All Episodes
Previous Next
May 22, 2020 - Rudy Giuliani
50:37
The Attempt to Destroy George Papadopoulos #OBAMAgate | Part 2 | Ep. 38
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
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.
Hello, this is Rudy Giuliani with Rudy's Common Sense.
And today we're doing the second part of our interview with George Papadopoulos.
The amount of material that he covers and the amount of information that he has really just can't be done in one interview, probably not even in two, but we'll give it a try.
So you should read his book, Deep State, which when I read it really helped me understand a lot about what's going on here.
But I'm going to ask him to summarize the first interview, and then we'll go right into where we are right now.
So when we stopped last time, we had gotten up to your last meeting with Alexander Downer, and then finally the beginning of the interviews.
But why don't you take us through the chronology of that frenetic two weeks that led up to that last meeting with Downer, and then we'll go forward.
Absolutely not.
Thanks a lot for having me again, Mr. Mayor.
It's always a pleasure.
Oh, it's a great pleasure for me.
Here's what happened, and I should mention even one other thing that was even more bizarre that involves the UK government.
Remember these high-level officials who wanted to meet with George Papadopoulos in those very fateful two weeks?
Another UK official from 10 Downing Street wanted to meet.
His name is Tobias Elwood.
Tobias Elwood, at the time, was the number two at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs under Boris Johnson.
This was not a nobody.
This was somebody who was running to be the UK Minister of Defence.
Also calls me and wants to know about the campaign, wants to know about me, wants to know what my ties are in the Middle East.
This all happened leading up to the Downer meeting, so I want to make sure that that's included as well.
So, to summarize, Israeli government, UK government, and Australian government, and the US government all met with me leading up to this fateful meeting with Alexander Downer.
Now, Alexander Downer invites me, I don't invite him, I don't even know who he is, to a bar in the area I used to live in in London.
And I sit down, And Erica Thompson is there, and so is Alexander Downer.
Erica Thompson is very stern in her approach to me.
She's not talking.
She seems to be monitoring this setting that we were having.
Alexander Downer starts the conversation, this is the Australian High Commissioner to the UK, telling me, you and your boss better leave my good friend David Cameron alone.
And it's something that To this day, it still shocks me to have had the Australian High Commissioner tell me this.
And I said, what are you talking about?
He says that your candidate is making problems and he should not be so hostile towards the UK Prime Minister.
This is after the UK Prime Minister, of course, went on a bizarre rant about the candidate, if you remember.
I stood back and I essentially told him that That's not what's happening, and in fact, David Cameron should probably retract what he said because it's unbecoming of a U.S.
ally to speak about a candidate running for the presidency's office.
After that, his phone comes out like this.
I demonstrated it to the FBI, to Mueller, to Congress, and he goes like this to me, as if he's recording something.
Immediately upon sitting down with him, I thought, he's recording me, but I don't know why he's recording me.
It was just almost a moment of shock that you don't know how to, and you don't know what to do at that point, because you're sitting at a bar with an Australian diplomat who's asking you questions about the UK.
He then begins to talk to me about China, asks me what my thoughts on Cyprus were.
He was a UN Now, to make things clear, I was a guest at this meeting.
I was not there to dictate the terms of the meeting.
I was not there to ask the High Commissioner questions.
The questions have dirt on Hillary Clinton.
Now, to make things clear, I was a guest at this meeting.
I was not there to dictate the terms of the meeting.
I was not there to ask the high commissioner questions.
As his guest, I was there to answer what and any questions he might have had for me.
Thank you.
So whatever he alleges that I said, and something that I have said under oath to the FBI, to Mueller and Congress, I never said the word emails.
I never even discussed anything except what he might have been asking me.
The meeting was a setup.
That's the summary.
And Downer and Australia, in my True opinion, and I think the facts support what I'm saying here, including John Durham investigating Australia's conduct during the 2016 election.
I believe the Australian government was willfully participating in an effort to sabotage the Trump campaign.
So that produces what then you could argue is evidence.
It produces a comment from you to him that they have dirt on Hillary.
He transmits that.
There's a dispute about how he transmits it, but ultimately that gets to U.S.
and U.K.
intelligence, right?
That's the story.
And now the new development is that the Australian ex-prime minister has come out, obviously now that there's a lot of scrutiny on Australia, and has stated that down ...acted on his own and we didn't know what he was up to.
