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May 13, 2020 - Rudy Giuliani
01:02:52
A Rogue Counter-Intelligence Trap, Part of OBAMAgate | Ep. 36 with George Papadopoulos
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It's our purpose to bring to bear the principle of common sense and rational discussion to the issues of our day.
America was created at a time of great turmoil, tremendous disagreements, anger, hatred.
There was a book written in 1776 that guided much of the discipline of thinking that brought us to the discovery of our freedoms, of our God-given freedoms.
It was Thomas Paine's Common Sense, written in 1776, one of the first American bestsellers in which Thomas Paine explained by rational principles the reason why these small colonies felt the necessity to separate from the powerful Kingdom of England and the King of England.
He explained their inherent desire for liberty, freedom, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and he explained it in ways that were understandable to the people, to all of the people.
A great deal of the reason for America's constant ability to self-improve is because we are able to reason, we're able to talk to each other, we're able to listen to each other, and we're able to analyze.
We are able to apply our God-given common sense.
So let's do it.
♪♪ Welcome back to Rudy Giuliani's Common Sense.
Today we have a really terrific guest, someone that is right in the center of, I think, one of the worst criminal conspiracies, at least political, in the history of our country.
That's just emerging.
The facts of it are just emerging.
Probably one of the biggest victims of it.
But one who handled it really, really well and therefore helped in the long run to dig out a lot of the key facts, particularly in his book Deep State, which I highly recommend to you, because it was the first book, when I was representing the president, that really So I have with me George Papadopoulos.
George, welcome.
Thank you for having me, Mr. Mayor.
Nice to be with you.
George, just tell everybody—most people know who you are, and a lot of people have read Deep State.
I recommend that the rest do.
It's a relatively short book.
you'll see that. So I have with me George Papadopoulos.
George, welcome.
Thank you for having me, Mr. Mayor.
Nice to be with you. George, just tell everybody, most people know who you are,
and a lot of people have read Deep State. I recommend that the rest do. It's a relatively
short book. It's very readable. It's not written in gobbled history, you know, all kinds of footnotes.
You can really get through it nicely.
And tell me just a teeny bit about your background, who you are and how you got to the Trump campaign, which is where this all started.
So I, um, after grad school, uh, ended up going to, uh, DC.
I was an aspiring, uh, lawyer, but I took a different route and I ended up working in a think tank in DC, uh, really prominent to one called the Hudson Institute.
It's a neoconservative thing.
Sure.
Very, very well known.
Yeah.
It's a neoconservative think tank.
I worked, um, there for five years as an associate with, uh, people like Douglas fight was the under secretary of defense under Bush.
Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney's vice president, Dick Cheney's chief of staff, obviously, and others like that.
And that was actually the institute that really helped shape my thoughts and my perspective in many ways on what the U.S.
position in the world should be.
So while I was at this institute, I took on a very interesting project that really, I think, has major implications for why I was targeted eventually.
And that was dealing with the energy implications that were discovered off of Israel.
In 2010 and 2011, at that time, the Israelis just discovered natural gas, the Arab Spring reverberated through the Middle East, and the Turkish-Israel relationship collapsed.
So I saw a vacuum emerge, and I thought that the U.S.
foreign policy should shift, and I convinced my colleagues at Hudson Institute to take on a different approach.
We were very successful, and while I was working at this institute, meeting with various ambassadors, with my colleagues, in capitals like Nicosia, Athens, Tel Aviv, now Jerusalem,
obviously, you could see that the Obama State Department didn't appreciate our foreign
policy views and our influence that we were beginning to have with some of these foreign
governments who just were really sick and tired of what the Obama administration...
What was the point of separation?
What was the thing that irritated them that you were doing that they didn't want you to
do?
I think the main point of contention was that the Obama State Department wanted a pipeline
from Israel going through Turkey.
And we all know where Turkey has ventured off as a basically an Islamist dictatorship.
And my colleagues and I thought that this pipeline should go from Israel to Europe directly from Cyprus and Greece.
Which if you know some of the history in that part of the world, you could understand how sensitive this matter is.
And obviously the second point of contention that we, that I personally advocated for was, you know, the Sisi in Egypt.
I remember moments when I would be in Athens and I would travel to and talk to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs there and tell them, look, this guy, meaning Sisi, is your top ally.
I don't care if he just came to power and some European capitals and even
Washington don't appreciate him.
You need to become allies with him and so do the Israelis.
So this was some of the behind the scenes type of work I was doing while I was in DC
and abroad.
And while I was doing that, all of a sudden, as I mentioned, we would see various ambassadors
reach out.
They didn't like what we were doing.
And that involved- Various Obama ambassadors.
Various Obama ambassadors.
And- ambassadors.
And that evolved into various defense attaches meeting with me or reaching out to me in London and Athens, trying to figure out what I was up to.
And that followed me through my work on the Ben Carson and Donald Trump campaigns.
So the reason I bring up the background is that people understand the greater story of why there was a motivation Well, particularly with Sisi.
They had overthrown Mubarak.
Yeah.
The Obama people had overthrown Mubarak.
Questionable decision as to whether or not he'd go from bad to worse.
They were all kind of involved in that.
Hillary would have been tainted by that.
And all of a sudden, he was replaced basically by the Muslim Brotherhood.
So it really was a bad to worse.
And then Sisi took over, and they were, I think, unhappy that they would have been much more comfortable with the Muslim Brotherhood sort of leaning administration they had in Egypt, which, of course, on the other side, on the conservative side, I mean, we see that as basically playing with terrorism.
So it was a very big divide.
