A leading Republican joked that the United States should have sent “every drone in our military” after Russia “dirt” tipster Joseph Mifsud if he really was as important to the launch of the Trump-Russia investigation as the FBI said he was.
California Rep. Devin Nunes made the comments about the Maltese professor during an interview with conservative podcaster Dan Bongino at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Friday afternoon.
Nunes said that “Mifsud supposedly starts this thing,” and yet the FBI let him leave the country after questioning him in D.C. in February 2017. He never returned to the U.S. and has disappeared from public view.
“It wouldn’t be hard to track him down,” Nunes said. “And, if it’s the end of democracy, as Democrats and the fake news have said, then, hell, they should’ve sent every drone in our military after Mifsud.”
Trump campaign foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos met Australian diplomat Alexander Downer at London’s Kensington Wine Rooms in May 2016. At this meeting, Papadopoulos said Mifsud told him the Russians had damaging information on Hillary Clinton, Trump’s Democratic rival in the 2016 election. Two months later, when WikiLeaks published stolen emails from the Democratic National Committee, Downer informed the U.S. about what Papadopoulos had told him. This prompted the FBI to open its Trump-Russia counterintelligence investigation, dubbed Crossfire Hurricane, on July 31, 2016.
The investigation was later wrapped into special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, which concluded that Russia interfered in the 2016 election in a “sweeping and systematic fashion” but did not establish any criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia.
Papadopoulos pleaded guilty in 2017 to making false statements to federal agents about his conversations with Mifsud. Nunes claims, though, that newly released FBI interview notes show the Mueller prosecutors misled the court about Papadopoulos’s cooperation in providing information on Mifsud. The California Republican said he’s sending a criminal referral to the Justice Department over this.
“They use that, supposedly, as the predicate to open up the investigation not into Papadopoulos, not into Mifsud, but into the entire Trump campaign, and then they populate it with everyone from the Trump campaign who they wanted to investigate, and that information was clearly coming from the dossier.”
DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz concluded in December that the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation was flawed. The watchdog criticized the DOJ and the FBI for 17 “significant errors and omissions” related to the surveillance of Carter Page and its reliance on British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s salacious and unverified dossier.
Horowitz did not find evidence that political bias influenced the decisions to open the investigations into Page, Papadopoulos, Michael Flynn, and Paul Manafort in the summer of 2016, and Horowitz said its launch was adequately predicated. Attorney General William Barr disagreed, and U.S. Attorney John Durham is looking into the Trump-Russia investigation’s origins. Barr and Durham both are looking for answers about Mifsud.
“Wouldn’t you have tried to find Mifsud before [July 31, 2016]?” Nunes asked on Friday. “He’s a foreigner. You don’t have to go to a FISA court. We have 17 intelligence agencies that we spend billions on in this country. You’d think we would’ve tried to find the Maltese dude, right? That’s where you would start.”
Former FBI Director James Comey called Mifsud a “Russian agent” last year, something unsupported by Mueller’s report. The special counsel repeatedly mentioned Mifsud in his 448-page report and did say Mifsud has “connections to Russia” and noted that he “traveled to Moscow in April 2016” and “met with high-level Russian government officials” while he was there before telling Papadopoulos about the Clinton “dirt.” Nunes has said Mifsud has connections to Western intelligence and that Horowitz didn’t unearth evidence that he was an FBI asset.
“If Mifsud is somewhere between Comey’s claim that he is a Russian agent and Mueller’s definition that he has connections to Russians … if he’s somewhere in that spectrum, don’t you think they’d really be looking for this person?” Nunes asked on Friday.