Now that's even more bizarre because the news story is that he didn't send a wire or whatever it's called, a diplomatic wire, to Australia.
He went directly to the number two at the U.S.
Embassy in London to talk about my alleged comments I made.
Now, don't forget, as I explained a couple minutes ago, the U.S.
Embassy had contacted me just days before Downer met with me.
This could all be a coincidence, Mr. Mayor, but as they say in politics, nothing's a coincidence.
So I think this is a reason why perhaps the Australian government has begun to distance themselves from whatever Downer was up to, because And even Devin Nunes himself has stated there's actually no raw intelligence from Australia saying what happened during this alleged comment I made.
So whatever was happening was something off the books.
So after that happens, you leave, when are you contacting Next about this?
So after I leave this meeting, that's actually when I move back to the United States, where Where my home was.
You know, I was leaving my old position in London and I was obviously moving back to the U.S.
at that time.
And at that time, I get back to the U.S.
and some characters start to message me who are now at the epicenter of the new investigation, including the Horowitz investigation, the Senate Intel investigation that's ongoing right now, and possibly the Durham probe.
And so, you've had the conversation with Downer, you leave, you come back to the United States to work on the campaign, and then when is the next thing that comes up of significance about this?
So the next individual who reaches out to me, which I don't have evidence that this might have been a nefarious character or not, so I'm not going to say it, is Sergey Millian, who allegedly is the source of this infamous dossier from Steele.
Sergey Millian meets with me or contacts me in July before Crossfire Hurricane comes out and says I work for the Trump Organization basically or that I have worked with the candidate in real estate.
Let's meet.
He meets with me and moving forward, that's the impetus that the FBI uses to interview me.
But before we get into the FBI interview, We could get into Stefan Halper and some of these other individuals.
Yes, please.
Yes.
In September 2016... Well, Sergei... Before we leave Sergei Milyan, Sergei Milyan calls you, tells you that he works with a candidate in real estate.
In fact, Sergei Milyan was working with the organization that was putting together this field dossier.
Isn't that correct?
My understanding was of Sergey Millian.
Remember, this is July 2016.
Good, right.
It's completely different from what we know now.
That's after they got the contract.
Basically, that's my understanding.
Yeah, the contract was like May.
Yes, and I basically get a message that this is somebody who knows the candidate, has worked in business with him.
So naturally, I thought, okay, and he says he knows Michael Cohen and other people.
So I said, okay, that's fine.
I'll go and And meet to see what this guy's all about, and then later on we find out he's an alleged source for steel.
Did he ask you unusual questions?
His whole demeanor was very suspicious.
I mean, I don't ever remember him being too aggressive or probe-like, but I was always suspicious of why he wanted to meet with me and what the purpose of these actual meetings were.
How many meetings with him?
About three meetings.
And what did he want to know about Trump's alleged connections to Russia?
What he actually wanted to do was connect me to Russia.
And apparently at the time, he was the CEO of the Russia Chamber of Commerce in New York.
Now, as you probably know, Mr. Mayor, I've never even traveled to Russia, let alone have a Russian contact.
Sergey, after I meet with him, decides that he wants to invite me to go speak at the Moscow Gath Forum, because that's what my background was.
I used to work in the energy world.
And within a week of meeting with him, he has an invite for me to speak on a panel with the CEOs and leaders of Russia, in theory.
I don't know if that was ever a real invite, but that's what it seems he wanted to do for me.
I never went, obviously.
Anything else like that?
That was probably the most strange thing.
And then later on during the inauguration, an associate of his tells me, did you know that he works with the FBI?
As Sergei is sitting next to him.
This is at the inauguration in DC.
Who told you he was working on the Steele dossier?
No one ever said that.
I never heard anything about the Steele dossier until that big piece in the Wall Street Journal came out, I think in January of 2017.
The only thing that this associate of mine said, and I mentioned it in my book as well, is that, did you know that Sergei works with the FBI?
And I said, this is during the inauguration.
All right.
So that's the story with Sergei.
In September, however, a couple of months after Sergei, that's when this Stefan Halper reaches out to me, this infamous professor who was targeting the campaign too.
And what does he want?
In September 2016, I'm in New York.
I get an email out of the blue.