So you became somebody that was in their crosshairs because you were trying to help CeCe, who they really resented tremendously.
They really did, and I remember moments when I was on the Carson campaign and then on the Trump campaign where I started meeting with Egyptian officials.
And actually, the way that the Trump-Sisi meeting happened actually all emanates from Athens in many ways.
If you read my book, you'll see the steps that it To get that meeting, and I'll just give a small anecdote because I think it's a very interesting point of how this behind-the-scenes stuff was going on.
I had a meeting with the Greek defense minister in Athens, and they actually had incredible ties with Egypt at that point in history.
And I said, look, I think that Sisi would be a great person for Trump to meet eventually if Trump wanted to do a foreign policy trip or if the president of Egypt would come during the UN.
He gets on the phone, he calls the Egyptian defense minister, and he says, let's get Papadopoulos a meeting over at the embassy.
And that's exactly what happened.
The next day I'm having baklava and Egyptian coffee with the Egyptians, talking about the catastrophe that you just mentioned with Hillary and what was going on.
And we kept in touch and then obviously later on Sisi and Trump met.
It was an incredible meeting.
They've had an incredible relationship since then.
And I think we need to support the Egyptian regime today.
Well, I think, I mean, there's a real difference of opinion between
what I guess we would call conservatives, broadly speaking, and left-wingers, between what's better for Egypt,
someone that involves the Muslim Brotherhood or someone that excludes the Muslim Brotherhood.
And those of us who are conservatives see the Muslim Brotherhood as one of the major supporters of Islamic terrorism.
So that would make you immediately—that would put you on a list of somebody they'd be worried about.
So then take us forward now to how you get into the—how do you get into the Carson campaign and then the Trump campaign?
So after I decided I wanted to leave D.C., I had spent five years there.
I wanted to venture off and do something a little different, more in the private sector, and possibly join presidential campaign politics, because obviously in the summer of 2015, we had a presidential campaign season going on.
I reached out to Corey Lewandowski in, I think, June or July of 2015, when the campaign might have been two or three people at that point.
I think it was George Gigicos, a bodyguard in Hope Hicks, and I said, look, Corey, I don't know you, you don't know me, but I think you have a winner here.
There was something about it that I just thought that Donald Trump would end up becoming the president.
When was this, George?
June 2015 or July 2015.
This is a year before, really, the election is hot and heavy.
The election, we should remind people, it wasn't until November of 2016.
This is a long time before.
Absolutely.
And I remember colleagues in D.C.
were telling me, you're crazy.
What are you talking about?
Go join, you know, Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush.
Sometime when we meet, when we meet in person, I'll tell you, I went through the same experience.
Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Chris Christie.
A couple more, too.
Huckabee, Huckabee, Mike Huckabee.
What are you crazy?
What are you crazy supporting that guy?
Mr. Mayor, you know what I heard?
Go get your feet wet and go join a different campaign and come back.
You were told you were too young.
I was told I was too old.
I was losing it.
Age is just a number.
So that's really what happened.
So Corey and I, we kept in touch.
And then eventually I joined Ben Carson's campaign first.
I flew in, I was working in London at an energy advisory group out there putting together
these very interesting energy conferences and policy conferences with people from, I
don't know, you name it, we put them together, from BP, the Azerbaijan government, Israeli
government, they were all coming to these conferences we were putting together.
I joined Ben Carson's campaign, he drops out, and I reach out to Corey one last time and
I say, look, Corey.
I'm tired of this back and forth.
We've been playing footsie for six or seven months now.
You want me to join this campaign or you don't?
I get in touch with Michael Glasner.
He puts me in touch then with Sam Clovis.
I have an interview and then the rest becomes very bizarre in London for me.
But you get hired.
Yes.
You're hired right away.
And then you have to go off to London before you really start, right?
I was actually in London when I actually had my interview over the phone.
With Sam?
Yeah, with Sam, because I was working there at this institute that we were talking about a little earlier, the London Center for International Law Practice.
Is that an American or Italian organization?
It's British.
It's a British institution or institute, I should say, with various connections to governments, from Australia to the U.S.
and Belgium and Italy.
A lot of high-profile lawyers and law firms were affiliated with this institute.
So they hired me right after I left Ben Carson's campaign.
I go there.
It was a very, you know, bizarre institute.
I wasn't really sure what I was... London Center for... International Law Practice.
And it's mostly law firms from UK, US, Australia?
It's law firms and ex-diplomats and some intel type of personalities that were all somehow affiliated to this organization.
So I thought, OK, I just left Carson's campaign.
They reached out to me.
How did they find out about me?
That's the first question that I have always had to this day.
And second, why did they hire me and make me a director so quickly?
And this group, when I tell them I'm leaving to join Donald Trump's campaign, that's when their behavior becomes very odd.
When they reached out to you, did they know you were thinking about the Trump campaign?
They might have.
But you were an operative then.
They reached out to you, you were on the Carter campaign.
Yes.
I guess the point is, what made them focus on you, do you think?
I think it's because I had been in London initially, then I joined the Carson campaign, and there was some interest by them to find out more or less why and who I was.
I don't have any other understanding of why they would reach out to me and make me a director at their institute within 48 hours unless they were told to by some entity.
But the attention you got at that point was because of your association with the Cardi campaign?
I think so, yes.
Yes.
And then, and then very shortly thereafter, you called, you called Corey and you reestablished
a relationship with the Trump campaign.
Yes.
While I was working for this institute, I reached out to Corey one last time and I said,
Corey, let's stop playing footsie.
