few statues of the unwitting hero, George Papadopoulos, leaning over to the guy next to him at the bar, laying out the treasonous plan of the Trump campaign.

[Today’s post is dedicated to the people of Australia. Thank you, Australia, for doing the right thing, and alerting the authorities.]

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5 Comments

  1. Proton
    Posted December 30, 2017 at 5:23 pm | Permalink

    https://www.opednews.com/articles/Jill-Stein-in-the-Crosshai-by-Mike-Whitney-Clinton-Campaign_Investigation_Jill-Stein_Political-Values-171229-372.html
    OpEdNews Op Eds 12/29/2017 at 00:03:09
    Jill Stein in the Crosshairs: the Russia Investigation Shifts to Clinton’s Political Rivals
    By Mike Whitney
    ……
    A “Russian asset”? Jill Stein is a “Russian asset”?
    How long are American liberals going to put up with this bullshit? How long before they wash the mud from their eyes and acknowledge what should be as plain as the nose on their face; that their precious investigation of Donald Trump is nothing more than a witch hunt designed to intimidate or destroy political rivals?
    The persecution of Jill Stein strips away the facade once and for all exposing Russia-gate as a complete fraud that is being used to exact revenge on the adversaries of Hillary Clinton and her reprobate friends. Even the New York Times admits as much.
    Why is there still no evidence of wrongdoing after more than a year of relentless, non-stop investigations? Why are there just accusations, allegations and baseless claims?
    Take a hard look at the Stein case and you’ll understand why. The meat-puppet senators who are conducting these wretched show trials don’t give a damn about the truth. They know the case against Stein is completely fabricated. They also know they can carry on with complete impunity because the big money powerbrokers who pull their strings and order them about, are beyond the reach of the any legal accountability. That’s what’s really really going on, the fatcat honchos behind the scenes are just settling scores for Hillary’s lost election. It’s payback time for the Clinton Mafia.

  2. Tommy Vietor by proxy
    Posted December 30, 2017 at 7:24 pm | Permalink

    I look forward to the @WSJ editorial board correcting this hit job on the FBI.

    The Wall Street Journal: “Democrats, Russians and the FBI – Did the bureau use disinformation to trigger its Trump probe?”

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/democrats-russians-and-the-fbi-1508971759

  3. wobblie
    Posted January 1, 2018 at 7:52 am | Permalink

    Still 10 c above normal in the arctic
    http://cci-reanalyzer.org/wx/DailySummary/#t2anom

  4. JM
    Posted January 2, 2018 at 9:36 am | Permalink

    This investigation is slow and methodical. I wouldn’t bank on anything big happening this week.

  5. Meta
    Posted January 3, 2018 at 8:37 am | Permalink

    Glenn R Simpson and Peter Fritsch (the founders of Fusion GPS , the political research firm responsible for the Steele dossier) have written an editorial for the New York Times in which they confirm that their research did not trigger the FBI investigation into Trump. Here is it.

    A generation ago, Republicans sought to protect President Richard Nixon by urging the Senate Watergate committee to look at supposed wrongdoing by Democrats in previous elections. The committee chairman, Sam Ervin, a Democrat, said that would be “as foolish as the man who went bear hunting and stopped to chase rabbits.”

    Today, amid a growing criminal inquiry into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, congressional Republicans are again chasing rabbits. We know because we’re their favorite quarry.

    In the year since the publication of the so-called Steele dossier — the collection of intelligence reports we commissioned about Donald Trump’s ties to Russia — the president has repeatedly attacked us on Twitter. His allies in Congress have dug through our bank records and sought to tarnish our firm to punish us for highlighting his links to Russia. Conservative news outlets and even our former employer, The Wall Street Journal, have spun a succession of mendacious conspiracy theories about our motives and backers.

    We are happy to correct the record. In fact, we already have.

    Three congressional committees have heard over 21 hours of testimony from our firm, Fusion GPS. In those sessions, we toppled the far right’s conspiracy theories and explained how The Washington Free Beacon and the Clinton campaign — the Republican and Democratic funders of our Trump research — separately came to hire us in the first place.

    We walked investigators through our yearlong effort to decipher Mr. Trump’s complex business past, of which the Steele dossier is but one chapter. And we handed over our relevant bank records — while drawing the line at a fishing expedition for the records of companies we work for that have nothing to do with the Trump case.

    Republicans have refused to release full transcripts of our firm’s testimony, even as they selectively leak details to media outlets on the far right. It’s time to share what our company told investigators.