I'm a professor at Cambridge University.
I want to pay you $3,000.
And I want to fly you to London.
And I want to hear your thoughts on the energy sector in Israel.
I said, that's fine.
That's how I made a living at that time in my life.
So there was nothing suspicious about it.
I looked him up.
I saw he worked in a couple of administrations.
He looked legitimate.
And he flies me to London.
Where, uh, if you remember that story in the New York Times where he introduces me to the so-called blonde bombshell.
I don't know if you remember that.
I do.
If you remember that story.
It's hard to miss.
Well, why, why the blonde bombshell?
While that's a sensationalized headline and obviously it's, it's funny and you know, it catches your attention.
While she was attractive, that wasn't the most peculiar part about who this person was.
This girl, whoever Stefan Halpern introduced me to in London, was a Turkish national.
Now, she had a very heavy accent.
Did she have a name?
Her fake name was Azra Turk.
Ordra Turk?
It's a fake name, but that's what she called herself.
So Azra Turk.
Now, think about what I'm saying here, Mr. Mayor.
I'm in London yet again.
London was a very strange city for me during these months.
Right.
This person, along with this other individual that we still don't have her true identity, and Horowitz never even mentioned her in the Horowitz report because it seems that she was working either with foreign intel or the CIA, invite me to London to meet, to spy on me, And the next day the UK government wants to meet with me as well at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
When you meet with them, what do they ask you?
What's the conversation about?
With Halper?
So Osra was being just very suggestive and basically trying to get me to repeat what Joseph told me in some form.
Basically, so is Wikileaks helping the campaign?
What do you think about these emails?
And I said, look, we have nothing to do with any of that stuff.
And some of these transcripts are now public, where I'm essentially telling Stefan Halper and this Azra Turk that what you're talking about is treason, and we have nothing to do with it.
This is all while I was being surreptitiously recorded, so of course I had no idea that I was being spied on at the time.
But that's what they wanted to know, and they wanted to hear my thoughts on the energy sector that I mentioned earlier.
And then what happened?
Well, here's where things get, I think, more muddy.
The UK government rolled out the red carpet for me to go meet their Tobias Ellwood, the number two at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in London.
Was that the next day?
That was the next day after I'm being targeted by Stefan Helper.
Okay.
So just to put things in context of what I'm talking about here, during an active spying operation against George Papadopoulos in London, the UK government is inviting me to meet their diplomats at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to also question me and my background and about the campaign.
That, in my estimation, in my opinion, is probably The single most damning piece of evidence that the UK government was directly involved in conspiring against the campaign at that point.
Because the operation against me was in London.
I'm an American citizen.
Why am I being flown to London to be spied on while Stefan Halper was spying on the campaign members in the US like Carter Page and Michael Flynn and some of the others?
So that's the first question.
And the second is, why did the UK government also want to meet with me while I was being spied on, in London, to ask me about the candidates, ask me about my background, and various other issues from the Iran nuclear deal, to Russia, to the US-European relationship.
That's something that no one has really scrutinized to this day, and we're almost three years post-election.
And was Tobias Elwood the only one at this meeting or did he have some assistance?
The UK North America attache was there.
So the representative of the UK government to North America was also there.
Was it recorded?
I have no idea.
I assume if I was being spied on the day before that they might have been recording for somebody too.
Were they taking notes?
They were taking notes, yeah.
And what was basically the conversation about?
The conversation basically was that we don't appreciate this America First tone.
We want to stay in the Iran deal and we want the UK to stay in Europe.
And if you screw around with these very important issues then we're probably not going to have a good relationship with your candidate.
That's essentially in a nutshell what I was being told in London.
So it was a threat?
It was a tacit, if not overt, threat, basically, by a U.S.
ally, whose conduct is now under investigation.
So, but no reference to emails, dirt, Hillary dirt, no reference to the Mifsud-Downer situation?
Zero.
So what happened after that?
So the day before, that's when all that conversation was going on, where Stefan Halper and this We're trying to get me to repeat what Mifsud told me four months ago, at that point.
Right.
Moving forward, the UK government was very fixated on me, if you will.
And the UK government, between September and the election victory, had their embassy meet with me in D.C.
I met with their number two in D.C.
at the DuPont Cafe, which You know, it's a little meetings place everybody goes to.