Let's figure out how we're going to work together.
And he says you're hired.
Here's an interview.
Go do it.
As I said, I got in touch with Michael Glasner, Sam Clovis, and they put me in touch to join the campaign.
Now this is where things get incredibly strange and something that has not yet been scrutinized.
Either willfully or just because people don't understand this part of the story.
I should say to the listener, the reason this would make an interesting novel, book, or reality show is, the real question is, when did they latch on to you?
Did they latch on to you way back?
I mean, even have some sense when you were with the Carson campaign?
This is a guy we may want to get into.
Or was it when the first mention of the Trump campaign came up?
There's no question you got into their shorthairs.
There's no question at some point, And you probably, when you did, they'd probably be able to go back and see your history with CeCe and say, this is a guy we want to focus on.
I used to do this work for 10 years, though.
Well, Mr. Amiri, you know better than anybody.
I read the first three chapters of your book and I said, This could only have been organized by a person, not an FBI guy.
This had to be organized by a CIA, it had to be organized by a counterintelligence guy, and I would say a kind of stupid one.
I'll tell you why later, but kind of a dummy type, but you'll see.
I always said the same thing, Mr. Mayor.
I never thought that... It was like Keystone Cops.
The Keystone...
I never thought that the FBI was running the show against me.
I always thought this was a foreign operation targeting me just based on the various encounters.
It was.
But go ahead.
So now you're hired by Trump.
You have still a commitment to the center.
So you're there and you tell them, I'm going to go work for the Trump campaign.
What's their initial reaction?
And who is them?
Let's get a human being.
Now this is where things get incredible.
And mind you, this is Early March 2016, before even the Washington Post identified me as an advisor on the campaign.
Listen, we got to put that into context for the second year.
In early March 2016, I am brought into an office by a director named Naji Idris, who says, you need to meet this other director.
At the moment, I had no idea who this lady was, except I thought she was just a high-profile attorney.
Her name was Arvinder Sambe.
Now, why do I bring up Arvinder Sambe?
Because while to the naive George in 2016, I thought she was simply an attorney and a director at this institute, After people did a lot of research on her, we find out that she actually worked with Bob Mueller after 9-11, and that she had a key role in introducing UK officials to Bruce Ohr during the 2016 election, according to people's research.
Now, I don't know why I was introduced to her, but she is the one who tells me, you need to go to Rome, we're going to help you make contacts for the Trump campaign, and they're going to be very beneficial for you.
And that's how the whole situation got moving, where I met with Joseph Mifsud, various Italian government officials in Rome a couple days later.
This was all before the Washington Post knew I was on the campaign.
So you had not been publicly revealed as being part of the campaign?
No.
You had told them you were part of the campaign as part of your exit from them, right?
That I was leaving the planning, yes.
Theoretically, you were now still working for them and wrapping up your work?
Yes.
And she is the one who organizes your trip to Rome?
Yes.
And what's the trip to Rome for, theoretically?
Theoretically, I guess it's to show this school named Link Campus, which David Ignatius has written extensively about.
It's some sort of a spy training center in the center of Rome that trains CIA and Italian intelligence for me to go there and meet people that might help me make connections for the Trump campaign.
The moment I get there into this exquisite, beautiful 17th century institutes, Uh, or school in the center of Rome, I'm introduced to Vincenzo Scotti.
Now, Vincenzo Scotti isn't a random nobody.
This was the former Italian foreign minister and he was a very high profile Italian diplomat for decades.
He reaches out to me, he says, Papadopoulos, I've heard all about you.
Why don't you come here?
I want to introduce you to a lot of people here at Ling Campus.
I get there, there's a conference going on with Libyan officials.
If you remember back then, Libya was divided between two governments.
Of course, yes, yes.
And Italy had a huge interest.
Another Obama-Clinton breakdown.
They overthrew Gaddafi, had no idea what they were going to get, and they made things much worse, which ultimately leads to Benghazi.
That's absolutely right.
Yeah.
Another embarrassing failure of foreign policy by Obama, Biden, and Hillary.
You're absolutely right.
That they're trying to cover up.
You're absolutely right, and we know what happened with the scandal with Hillary because of that.
But I didn't think too much initially of that because I thought this might be some sort of Georgetown University.
You know what I mean?
Where you have these type of conferences and these type of high-level diplomats who are affiliated with this university or whatnot.
And Vincenzo Scotti says, this is the guy you're supposed to meet.
I go and that's where Joseph Mifsud.
And did he tell you why?
I was essentially handed off like a bride to Joseph Mifsud, for whatever reason, by Vincenzo Scotti, the former Italian foreign minister, and Mifsud knew all about me.
He says, I'm going to help you, I know X, Y, and Z, I know this person, that person, and we end up going for dinner, and he starts probing me a lot.
It was almost like he was trying to gather information about my own background, what made me tick, what didn't, what my allegiances were, what I thought on various issues.
And this was all in early March 2016.
And what did you know about him, about Joseph Mifsud?
What had they told you about him?
They told me that this was a person who was very well connected to various foreign governments and that He could help me with various contacts if I needed them with, you know, DC, Brussels, London, or even Russia at that point.
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Welcome back.
This is, if this weren't true, it'd be a novel.
This is quite, quite a tale of skullduggery and something sounds almost a little like treason.
So now you met Mifsud, and during the course of, in Italy, these conversations take place in Italy.
This is all happening in Rome, at Ling Campus, as I just explained, at a school that's notorious for training intelligence officers.
And I leave Rome after a couple days.
I go back to London, and here's where things start to become even more strange.
