Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte said he made clear to the United States that his country’s intelligence services had no ties to Joseph Mifsud, the mysterious Maltese professor who allegedly played a central role in the launch of the Trump-Russia investigation.
Two recent meetings between Attorney General William Barr and Italian intelligence officials “clarified that our intelligence was not involved in the affair,” Conte told reporters.
This casts some doubt on a theory pushed by Republican allies of President Trump who suspect Mifsud, who was teaching in Rome in 2016, had ties to Western intelligence involved in some conspiracy to taken down then-candidate Trump.
“It seems like Mifsud has an awful lot of ties to U.S., British, and Italian intelligence services,” Rep. Devin Nunes, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, said earlier this year. He said special counsel Robert Mueller’s team, which described Mifsud as having “connections to Russia” in their report, decided to cherry-pick information from news reports, leaving out that he had been described as a Western intelligence asset.
Barr was in Rome on Aug. 15 and Sept. 27, Conte said, confirming a key part of media reports about the attorney general’s global travels as part of the Justice Department’s review of the origins of the Russia investigation. During that second trip, Barr and U.S. Attorney John Durham, who is leading the review, reportedly listened to a taped deposition of Mifsud at the U.S. Embassy in Rome as well as met with Italian security officials who provided them with other information that the Italian government had on Mifsud. The DOJ also allegedly obtained two Blackberry devices used by Mifsud, former national security adviser Michael Flynn’s defense team claimed in a court filing.
Critics have panned the inquiry as an effort by Trump to discredit Mueller’s work that puts the U.S. relationship with foreign allies at risk. Conte described the meetings, attended by Italy’s spy chief Gennaro Vecchione and other officials, as being “fully legal, correct, and didn’t remotely harm our national interests.”
Barr and Durham are seeking information related to key Trump-Russia figures, including British ex-spy Christopher Steele, whose unverified dossier was used to obtain secret surveillance warrants against Trump campaign associate Carter Page; Australian diplomat Alexander Downer, whose tip about former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos telling him the Russians had damaging information on Hillary Clinton led the FBI to officially open the Trump-Russia counterintelligence investigation dubbed “Crossfire Hurricane;” and Mifsud, who allegedly told Papadopoulos that Russia had “dirt” on Clinton. Mifsud has denied telling Papadopoulos anything about Russian “dirt.”