And eventually, during the UN General Assembly, where Trump was meeting with leaders and, you know, as we talked about in episode one, that's when Tobias Ellwood meets with me in New York.
Tobias Ellwood was the number two at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
He pops up again in my life, where he wants to meet with me once again.
What's the purpose of their meetings to try to convince Trump that he should abandon his America First policy, his having NATO pay their fair share, that kind of thing?
So Tobias Ellwood, as I explained, was the number two at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and he met with me three different times in three different months.
I don't care, as I explained earlier, not even the Secretary of State meets that frequently with these type of officials.
And I was simply a campaign advisor at that point.
Okay?
Tobias Ellwood, during the UN General Assembly, says, George, I'm in New York.
You want to go grab a beer?
I'm at another bar with another diplomat.
At this meeting, Tobias Ellwood basically tells me that we're very worried about the candidate and NATO.
We don't like this posture for NATO.
That's when NATO started to come up a lot.
Because this is September now.
The election is only two months away at that point.
So the hostility from the UK government was getting a little more overt.
You could see that they were worried about something.
That they were worried about where the candidate would take the US-NATO relationship at that point.
So then what happened after that?
After that, then the UK embassy reaches out to me in DC.
The candidate is then elected.
And I get an email from the UK government.
Oh, hey George, we want to send you Theresa May's letter of congratulations.
Can you please send it to the candidate?
To this day, I have Theresa May's letter of congratulations.
I don't think it's been missed.
I don't think they miss it very much.
I think I'm a pretty interesting guy, but I don't think I deserve that much attention from the UK.
This would be a good time to take a short break.
When your life is in chaos, your home is your safe haven, your most valuable asset.
Imagine losing your home to some online scammer.
In an instant, you have no place to live, and your home, your security, your nest egg in an emergency isn't yours anymore.
Is this even possible?
In a word, yes.
It's called home title theft.
And the FBI calls it one of the fastest growing crimes.
My friends at Home Title Log demonstrated how quickly and easily online scammers can steal our homes.
This is a legal title to a home in California.
All home titles, yours and mine, are vulnerable.
They're kept online, where thieves, foreign and domestic, hunt them.
They simply print your home's title, Forge your signature stating you sold your home, put a fake notary seal on it, and refile it as the new owner.
In an instant, your home is theirs.
Then they can borrow against it and you'd be responsible for the payments.
Or they could try to evict you.
I'm serious.
Your bank doesn't cover you and neither does your homeowner's insurance.
Home title lock does.
For pennies a day, Home Title Lock puts a virtual firewall around your home's title.
If some cyber thief tampers with your home's title, they're on it, helping to shut it down before you lose your home.
Here's what I want you to do.
Go to HomeTitleLock.com and register your address to see if you're already a victim and don't know it.
You will receive 30 days of free Home Title Lock protection using the promo code Rudy.
You need to do this now.
Get 30 days of free protection with promo code Rudy at hometitlelock.com.
Welcome back to our interview with George Papadopoulos.
Peace.
So now, when did the U.S.
government, in the way of the FBI and all the deep state people, start getting involved with you?
Up until now, you probably had no sense that you did anything that would be considered worthy of investigation, right?
Of course not.
Of course not.
I've never even had a parking ticket in my life, let alone thinking that there was an active counterintelligence investigation into myself and others.
At that point.
That involved some serious players.
These weren't some bozos running into me and others.
And after the inauguration, I get a call from the FBI once that Steele dossier story comes out.
So that's about when?
About January?
That's January 2017.
It was a front page Wall Street Journal story.
I remember.
And then what happens there?
So the FBI comes to me and they say, you know, can you help us with some stuff, right?
And you know what we want to talk about.
And I thought they wanted me to talk about Sergei, this guy who, uh, you know, met with me a couple of times and there was nothing to it besides him reaching out.
And there was nothing really that I felt was, um, that I needed to worry about, if you will.
So I go to the FBI mistakenly without an attorney, like General Flynn did.
And, I'm shown a picture of this Sergei Millian. They say, do
you know this person? I said, yeah.
I give a two minute summary of how I know him. And the FBI then says, well, that's not why we
really want to talk to you. We have a lot more we want to talk to you about. They don't tell you
what it is, though. No. And I and they start to talk to me about Israel. Israel is brought up a
lot during this initial FBI interview. And I say, why? What's wrong with Israel?