Nagy Idris, who's another director at this institute, tells me, Mifsud wants to meet you again, and good news for you, George, Putin's niece is with him.
And I said, what do you mean Putin's niece is with him?
So Nagy Idris vetted Or apparently vetted or was in on whatever this Joseph Mifsud situation was and tells me you should go meet him as Putin's niece he wants to introduce you to.
And that's where the whole Putin's fake niece story came about.
You meet with them at a wine?
You meet with them for a drink?
Is that it?
Or dinner?
We meet actually for lunch at a hotel across the street from where this center was.
It was a Holborn Hotel.
It's a beautiful five-star hotel over there.
It's you, Mifsud, and the purported niece of who I assume is straight out of Central Casting.
Beautiful Russian actress type.
Basically, they're like, like an idiot, basically shaking this person's hand thinking, okay, she's a relative of the President of Russia, I should, I should be very, you know, Olga, of course, Olga.
So I'm having this meeting with them, nothing really comes about, I basically tell them that, you know, it would be interesting to see about a Trump Putin meeting, you know, because Trump had always talked about Vladimir Putin and Russia.
There was nothing suspicious or odd about it.
And as you know better than anybody, a lot of candidates actually go on foreign policy trips during the presidential campaign season.
It's the way they develop their credentials.
In fact, he did take a trip to Mexico in August, remember, in the middle of the campaign to meet with the president of Mexico.
Exactly.
And even Carson, when I was on his campaign, he traveled to Georgia to talk about the refugee issue.
And if I recall correctly, Obama went to Germany when he was running.
And it's a rather common way, particularly if you don't have established foreign policy credentials, to do a couple of those trips to show you can deal with foreign leaders.
You're absolutely right, Mr. Mayor.
And that was my logic at that point.
Right.
Yeah, no, obviously.
Yeah.
As a foreign policy advisor, I had two responsibilities.
One, to help craft any speeches or any potential talking points on foreign policy.
And the second is to possibly think of a foreign policy trip.
Very simple.
And Mipsud says, I could introduce you to Putin.
The Russian government knows all about you.
And you're going to meet the Russian ambassador here in London, who I've already spoken to
about you, which we all know was fake and nonsense.
So Mipsud and this UNGA...
uh... began to play games.
There's a lot of rumors that uh... that Olga and even Mifsud were actually working with western intelligence.
I think uh... that's the overwhelming suggestion and evidence is uh... leading to that conclusion now.
So why Najee Idris, this institute, Link Campus, and this FBI lawyer Arvinder Sombe were all in the mix to make this happen?
That's something that uh... has yet to be really scrutinized.
But the ultimate Yeah, of course.
So here's where things happen.
is the passing on of the information. It seems to me, and this is now my analysis from the outside,
this was all done in order to plant this information with you.
Yeah, of course.
So how does that happen?
So here's where things happen. After this meeting where I'm meeting the niece of Putin,
a couple weeks later, my name is announced for the Trump campaign.
I think this is late March, 2016.
I go to Israel actually on a separate business conference.
I was speaking at, at that time in early April, 2016.
I come back to London where I was still working at the time.
Now you had received a fair amount of publicity.
Yes.
Because it's only a small group of people, if I recall, four or five people that are his foreign policy advisors, and each one of you got a certain amount of attention.
Yes, yes.
So people interested in this would now, you would become a person of interest.
Yes, that's absolutely correct.
Then we go to April 2016, and by mid-April 2016, I start to really not think too highly of Joseph Mipsa.
He couldn't introduce me to anyone of significance.
He seemed to bloviate a lot, not really be a man of substance or somebody who kept his word regarding anything.
So as I'm distancing myself from him, here's something that I think is now under investigation, actually, by John Durham, and that's the Australian angle into what happened here.
Fascinating.
Here's what happens.
In April 15, 2016, the Australian government reaches out to me.
Donald Trump never said the word Australia on the campaign.
I've never traveled to Australia, and we had nothing to do with the Australians.
Yet, the Australian government, April 15, wants to go out and meet with... You were in London at the time?
I was in London at the time, yeah.
And you had no prior contact with the Australian government?
Zero, absolutely zero.
There was no reason to.
So how do they make contact with you?
Well, here's something that I still scratch my head to this day about, through an Israeli diplomat.
Israeli diplomat, and he had a girlfriend as well, right?
Well, this was the apparent girlfriend.
And the girlfriend was the secretary to Mr. Downer.
Is that right?
Supposedly.
This is all part of the plot, or whatever.
So who actually makes the first contact, George?
So obviously by that point I was very well known in Israel.
I had a lot of connections to the Israeli government by that point.
So meeting with Israeli diplomats wasn't something that was, you know, shocking or difficult for me at that point.
And an Israeli diplomat decides to introduce me to this woman.
Who just happens to have a profile, we later find out, of an intelligence officer and somebody who was working very closely with Alexander Downer.
So who writes, who makes the first call to you to set this up?
The Israeli diplomat.
Israeli diplomat calls you and says he wants you to meet, he actually says he wants you to meet his girlfriend, right?
Yeah, which is even more bizarre, yeah.
And you have, you have a drink or dinner or with them?
We go out, we have chicken wings at a local pub, you know, just talking foreign policy, etc.
And this Australian person... Can you give us her name?
Yes, Erica Thompson.
Erica Thompson?
Yeah.
She's actually been interviewed by Durham, I think, four or five months ago, along with Alexander Downer.
Uh, this, this individual was very hostile towards candidate Trump, uh, calling him a pariah.
