Something that makes you go: “Hmmmmmmmm”……

The Russians identified by Papadopoulos, he told the FBI, were tricksters. One, a professor, was “just a guy talk[ing] up connections or something”. According to Papadopoulos, he believed the individual was “BS’ing to be completely honest with you.”. The FBI investigation, and Mueller’s conclusion, are that these statements are criminal lies.
Official Russian interest by Chaika and the security services is now focusing on the three Russian individuals whom Papadopoulos identified, but whose names are being kept secret by the US government. The first was a Russian professor “based in London…[who] claimed to have substantial connections with Russian government officials”. US reporters investigating this individual have pinpointed him as a Maltese, with a job at a university in Scotland, and a record of one visit to Russia and one to the Russian Embassy in London. To an American ear, the professor’s Maltese accent may sound Russian.
The second was “a certain female Russian national” whom Papadopoulos told his Trump campaign supervisors was “Putin’s niece”. The third, according to the court papers, was “an individual in Moscow (the ‘Russian MFA Connection’) who told defendant PAPADOPOULOS he had connections to the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (‘MF A’). The MFA is the executive entity in Russia responsible for Russian foreign relations. Over the next several weeks, defendant PAPADOPOULOS and the Russian MFA Connection had multiple conversations over Skype and email about setting ‘the groundwork’ for a ‘potential’ meeting between the Campaign and Russian government officials.”
In fact, according to the newly released US evidence, Papadopoulos was lying to the Trump campaign about the connections, influence, and significance of the three Russian contacts. It turns out, according to the FBI, that noone was related to Putin; the Russian contacts were unable to arrange an official invitation for either Papadopoulos or Trump to visit Russia, or even the Russian Embassy in London.
Papadopoulos has pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI when he failed to reveal that he had lied to a senior member of the Trump campaign organization in an email of April 26, 2016, in which he claimed: “The Russian government has an open invitation by Putin for Mr. Trump to meet him when he is ready… The advantage of being in London is that these governments tend to speak a bit more openly in ‘neutral’ cities.”
Papadopoulos has also pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI by concealing that he had been told by his contact on April 26 that the professor had returned from a trip to Moscow where ” he had met with high level Russian government officials.” Papadopoulos didn’t ask for the names, and didn’t report checking them before telling Trump headquarters. That’s because Papadopoulos wanted to be believed by Trump more than he cared if the professor was telling him the truth.
According to the FBI, “the Professor told defendant PAPADOPOULOS that on that trip he (the Professor) learned that the Russians had obtained ‘dirt’ on then-candidate Clinton. The Professor told defendant PAPADOPOULOS, as defendant PAPADOPOULOS later described to the FBI, that ‘they [the Russians] have dirt on her’; ‘the Russians had emails of [Hillary] Clinton’; ‘they have thousands of emails.’”
It didn’t occur to Papapopoulos, the Trump campaign chiefs, the FBI, Prosecutor Mueller or the Justice Department to check whether the “dirt on Clinton”, the “emails of Clinton”, and the “thousands of emails”, were openly accessible after their publication commenced by Wikileaks on March 16, 2016; that was five weeks before the “Professor” went to Moscow to discover what had already appeared in London and Washington on the internet. Read the Wikileaks archive, starting here. The Wikileaks publications included some 30,000 emails and more than 50,000 document pages covering the period from June 2010 to August 2014.

But Wikileaks wasn’t the first to disclose the dirt and the Clinton emails. The US Department of State had begun the disclosure in May of 2015, when a media-led Freedom of Information Act request led to the opening of Clinton’s Secretary of State files, and when newspapers across the country began publishing them. Read more of the dirt Russian officials announced they had on Clinton from years earlier by clicking here.
Russian sources close to Chaika say they cannot prosecute the “Professor” for revealing what the State Department and Wikileaks had already started to publish. Nor, the sources add, is it a crime under Russian law for a Russian living in London to speak to an American.
For admitting he concealed this from his superiors in the Trump organization, and then from the FBI, Papadopoulos is now facing at least six months in jail. Russian sources say that what is now a jailing offence in the US cannot be a crime in Russia if the evidence substantiates that lies were passed about lies. According to Mueller’s prosecution of Papadopoulos, “in truth and in fact, however, defendant PAPADOPOULOS understood the Professor to have substantial connections to high-level Russian government officials and that the Professor spoke with some of those officials in Moscow before telling defendant PAPADOPOULOS about the ‘dirt.’ “. Russian sources say there is no evidence the “Professor” has the connections he claimed. They add the US court papers prove this by revealing that none of the meetings Papadopoulos requested of his Russian contacts materialized.
Russian sources say the release of the US prosecutor’s indictment of Paul Manafort and Richard Gates III is of next to no interest to Russian prosecutors. This, they say, is because there is no evidence and no charge that any Russian person, source of Russian money, Russian publication or Russian government entity was involved in the activities for which Manafort and Gates have been indicted.