They say, were you meeting with this diplomat or this diplomat?
Are you being co-opted by the Israeli government?
And I started to laugh.
I actually, you see, I don't know if the transcript exists yet of that meeting, but I started laughing.
And I said, what do you mean?
Am I being co-opted by the Israelis?
I know a lot of people in Israel.
I was a consultant.
For a U.S.
energy company out in Israel.
But are you asking me if I'm a spy?
And they just started to... I mean, it was a bizarre exchange.
And they looked at me in a very stern way.
Like they had a big problem with the Israelis.
To this day, I don't know why.
But they did.
After that, they asked me, did you hear anything about Russian emails?
And I said, I've never met a Russian official in my life.
But this Maltese guy, Joseph Mifsud, told me that the Russians have thousands of Hillary's emails.
Now, here's something that bears scrutiny, right?
I never told... Allegedly, what I told Alexander Downer was that the Russians have dirt on Hillary.
That's what Downer has said.
The word dirt.
Not emails.
Dirt.
I never repeat what Joseph Mifsud tells me about emails to any informant, and if you count them on your own hand, I had at least six informants, including college buddies of mine, trying to set me up.
But the FBI wanted to ask me what I knew about emails.
The only way the FBI could have known about emails is if they knew exactly what Joseph Mipsa told me nine months before that.
Fateful interview I had with the FBI.
So that that was the that was the second conversation with Mifsud that we're talking about?
We're talking about the where he drops the info about emails in April.
They had already dropped the information about D.I.R.T.
before that.
Mifsud gives me the the info about Russia and emails in April of 2016.
The FBI interviews me in January of 2017.
I'm talking about the conversation where he says he mentioned dirt.
That he mentioned dirt to you.
He mentioned the word emails.
Where this word dirt comes from, I think that's what Downer said.
I see.
So Mifsud never uses the word dirt.
Mifsud uses the word emails.
That they have emails of Hillary Clinton.
Yes.
When you talk to Downer, it gets converted into dirt.
When I talk to Downer, what he says I said, Which I have absolutely no recollection of saying it, is that I made a general term like, oh, the Russians have dirt on Hillary.
This is what Downer, his story is, and what is public knowledge at this point.
But just so everyone understands, the actual conversation with Mifsud is a conversation in which he does not mention the word dirt.
No, he doesn't.
He says emails.
Yes.
So dirt is a word that Downer introduces.
Yes.
The word emails was never brought up after that meeting with Joseph Mifsud to anybody.
Okay.
So what you're saying is up until, up until this conversation now, a year later, the word emails had never been mentioned except at the conversation with Mifsud.
You would never mentioned it to friends.
Yes.
You would never mentioned it to Downer, never mentioned any of his associates.
No.
So what you're saying is this has to have come from a tape recording or from Mifsud directly?
Absolutely.
And that's why Mifsud is the key right now.
That's why, and I'll never forget it, Mr. Mayor, to the day I die, right?
When I told the FBI agents this information, as a patriot who loves America, as somebody who just worked on a rival presidential campaign to Hillary, I openly tell the FBI, hey, this guy told me this information, you should go look into him.
It's as if I told the agents 2 plus 2 was 4 and the sky is blue.
They didn't even nudge.
It's as if they knew exactly what it was, what Mifsud was, and then they proceed to try and trip me up and they get me in a perjury trap asking me about dates and the number of times I meet with Mifsud.
That's actually what my so-called lie was.
So what, yeah, tell us what your so-called lie was, the confusion that led to the perjury or the false, really not perjury, it's a false statement, right?
Yes, well, I think we see with the General Flynn case, you plead sometimes at things that you really don't do.
But what they said, after I have a two-hour conversation with them about everything from Israel to meetings with foreign diplomats, They asked me, when did you meet Mifsud and how many times?
And because I misremembered when I met him exactly, they then used that as some sort of charge.
What did you say specifically?
How often had you met him?
I think what they say I said was I met him before I was on the campaign.
And in fact you didn't?
And they say that's a false statement?
That's what the story that they have made is, and that it was a material false statement, because as a prosecutor yourself, you know better than anybody.
Yeah, yeah.
It's what, when I was younger, we would call a chicken, you know what, case.
Chicken, yeah, chicken-esque case.