Uh, this was actually something that most of these, um, governments in Europe were calling the candidate because while America first was music to my ears.
Yeah, sure, sure, sure.
They saw it as.
It was vitriol over there.
They couldn't take it.
April 15th, I meet this Australian.
April 26th, Joseph Mifsud drops the email information on me.
And a couple days later... Now, let's go back to that for a second.
Yeah.
So April 15th, you meet her.
Yeah.
She's going to set up a meeting with Downer at some point, right?
Eventually, yes.
Eventually.
And then Mifsud comes back into the picture.
And what's that date?
April 26th.
So April 26th, Mifsud shows up in London.
He shows up again in London with an email telling me, oh, I just, uh, I'm leaving Moscow.
I just met with officials at the Duma, which is, uh, the equivalent of Congress over here.
So basically he's on his way back from Moscow.
Allegedly.
Allegedly.
To, to, to London.
He meets with you and what, what, what happens?
You and him alone or?
Well, we're at another, uh, swanky hotel in London with probably, you know, 50 or 60 other patrons around us having brunch.
And he decides in an open setting to drop this allegedly mysterious secret information that at that time had been openly speculated for months in the global media that Hillary Clinton's emails had been hacked.
Is that what he tells you?
He tells you that they were hacked?
He tells me that the Russians have thousands of her emails.
That's what he says.
Does he use the word hack or not?
I don't remember the word hack.
All I just remember is that the Russians have thousands of her emails.
And I basically ask him, what are you talking about?
How did you know that?
And he smirks and he says, oh, they told me.
It was a very generic...
Type of, like you had mentioned earlier, it was planting a bomb on me, essentially.
Did he previously mention that they had dirt on her?
He just mentioned this email stuff.
This is the first time that he did this?
On April 26th, yes.
Had he earlier said that they had dirt on her when you first met him?
Had he talked about her at all when you first met him?
No, never.
But this Alexander, this woman, Erica Thompson, she mentioned Trump prominently, in a very hostile way.
Yes, the Australian government was incredibly hostile towards candidate Trump at that point, and even the UK government.
Let's not forget, there was one leader in the world who castigated candidate Trump, and that was David Cameron.
Do you remember when he called him?
I do, and you wrote a counter to that, if I recall correctly.
That, exactly.
So this is why the chronology is so key in what we're talking about here.
Right.
April 26th, MIPSA drops the bomb on me.
A couple days later, David Cameron comes out with this statement and the Times of London, which is, you know, is, you know, London's premier newspaper, reaches out to me and we have a two hour lunch about everything regarding foreign policy and Trump.
And they asked me, so what are your thoughts on What David Cameron said, and I said he should retract it because that's not something a U.S.
ally should be saying about a candidate running for the presidency's office.
That became a global headline for a couple days.
And after that headline, this is around early May 2016, the Australians want to meet again.
The U.S.
embassy then wants to meet with me.
Including two intel officers from the U.S.
Embassy.
You see what I'm saying here?
Yeah.
It's a coincidence in a matter of two weeks.
And what happens?
So I give this interview.
The U.S.
Embassy reaches out to me.
These two intel officers named Gregory Baker and Terence Dudley, who have also reportedly been interviewed by John Durham.
One was the U.S.
Navy attache in London, Terence Dudley, and the other one is Gregory Baker.
And basically they start to, you know, whine me and dine me, try to probe me about my background, and eventually they introduce me to a CIA person in Athens, the U.S.
defense attache over there.
But before we get to that, after they come into my life, the Australians want to meet with me one more time.
And how did that happen?
Does she call you?
She calls me.
So Erica calls you.
The Australians wanted to meet me three times in two weeks, just to put things in context of how bizarre... So Erica calls you and says that Downer wants to meet with you?
Yes.
She mentions Downer.
He's the ambassador, correct?
He's the former foreign minister of Australia and the current ambassador at that time, yes.
And she says specifically he's the one that wants to meet you.
Yes.
And when do you meet with him?
So after I...
Around May 5th, May 6th, when I finished meeting with these two US Intel agents, and then I meet with Downer on May 10th, 2016.
And immediately upon getting to this meeting with Downer... And the meeting was the 18th?
On the 10th.
It was on May 10th?
Yeah.
And it was at?
At a wine bar.
Not the typical place you meet an ambassador, especially for the first time.
And who was there?
Who?
None other than Erica Thompson.
The ubiquitous Erica Thompson and Alexander Downer.
And you.
And me.
And this, Mr. Mayor, this was probably the most bizarre, aggressive meeting I ever had in my entire life with any diplomat you can imagine.
Or, you know, I've had better welcomes from exes, as I said in my book.
You know, that's how hostile this person was during this meeting.
Hostile toward Trump?
Hostile towards Trump and me.
Hostile toward Trump and hostile toward you because you were supporting Trump?
Yes.
And how did it manifest itself, George?
So let's remember who Alexander Downer is for a second here.
Alexander Downer was the former Foreign Minister of Australia.
As Foreign Minister of Australia, he was able to earmark $25 million for the Clinton Foundation.
He was a personal friend of Bill and Hillary as well.
He was also, at the time, a board member of a private intelligence organization called Halicut, which also Stefan Halper, which we'll talk about eventually, was also a member of.
I get down to this meeting with Downer, and as I explain in my book, he tells me right away, I'm going to tell you, and I want you to tell your boss, Donald Trump, to leave my good friend David Cameron alone.
Like a threat?
Like a threat.
And I, and I, and it, and I, I, it, it shocked me.
And I, and I went back a bit and I said, why is an Australian diplomat talking to me about the UK prime minister who just a couple of weeks ago was attacking the candidates.
