IS THIS THE “EXCULPATORY INFORMATION?”
by Sharon Rondeau
(Jul. 31, 2019) — Just before midnight Tuesday, former Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos tweeted that “transcripts” will be released on Wednesday.
For months, Papadopoulos has indicated that “transcripts” exist of his conversation with former Australian ambassador to the UK Alexander Downer from May 2016, when Papadopoulos was asked to meet Downer in a London bar after two encounters with a mysterious Maltese professor, Joseph Mifsud.
In April 2016, Mifsud told Papadopoulos that the Russians had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton, strongly suggesting it was in the form of emails not released publicly but sent and received over her private, unauthorized server while she worked as Obama’s secretary of state.
Papadopoulos, who accepted a plea deal with the Justice Department for lying to the FBI in 2017, maintains that based on information he has learned since then, exculpatory evidence was withheld from his legal team. Had it been provided, he has suggested, he might not have accepted the agreement.
Mifsud was said to have lied to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team of prosecutors when he was interviewed in Washington, DC in early 2017 but was not prosecuted. In grilling on Capitol Hill last week under Republican congressmen, Mueller was unable or unwilling to answer why his investigators did not prosecute Mifsud.
Papadopoulos’s tweet echoes a prediction made on Monday night by Sean Hannity, who mentioned “transcripts” containing “exculpatory information” are among materials to be released Wednesday under a declassification order by President Trump in late May.
According to the directive, the U.S. intelligence community was to work with Attorney General William Barr to declassify documents associated with the Russia “collusion” probe which turned up no evidence of a conspiracy between Trump campaign aides and the Russian government to affect the outcome of the 2016 election.
Papadopoulos now believes that he was not only under government surveillance beginning in 2015 or possibly before, but also that either the FBI or the Special Counsel’s office attempted to entrap him when Charles Tawil handed him $10,000 in cash in an Israeli hotel room in July 2017. Upon returning to the United States, Papadopoulos was immediately arrested at Dulles International Airport and all of his luggage searched for the cash, Papadopoulos told Maria Bartiromo of “Sunday Morning Futures” on July 28.
Papadopoulos also relates the narrative in his book, “Deep State Target,” in which he describes his experiences as a volunteer for the Trump campaign and afterward.