But you did admit to meeting with Mifsud, right?
And you told them, and only really one conversation with Mifsud was really pertinent and relevant.
That's the conversation in which he tells you about the emails.
And unlike anybody else, you tell them about that.
Willfully.
Willfully.
So what the point is, you gave them the material information.
Yes.
Everything else was background.
Exactly.
And in the course of this, this is all one meeting with the FBI?
All one long meeting?
This is one long meeting.
How long was it?
It was about two hours.
And how many agents?
There were two agents.
And that's the meeting from which they extracted the false statement charge?
That's the meeting, yes.
Did they before the meeting tell you that you could be prosecuted for false statements?
I don't remember that at all, actually.
If I had known that, I probably would have had a lawyer at that point.
Part of the thing, just a little legal background, for the longest time, FBI interviews were not subject to perjury or false statement prosecutions, largely because they don't have to be transcribed.
They're just the agent's notes.
Maybe 20 years ago or so, it became a crime.
It's a new, it's a fairly new crime.
And it's probably the weakest of the perjury crimes because it's not based on a transcription.
Somebody's sitting there taking it down.
It's not necessarily based on a tape recording.
They may or may not have one.
It's based on the agent's notes.
So, and the person The reason we prosecute perjury, going back to the common law, is because we have the person take an oath, and that oath is supposed to remind them that unlike normal conversation, where you can sometimes exaggerate and sometimes be inaccurate, now that you've taken an oath, you've got to be very careful.
None of that happens with an FBI 302 or this prosecution.
That's why I said it's considered somewhat of a chicken prosecution.
But in any event, this is what they then require you to plead guilty to.
And if you didn't plead guilty to it, what would have happened to you?
Well, basically, after this meeting, before the Mueller team comes in, And this FBI agent tries to force me to wear a wire against MIPSUD.
We now know that MIPSUD is the key to the entire criminal probe of Durham.
So why this FBI agent tried to force me to wear a wire and to go back to London and that they would pay me to record MIPSUD at a time when MIPSUD was actually invited to DC to a State Department conference?
I don't know.
But all I know is, after I refused to wear a wire, and I'm getting into your answer of the question you just had, this FBI agent told me, we're going to bust your ass, basically, for what you're doing with Israel.
And I said, why do you keep saying Israel?
What's happening?
And later on, as I'm moving forward, the special counsel says, if you don't plead guilty to one count of lying, we're going to charge you as an Israeli agent.
And at that point, after spending probably $200,000 just going into my career with these new bizarre charges, I said, look, I don't know what's going on here.
Let me get these guys off my back.
And that's why I pled guilty.
That's actually the story.
So you pled guilty to one count of false statement because they said if you didn't plead guilty, they were going to charge you as a spy for Israel or a foreign agent.
Like they did to Flynn, too.
With Flynn, it was the same exact textbook.
A foreign agent.
For failing to register as a foreign agent of the state of Israel.
Something they almost never prosecute anybody for, except if they're connected to Trump.
That's a crime that only exists if you are connected to Trump.
They don't consider that any other place.
So they said that if you don't plead guilty to this one count, which is a fairly minimal count, They're going to stick on a foreign agent registration charge for dealing with Israel.
Yes, that's exactly what happened.
At that point, Mr. Mayor, I was under some sort of seal.
You know, after spending over $200,000 in legal fees, you know, without being able to raise any money or go on television and present my case, there was nothing I could do at that point.
So you have to throw in the towel and then you have to hit them back the way I did.
And that was going public with real information.
Like we are today.
So you plead guilty, you got a... I know any time in jail is not very nice, but you got a ridiculously low sentence.
I mean, people get that kind of sentence for... reckless driving.
Maybe worse than that.
What, 14 days was it?
It was like... 14 days or... It was 11 days.
11 days.
Was that the actual sentence or what you served?
What I served.
Well, what was the actual sentence?
Two weeks.
14 days.
So it was a two-week sentence and you served 11 days.
Yeah.
Was that in the local... Where was it?
In the local MCC?
No, actually I was just learning about a lot of things from a lot of accountants and lawyers and doctors who didn't pay their taxes.
One of these In one of these camps.
If you were a lawyer, you could have picked up a lot of clients there.
So I mean, it wasn't the worst thing.
And in fact, I always say it.