His phone comes out like this, nothing surreptitious, pretty overt like this.
And I said, this guy is recording me immediately.
I said, this guy is either taking photographs of me or he's recording or he's doing something he shouldn't be doing.
But I don't want to be rude because this is obviously a very senior diplomat and he's a U.S.
ally at that point.
We begin to get into a conversation about everything except the U.S.
Australia relationship.
And basically a conversation about Trump and the campaign and... Basically about my thoughts on Cyprus.
That's why I wanted to mention my background because that's why I think this target was on me.
About Israel, he was telling me that he was the UN envoy to Cyprus a couple years back and that my thoughts on that part of the world were wrong.
So he was there to basically probe me on my thoughts, what I was advising the campaign on, to tell me that Donald Trump was a pariah, and to record me essentially as he's veering a conversation into Hillary and Russia.
And how does that come about?
As an invited guest, speaking to a senior level diplomat, I wasn't there commanding or directing the conversation.
I was answering questions.
Every time I would answer a very sensitive question, his phone would come out.
And I said, this guy, there's something just off here, but let me keep going with it until I leave and finish my gin and tonic over here.
When did he get around to the subject of Hillary?
Sounds like what he was doing was trying to get you angry so that you would defend Trump.
Is that possibly what?
To try to get out of you the information that you had, that she was all dirtied up?
What I think was going on here, and let's remember here, on May 6th, my meeting with Downer was May 10th.
On May 6th, a mutual friend of ours, Judge Napolitano, was on Fox News saying openly, in front of millions of people, that Hillary's email is hacked.
And possibly the Russians or even the Israelis have our emails.
This was May 6th, 2016.
Okay, sure.
I remember that, yeah.
If you Google it, you'll see it.
It's on.
But that was a speculation.
Complete speculation.
Complete speculation.
Turned out to be right, but... Yeah, that everybody was talking about openly and especially in diplomatic circles, people were gossiping about.
This was nothing criminal.
It was nothing... Had you heard it before?
Well, I read it in newspapers at that point that her server might have been hacked, but this was open.
I mean, this wasn't anything secret at that point.
And Downer, here's the story that he says, or I guess is the story that's out there.
So, basically we have two different versions of the conversation, right?
What he has testified to, we think, and what you're saying.
What he says happened is, he asks me a question, Oh, so what's going on with Russia and Hillary or something like that?
And I say, oh, the Russians have dirt on Hillary.
So I use the word dirt, this amorphous, very generic term, dirt, on Hillary Clinton.
He gets his phone out.
Apparently he records me saying this thing.
Now, at the time that this was going on, that this meeting happened, as I explained, the U.S.
Embassy reached out with these two intel guys.
Bill Priestap, who was Peter Strzok's boss, was in London at that exact same moment I was meeting with Downer.
And Mark Meadows, who's currently the White House Chief of Staff, a couple, maybe a year or so ago, he was on Fox and he said something about ambassadors conspiring with the FBI.
I don't have proof that he's talking about Downer, but I'm almost certain he was talking about Alexander Downer and this very strange meeting I had with him in May 2016.
Which you see as a meeting designed to elicit information from you?
That's exactly what I think this was.
I think what's going on here is this.
The Australians were sent to spy on me.
And to try and retrieve whatever information Joseph Mifsud dropped to me in April 2016.
We saw it over and over and over again with various confidential informants, other spies who were trying to get me to repeat what Joseph Mifsud said, except as you saw in all the transcripts, I basically blew everybody off and said, I don't know what you're talking about.
But, but he got, he got, he basically According to him, he got you to say that the Russians have dirt on Hillary, that you know that the Russians have dirt on Hillary.
Is there anything else he adds to that?
He says that and he says, this is the, that's what he says.
He says Papadopoulos said, no, the Russians have dirt.
No emails?
No.
Never used the word email.
No interception?
Zero.
They had dirt?
Okay.
Yes.
And Attorney General Barr made a very interesting statement, I think during one of his congressional testimonies.
He said, I don't see the link between the word dirt and emails released four months later.
Something like that.
So... Yeah, I mean, dirt... That means Russians have dirt on everybody.
I mean, that's hardly a revelation.
I mean, when I read those original speculations, I said, OK, they have dirt on her, they have dirt on Bush, they have dirt on me, they have dirt on—that's what they're in the business of.
But he—now, how do you remember the conversation?
Because he goes ahead and he puts this statement into a memo, and possibly it's also tape-recorded.
So he makes a big deal out of it.
Yeah, so what the real scandal, I think, that is brewing, and why the president himself
called out Australia last summer, and why Attorney General Barr
is looking into Australia's activities, along with John Durham,
is because Australia was willfully attempting to sabotage the campaign with this information,
or with MIPSUD.
I don't know if there's a connection yet with MIPSUD and the Australians,
but certainly there's something about MIPSUD that John Durham and Attorney General Barr learned about
him that resulted in this probe becoming criminal now.
I don't have the classified information, but it looks to be very coordinated.
Mifsud, at the conclusion of this, makes a memo of it.
Downer, yeah.
That's what he says, right?
And Downer makes a memo of it, which would be rather unusual because it's not particularly significant information that the Russians have dirt on Hillary.
I don't know that I'd make a memo of that.
I mean, we all know that.
Maybe if you had said hacking emails, but he makes a memo of it contemporaneously.
Does he act shocked or surprised?
Well, first of all, you don't believe you said that to him, correct?
No.
What do you remember?