    We don’t believe the Steele dossier was the trigger for the F.B.I.’s investigation into Russian meddling. As we told the Senate Judiciary Committee in August, our sources said the dossier was taken so seriously because it corroborated reports the bureau had received from other sources, including one inside the Trump camp.

    The intelligence committees have known for months that credible allegations of collusion between the Trump camp and Russia were pouring in from independent sources during the campaign. Yet lawmakers in the thrall of the president continue to wage a cynical campaign to portray us as the unwitting victims of Kremlin disinformation.

    We suggested investigators look into the bank records of Deutsche Bank and others that were funding Mr. Trump’s businesses. Congress appears uninterested in that tip: Reportedly, ours are the only bank records the House Intelligence Committee has subpoenaed.

    We told Congress that from Manhattan to Sunny Isles Beach, Fla., and from Toronto to Panama, we found widespread evidence that Mr. Trump and his organization had worked with a wide array of dubious Russians in arrangements that often raised questions about money laundering. Likewise, those deals don’t seem to interest Congress.

    We explained how, from our past journalistic work in Europe, we were deeply familiar with the political operative Paul Manafort’s coziness with Moscow and his financial ties to Russian oligarchs close to Vladimir Putin.

    Finally, we debunked the biggest canard being pushed by the president’s men — the notion that we somehow knew of the June 9, 2016, meeting in Trump Tower between some Russians and the Trump brain trust. We first learned of that meeting from news reports last year — and the committees know it. They also know that these Russians were unaware of the former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele’s work for us and were not sources for his reports.

    Yes, we hired Mr. Steele, a highly respected Russia expert. But we did so without informing him whom we were working for and gave him no specific marching orders beyond this basic question: Why did Mr. Trump repeatedly seek to do deals in a notoriously corrupt police state that most serious investors shun?

    What came back shocked us. Mr. Steele’s sources in Russia (who were not paid) reported on an extensive — and now confirmed — effort by the Kremlin to help elect Mr. Trump president. Mr. Steele saw this as a crime in progress and decided he needed to report it to the F.B.I.

    We did not discuss that decision with our clients, or anyone else. Instead, we deferred to Mr. Steele, a trusted friend and intelligence professional with a long history of working with law enforcement. We did not speak to the F.B.I. and haven’t since.

    After the election, Mr. Steele decided to share his intelligence with Senator John McCain via an emissary. We helped him do that. The goal was to alert the United States national security community to an attack on our country by a hostile foreign power. We did not, however, share the dossier with BuzzFeed, which to our dismay published it last January.

    We’re extremely proud of our work to highlight Mr. Trump’s Russia ties. To have done so is our right under the First Amendment.

    It is time to stop chasing rabbits. The public still has much to learn about a man with the most troubling business past of any United States president. Congress should release transcripts of our firm’s testimony, so that the American people can learn the truth about our work and most important, what happened to our democracy.

    Read more:
    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/02/opinion/republicans-investigation-fusion-gps.html

6 Trackbacks

  1. By The plot to shutter the Department of Justice on January 3, 2018 at 11:23 pm

    […] the FBI, led to the initiation of the Russia investigation. First, we heard earlier this week that the investigation had actually begun with a tip from the Australians about something Trump campaign …, and, then, yesterday, the owners of Fusion GPS, the research firm responsible for having compiled […]

  2. […] we know now, it was not the Steele Dossier that caused for the investigation to be initiated, but a tip from an Australian ambassador in London, who had heard about the Russian hacking campaign against Clinton from Trump advisor George […]

  3. By #ReleaseTheMemo v. #RemoveNunes on February 1, 2018 at 10:14 pm

    […] which he wouldn’t, and 3. that the investigation didn’t begin with warnings from the Australians and the Dutch, as we now know that it did. And, of course, you’d have to ignore the fact that […]

  4. By Life after the Nunes memo on February 5, 2018 at 9:25 am

    […] statements made by Trump foreign policy advisor George Papadopoulos, who, as you’ll recall, had told an Australian diplomat in London that the Trump campaign was about to receive Democratic Pa…. And second, the Nunes memo fails to make the case that Carter Page was surveilled because of his […]

  5. […] well before the Steele dossier came to light, based on a tip from the Australian government that George Papadopoulos, while drunk at a bar in London, had mentioned that the Russians would soon be r…. [Plus, as we know now, the FISA warrant against Carter Page was issued by a Republican judge, and […]

  6. […] it’s probably true that the intelligence community, once they were alerted to the fact that George Papadopoulos, while in a London bar, had told an Australian diplomat that the Trump campaign …, sent an informant to speak with Papadopoulos, in hopes of finding out what in the hell was going […]

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