The biggest mistake they ever did was really going after me with these bizarre characters and operatives because I blew it all open against them.
And they might have been looking to Manafort me and put me away for years.
I don't know what the purpose was.
The way they went after me and why so many operatives and countries were involved, but that's what it is.
Did they ever try to determine whether you had information that could help them against Manafort or Trump or Trump Jr.
or the campaign?
Did they put you through any of that?
Basically, Mr. Mayor, and you probably heard this from others who have gone through the ring door with these guys.
It was basically, tell us the story we want to know.
And we're not really after you.
And we're really after the big whale, and you know who the big whale is, and that's the president.
Who presented that to you, the FBI or the Independent Council?
The Independent Council.
And who was it that was questioning, do you remember?
The three prosecutors, I should say, along with three FBI agents.
It was Janee Rhee, who was a Clinton Foundation lawyer, Uh, uh, Andrew Goldstein and, uh, this guy, Zelinsky.
So, Jeannie Rhee, Goldstein.
And Zelinsky.
And Zelinsky?
Zelinsky.
You were never treated to the tender mercies of Andrew Weisman?
No, fortunately not, but, uh, but I had, uh, the Clinton Foundation lawyer against me, which might've been even worse.
Yeah, yeah.
And they, so what they basically wanted you to do, they made it clear to you that if you had information that could implicate The situation was this.
Tell us everything you've been up to in the Middle East.
Tell us what you have been doing with the Israelis, with Greece, with Cyprus, with Egypt.
... ruling hours of interrogation in about 30 seconds for the listeners.
The situation was this.
Tell us everything you've been up to in the Middle East.
Tell us what you have been doing with the Israelis, with Greece, with Cyprus, with Egypt.
Tell us why you know these people, how you know them, and how you were influencing foreign policy in whatever way
you might have been doing it.
They were looking basically to charge me with a Logan Act as well.
Zelinsky tells me, you know what the Logan Act is, Mr. Papadopoulos?
I didn't even know what the Logan Act was at that point.
So they used against me, they used against Flynn too.
So that was the first part of the interrogation.
The second was, who did you tell on the campaign what Mifsud told you?
Did you tell the president?
Did you tell Bannon?
Did you tell Don Jr.?
Who did you tell?
And the reason they wanted to find out if I told anyone on the campaign what Mifsa told me was because that was the center of their conspiracy case and their collusion case.
If they could have proven that George Papadopoulos told Don Jr.
or candidate Trump or Mayor Giuliani, hey, did you know that the Russians have Hillary's emails?
And if I had typed that out or if I was on a phone call, that was a collusion fake collusion case that they wanted.
And I told them I never said this to anyone.
It's not my business to go and say this to anyone in the campaign.
And I never did.
And they said, well, we don't believe you.
And I said, well, why don't you go look through my emails and my records?
Because 90% of my communication with the campaign was on email.
So if you don't believe me, there's nothing I can do.
And that's when essentially they They started to tell me that if you're not going to tell us, we're going to go after you hard.
And that's when I explained the Israeli agent and the line charges and obstruction of justice.
And I said, I'm just going to get these guys off my back and I'm going to end up hitting them when it hurts.
And they question you how many times?
It was over 20 hours, Mr. Mayor.
One 20 hour session?
Five times, five different meetings.
I mean, you can understand how bizarre these conversations are.
I'm being asked about the Logan Act.
I'm being asked about my interactions with U.S.
allies, about the Muslim Brotherhood, about who I told on the campaign, what Mifsud told me a year ago.
You can understand that this wasn't your typical criminal investigation.
This was a political hit job that wanted to weaponize me against the President, and I wasn't going to lie, because I wouldn't lie So, what did this cost you, in terms of a lot of money?
and for that matter to get out of trouble.
And I just stood my ground.
I took it like a man and that's what happened.
So what did this cost you in terms of a lot of money?
A lot of money, right?
Well, money was probably the easiest thing to replace at this point.
Initially, I saw my skyrocketing career get evaporated with people talking about me as if they was
and denigrating me.
I saw old allies turn against me.
And I was very lucky.
I guess I had my girlfriend and wife at that point, who was the only one who defended me
on national television.
But you know, things are much better now.
But it was a very dark beginning to where we are now.
Did you use up all your assets?
At that point, yes.