First of all, the thing I remember talking to him about was the UK, David Cameron, And the energy business in Cyprus and Israel, which he wanted to probe me about.
I don't even have any understanding or any memory, and I testified to Congress, to the FBI, and Mueller about the same thing as I'm telling you here, that I had no memory at all of saying the word dirt.
Do you have memories of Hillary?
No.
I have memories of him trying to bring her up, and that's it.
Like what?
Like how?
Like how?
Oh, so do you really think that Trump is going to beat her?
And I said, yeah, of course he's going to beat her.
So I was very uh it was one of these type of conversations where he was trying to elicit something out of out of me to then manufacture into what later became a very illegal investigation.
So how long was the meeting with you and was she continually a part of it?
Was Erica continually a part of it?
I'm glad you you mentioned this because Erica Went from being a very kind of jovial, probing type of person during my previous meetings to a very stoic, almost person who would scan the meeting with me and Downer.
And after the meeting with Downer and I, she emailed me, oh, we had such a great time with you, George.
I would love to meet with you one more time.
I still have all these emails.
Did you meet with him one more time?
Well, I was actually invited to the Israeli embassy has an annual Independence Day festival.
And I think I was invited to their 67th anniversary in London.
And that's where I bump into Alexander Downer again.
I see Erica Thompson, I see the Israeli diplomat, and I see the two U.S.
intelligence officers who I met with me the week before, all circling me and introducing me to people at the U.S.
Embassy in London.
They all had an interest in George!
You know, I wrote something in the Wall Street Journal about this, Mr. Mayor.
I think I remember that.
I was the target, you know.
So by the time you concluded the conversation with Mnuchin, your recollection is you never discussed dirt or Russians having anything on Hillary.
His recollection, as far as we know, is that you said dirt on Hillary.
He makes a memo of it as if it's very significant.
And then he doesn't really do anything until there's a revelation.
How many months later?
Well, here's something that's come out recently, which I found shocking, and that's the former Australian prime minister wrote a book, and he said that Downer was acting on his own.
The Australian government had no idea what he was doing when he was meeting with me, and his so-called tip that he gave to the U.S.
Embassy in London was not authorized.
This is according to Malcolm Turnbull, who was the former Australian Prime Minister.
Yes, sure.
So we don't know if Turnbull is telling the truth or trying to run away from this, right?
Well, there's clearly something very suspicious about Alexander Downer and Erica Thompson.
That even has the Australian media really pouncing on the story because it never made sense from the beginning.
And they're asking open questions now to Morrison, who's the current Prime Minister of Australia.
And there's a very different administration there now.
A conservative administration, very pro-Trump, and not likely to cover things up for the prior administration.
I don't think they can at this point, Mr. Mayor.
The scandal is too big.
I think same thing with Italy.
The same thing.
Italy, I mean, we could really get into Italy, as I think we talked about earlier.
Renzi wants to sue me apparently now for trying to, you know, get out Italy's involvement in what happened.
So people are panicking.
So.
So now.
Mifsud has the information, he has it in a memo, and we think he has it in a tape recording, but you've never seen that tape recording.
Well, I'll tell you what Mueller's team told me.
Okay, please.
When Mueller's team kept asking me what I remember from this meeting, I kept telling them I just remember meeting a very uncouth, rude diplomat.
And they said, no, you told this guy Russia has dirt.
And I said, I have no idea what you're talking about.
This is what I told Mueller's team, what, two and a half years ago.
And, and they told me, no, we know you told him that the Russians have dirt.
And I said, what are you talking about?
And then I told them, well, I think he might've been recording me.
And Mueller's team said, how did you know he was recording you?
So they confirmed it to me, essentially.
I then testified under oath to Congress about that exact same conversation I had with Mueller.
And I think when it comes out that an Australian diplomat was secretly recording a conversation with an American in London, the Five Eyes intelligence agreements might take a real beating.
Because that's exactly what it looks was going on here.
It looks like the Five Eyes were weaponized.
So it's your best recollection that you didn't say you had dirt on Hillary, but you might have.
I remember.
I remember reading that, so I just wanted to make that clear.
that time. So it's your it's your best recollection that you didn't say that
you didn't say you had dirt on Hillary but you might have.
That's exactly what I told Mueller, the FBI, and I testified. I remember I
remember reading that so I just wanted to make that clear. There's also the allegation
that you were inebriated or drunk during this conversation. Well it's a
little it's a little hard to... Is it true or not? No, first of all we
had the one water...
It wouldn't be the worst thing in the world if you were, by the way.
I mean, people occasionally do.
No, no, no.
Bo Downer and I had one watered-down gin and tonic, and my memory is so clear from this meeting that I ended up reporting him to Mueller and the FBI.
I testified against him in Congress.
No, you didn't.
wrote an entire chapter about him and my meeting and my book about him.
It's a very clear, very precise, very well-written chapter, by the way.
Yeah, so the New York Times, of course, wanted to create this propaganda.
Oh, that of course it was a drunk meeting and that's why he said it, but that's not
the truth.
And Downer himself has said the same thing.
We had one drink and that's it.
Downer has not said you were drunk?
No, Downer admitted.
He said we had one gin and tonic and that's it.
Now you're finished with Downer.
He leaves.
When's the next time you hear from Downer?
One more time, right?
So Downer, I see him a week or so later at the Israeli embassy event where Erica Thompson reaches me and says, hey, look who's here, George.
And I see Downer, and he shakes my hand, and he makes almost like a grunt, like, I got you.
Something, I'll never forget his face, how he shook my hand.
It left an indelible memory in my mind.
