Claim: Papadopolous Only Pled Guilty After Mueller Threatened to Charge Him as a Foreign Agent of... Israel

This "Russian Collusion" seems to involve a lot of countries not named "Russia."

George Papadopoulos' wife, Simona Mangiante, said her husband was not involved in collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government and that he pleaded guilty in the special counsel’s investigation to avoid facing charges that he was an agent of the Israeli government.

In an exclusive interview with The Daily Caller News Foundation, Mangiante also claimed that it was former Trump campaign aide Papadopoulos who, during an interview with the FBI on Jan. 27, 2017, brought up Joseph Mifsud, the mysterious Maltese professor who mentioned Hillary Clinton’s emails to him during a meeting in London in April 2016.

Papadopoulos' willingness to bring up Mifsud during that FBI interview suggests he was not trying to cover up a conspiracy involving Clinton's emails, Mangiante said.

Also see this entry in Mollie Hemingway's run-down of Mueller's previous abuses of prosecutorial discretion.

An Israeli Spy Ring That Wasn't

Another black mark on Mueller's record at the FBI was the pursuit of what the bureau dramatically claimed was an Israeli spy ring operating out of the Pentagon. The news broke in August 2004 that a spy working for Israel was in the Department of Defense.

It turned out that the bureau had gone after a policy analyst who had chatted with American lobbyists at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Charges were also pursued against two AIPAC employees. Those charges were later dropped and the sentence of the first person was dropped from 13 years to 10 months of house arrest and some community service.

The Washington Post wrote:

The conspiracy case against two former AIPAC lobbyists came to an inglorious end in May when the government dropped all charges after 3 1/2 years of pre-trial maneuvers.

It was a curious case: First, the lobbyists, Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman, were charged under an obscure section of the Espionage Act of 1917, a law that had been used only once before -- unsuccessfully and never against private citizens for disclosing classified information. Second, they were targets of a bizarre sting in which they were fed false information suggesting that the lives of U.S. and Israeli operatives in Iraq were at risk and that American officials were refusing to take steps to protect them. The accusation was not that they brokered this information to some foreign enemy but that they offered it to everybody they could, hoping, among other things, to get a reporter from The Post to publish it so that it might draw the attention of the right U.S. officials and save U.S. lives. In short, even if the two were guilty as charged, they look more like whistle-blowers than spies.

It turned out the probe was led by David Szady, the same man who notoriously missed Russian spy Robert Hanssen in his midst while he spent years targeting an innocent man named Brian Kelley, an undercover officer at the CIA. For this good work, Mueller named him assistant director for counterintelligence.

posted by Ace of Spades at 06:11 PM

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