And found it hard to work during that period, I would imagine, right?
Well at that point, my livelihood was based on traveling and having a passport.
And when you're subject to confinement in the city of Chicago, where it's a beautiful city, it's my hometown, but I had no professional connections at that point to the city, I couldn't work for a couple of years.
And it took a tremendous toll.
It really did.
How long was the whole The whole process that you went through.
Two years.
Two years, right.
Two years is a long time.
Were you surprised at the end that they let you plead to something so, I hate to say this, but so meaningless?
Because the plea, you realize in the wider world, the plea hurt them a lot because they had played you as the blockbuster.
You were going to break the case open.
Well, Flynn also, but you were going to break the case open.
And then as the months and the years went by, they would sort of suggest they were going to eventually break you and you were going to implicate Manafort and Trump and who knows who else.
And then all of a sudden, the next thing you hear is you get 14 days in jail.
Well, that hardly is a person that they had any kind of evidence could break to open a very big case.
If they thought you could break open a very big case, they weren't going to let you get away with it with a 14-day sentence.
So did you ever realize how stupid their plea looked?
Spending millions of dollars for a 14-day conviction?
Well, Mr. Mayor, if they were able to coerce me to I think the world mocked Mueller and his team when I did get this 11-day sentence.
It's something I should have never pled guilty to.
I wasn't going to do it, it blew up in their face.
And you're absolutely right.
I think the world mocked Mueller and his team when I did get this 11-day sentence.
It's something I should have never pled guilty to.
I do have a legal team looking into the situation, especially with all the new evidence coming
out.
And at the end of the day, as I've explained during our conversation, what happened to
to me is the center of the Durham probe.
So it really backfired on them, because what Durham and Attorney General Barr are looking into, including Joseph Mifsud and the conduct of the FBI and the Special Counsel, really runs through my story.
So it really backfired, and you might actually see criminal indictments on the other side, based on what they did to me.
Well, you might.
I mean, if you just boil it down to you pled guilty to making a false statement because you said that you didn't meet with Mifsud before the meeting, the consequential meeting.
And your answer to that is, I didn't remember meeting with him before, which is very credible.
You have several meetings with someone, you sometimes don't remember if you had two, three, or four.
I think from anyone else, they would have accepted that.
But they didn't accept that from you because they felt they had a hook on you.
The same way with Flynn, where they asked him, did you talk about sanctions?
They had a tape recording right in their briefcase talking about sanctions.
And when he said no, they sort of almost gave themselves a high five.
Oh, now we captured him.
Rather than just show it to him and say, General, you know, you did talk to him.
What was it about?
So your two cases really illustrate that this was a witch hunt.
It was clearly a witch hunt.
Not a criminal investigation of any kind.
And I'm just sorry that you went through it.
I appreciate that, Mr. Mayor.
And I'll leave this quote by, I guess, Stalin, where he says that, I'll show me the man and I'll find the crime.
They were looking to investigate crimes.
They were looking to invent crimes.
And you see parallels between what happened to myself and General Flynn.
And, you know, it was a sad moment in American history.
And it really divided us as Americans.
And we still feel the effect of what happened two years ago today.
And I think most Americans just want accountability now.
They don't want a two-tiered justice system.
And they want this country to continue moving forward on a positive trajectory the way it was before, obviously, Corona hit.
That's where I think we're heading, and I think it should be a great next couple months for all Americans in this country.
Well, I hope so, and I congratulate you for sticking with your principles rather than doing what a lot of men would have done.
So, you're a very special patriot.
Thank you very, very much.
Thank you, Mr. Mayor.
And good luck to you and your wife and family.
And we'll be in touch.
Thank you, Mr. Mayor.
Thank you.
Thank you.
It was a real pleasure.
Well, I think that was a very enlightening interview from a very incredibly good witness and person who really, I think, described very succinctly what's been wrong with us the last three years and what's wrong with our criminal justice system that has to change because people shouldn't go through what he went through and what General Flynn went through and ultimately what the president went through.
It shouldn't happen again, and the reason to investigate it and to prosecute them is to deter anybody else from doing this again.
So I thank George Papadopoulos for participating, and I commend him for his courage, and we'll be back shortly with more episodes about this terrible, terrible time in our history and how we can fix it.
Thank you.
▲
Export Selection