And that's the last time I saw him, was in May of 2016.
of 2016.
And then, and then of course, when the, when the information comes out that she had been,
that her emails had been hacked and obtained by the Russians and went through WikiLeaks
and that's when, that's when Downer.
Bye.
Sometimes during that period, he submits this memo.
There are conflicting reports of what he did because now with the revelations by Turnbull
that Downer was acting on his own and no one knew what he was really up to, we really don't
know what he actually did with this apparent information that he might or might not have
gotten on tape.
So George, there's so much more to the story, maybe we'll do another chapter, but I really
would like you to tell me, and this I understand is your best analysis, not evident.
What you told me up to now is evidence, but you'd be the best person to give us a sense of what do you think was... I mean, I think I know what was happening, but you're in a lot better shape What do you think was happening?
How do you see it now?
We're all, now we're several years later, there's a pile of information you've gotten that sheds light on it.
What do you think now?
Thank you for that question, Mr. Mayor.
Initially, I didn't think that General Flynn and I had, our stories weren't intertwined.
But as recent revelations have come out about General Flynn's case, It seems that people like Joseph Mifsud were meeting with him going back as early as 2015.
So clearly there were eyes on particular individuals, General Flynn, probably Paul Manafort, myself, Carter Page, maybe others, as we discussed earlier.
What I think was happening here is, based on our various backgrounds and connections to whatever governments, The Obama administration used those ties to put eyes on us.
And that's why you're starting to see the Logan Act weaponized the way it was, and various FISA warrants executed on Americans working for a presidential campaign.
So that's the first thing.
The second is, I think these foreign governments all had vested interests in a Clinton presidency.
I've always said it from the beginning.
The UK at that time was very pro-EU under Cameron.
They did not want the EU and Brexit to happen.
And candidate Trump, of course, was very pro-Brexit.
The Australians were very pro-TPP, meaning the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
And they had a socialist government in power at that time under Turnbull, who was an ally of Clinton.
And in Italy, you had Renzi, who was very close to Obama, actually.
Renzi was actually invited by Obama to meet with him in October of 2016, right when the spying was really ramping up.
So clearly these governments, along with a very politicized FBI and CIA, wanted to do everything possible to do two things.
One, to sabotage the Trump campaign and get an ear into it, and should Candidate Trump have eventually won, even if it was a small chance, to then handcuff him and not allow him to properly govern this country with the appointment of a special counsel.
And that's exactly what Jim Comey did by leaking information and what Rosenstein did by writing this bizarre memo that I was an Israeli agent, that Flynn was a Russian agent, that Manafort was a Russian agent, just to create a fantasy To investigate and to keep the heat on Trump.
That's what I think the summary is of the last three years.
I think I'm going to be proven right.
Every day there's more and more information, independent of you, as well as connected to you, that supports that thesis, which was more or less my guess back when I first read your book.
I think it's worth maybe if we could do a second one that takes it from where we just left off through what they did to you, because it's one thing to do this.
It's another thing to basically trash the rights of an American citizen.
But for the grace of God, you could have been destroyed, completely destroyed.
I mean, I think now you can look back on it, George, as an experience that made you stronger and better.
But had the other side not come out, had they been successful, you'd have been destroyed.
And so would Flynn, and so would Manafort, and maybe even the president.
Who knows?
So I want to thank you very, very much for, first of all, for what you went through.
And not doing what some people might do, which is just tell them what they want to hear.
It means you're a man of character.
And number two, I want to thank you for being interested in rectifying this, because we don't want to see this happen again to other people.
Whether you're a Republican or a Democrat, you can't conduct a decent government like this.
How are you now, and how's your wife?
You got married in the middle of all this, right?
Well, thank you for those kind words, Mr. Mayor.
It really Yeah, we want to get into that.
That's really important.
you're right, if I had simply composed and for the special counsel the way they wanted
me to, I'd be a free man and you'd likely not see President Trump in office with what
they wanted to make me say about him.
Yeah, that's right.
We want to get into that.
That's really important.
Like you said, I did get married through this situation.
It's a beautiful Italian girl from Naples.
Well, the best.
And Greek girls are number two.
It's a great combination.
Greek and Italian is a great... I have a cousin who has a beautiful Greek wife and two wonderful Greek-American children.
Exactly.
And, uh, you know, the, I'll say one thing about my wife.
Uh, she's not simply my wife that we got married through this.
She actually is the one who really helped me put pieces together because she used to be a diplomat in Europe actually.
And she knew, and she knew Joseph Mitsud and she knew his connections to Italy.
And she testified under oath to Congress and she was subpoenaed by Mueller.
That's something a lot of people don't know, but they wanted to know what she knew about Mifsud and Italy and why she was in my life at that very sensitive moment.
So that's something else that you couldn't have written.
No, I could see from the outside watching that that she was a...
Thank you.
Thank you.
It was a real honor.
that she was playing a big role in helping you.
And so congratulate her too.
Okay?
Thank you.
We'll talk very shortly.
Thank you, George.
Thank you.
It was excellent.
Thank you.
Well, I think that was about as revealing an interview as we've had about this terrible,
terrible attempt to first prevent the man the American people wanted as president from
becoming president, and then even worse than that, to remove him from office by any means
possible, legal, illegal, quasi-legal.
Unfortunately, George Papadopoulos was in the middle of it, but fortunately, George
came through it and has a very, very solid recollection of it.
So I really admire him for being able to have gotten through it, for his honest rendition of it now, and I hope that all of this, as it comes out, will prevent it from happening in the future.
And we'll be back with you very shortly.
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