June 6, 2018Gronda Morin

aside President’s Former Team Members George Papadopoulos And Mike Flynn’s Connections To Israel

Image result for photos of George Papadopoulos and kushner

Recently I have been blogging about how some of the republican President Donald Trump’s early key players not only had connections to Russia bu to Israel, UAE and Saudi Arabia.

The following Seth Abramson Twitter thread sheds some further light of the connection of George Papadopoulos and Lt. General Mike Flynn with Israel.

Papadopoulos, circled, at a meeting with Trump in March 2016.
GEORGE PAPADOPOULOS

On June 4, 2018, Seth Abramson tweeted:

With today’s BREAKING NEWS that—per George Papadopoulos’ wife, Simona Mangiante—Special Counsel Bob Mueller was about to charge Papadopoulos with being a secret *Israeli* agent when Papadopoulos agreed to cooperate, this thread from two weeks ago suddenly becomes *very* relevant.

THREAD) BREAKING: A new look at intersections between Trump’s campaign and key Israelis reveals a startling possibility: that Michael Flynn was behind George Papadopoulos joining Trump’s campaign—and Papadopoulos’ meetup with Kremlin agent Josef Mifsud. I hope you’ll read/share.

RICK GATES. MIKE FLYNN/ PAUL MANAFORT/ GEORGE PAPALOPOULOS
11:17 AM – 21 May 2018
May 21
1/ News that Trump’s son met secretly with an Israeli entrepreneur involved in private intelligence-gathering in August 2016—at the direction of longtime “shadow” Trump advisor Erik Prince—has journalists looking afresh at the Trump campaign’s positioning with respect to Israel.

May 21

2/ This new consideration of how key Israeli figures fit into the Trump-Russia narrative arises alongside two ongoing—and critical—mysteries: why Donald Trump put George Papadopoulos on the Israel beat in April ’16, and how/why Papadopoulos’ plea deal helped Mueller snatch Flynn.

May 21

3/ But there are two *other* ongoing Trump-Russia mysteries that dovetail with these questions, and new evidence suggests all five issues could be related: (1) How and why Paul Manafort was hired by Donald Trump; (2) how and why (and when) George Papadopoulos was hired by Trump.

May 21

4/ We know Michael Flynn dined with Putin in December 2015—at a time he was advising Trump’s campaign. We learned this week that federal law enforcement began investigating Flynn at that point. And we know Flynn “formally” joined Trump’s presidential campaign in February of 2016.

May 21

5/ Shortly after Flynn—who’d just met personally with Putin—joined the campaign, two key things happened: 1) On February 14, Flynn’s business partner Tom Barrack met with Manafort and convinced him to write Trump about becoming Trump’s campaign boss; 2) Clovis hired Papadopoulos.

May 21

6/ Manafort had been out of politics for years, and on February 14, 2016 the Trump campaign *didn’t*—contrary to Trump Jr.’s claims—have the GOP nomination locked up, so Manafort was *not* (as Trump Jr. says) hired to help with a brokered GOP convention. There was another reason.

May 21

7/ The reason was that Trump friend and Flynn business partner Barrack—who has since secretly lobbied Trump on many *other* issues now being looked at by Mueller (e.g., Trump potentially giving nuclear tech to Saudi Arabia)—vouched for Manafort. Which means Flynn likely did, too.

May 21

8/ But the media has assumed that Papadopoulos not only joined the Trump campaign much *later* than Manafort, but also that he was hired simply because he’d previously been a low-level aide for *Ben Carson*—a dubious connection with Trump that never really made any logical sense.

May 21

9/ One clue Papadopoulos came to Trump’s campaign by other means than we thought—just as Manafort did, given that the Trump campaign’s original story that he was hired only after they knew there’d be a brokered convention turned out to be false—is that he had no real credentials.

May 21

10/ But another clue is a little-known observation that appears as a minor note in many media reports on Papadopoulos’ role in the Trump campaign: that Papadopoulos *was already part of the Trump campaign on March 14, 2016*—the day that he met Kremlin agent Josef Mifsud in Italy.

May 21

11/ We also know that George Papadopoulos has said—through his wife-to-be Simona—that *all* his foreign trips post-hire were authorized. That means that Papadopoulos was (a) hired by Trump well before March 14, as (b) time was needed for the campaign to arrange his trip to Italy.

May 21

12/ It also means Trump’s campaign sent Papadopoulos to Italy for a reason—that it wasn’t, as the campaign would have it, Papadopoulos choosing to take an *insanely stupidly timed Italian vacation* just days or weeks after being given the *biggest professional break of his life*.

May 21

13/ (As I noted recently, Papadopoulos’ supposed Italian “vacation”—insanely timed—is the *second* insanely timed Italian vacation taken by a top Trump aide that looks to have been no vacation at all. Cohen’s pre-RNC Italy “vacation” story fell apart once his “Capri alibi” did.)

May 21

14/ So it’s clear Papadopoulos had to have been hired by the Trump campaign not just days but *weeks* before March 14, 2016—as the campaign wouldn’t have entrusted him with a Kremlin meetup in Italy unless and until it had time to set up the meet and fully pre-brief Papadopoulos.
May 21
15/ That places the ridiculously young, ridiculously lightly qualified Papadopoulos’ inexplicable hire by the Trump sometime in February 2016—the same month secret (Turkish and possibly Russian) foreign agent Flynn joined the campaign and apparently had Barrack recruit Manafort.

May 21

16/ What if I told you that the man who connects Michael Flynn and George Papadopoulos is… …Josef Mifsud? It seems like that’d explain everything—why Papadopoulos was hired; how Mifsud knew Papadopouos would be in Italy; why Mifsud was the man the Kremlin chose to meet him.

May 21

17/ In November, BUZZFEED reported what it called at the time a “possible coincidence”: “Papadopoulos attended conferences that included the same energy firm that was a source of funding for a controversial lobbying contract with former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.”

May 21

18/ This is where things get quite confusing, so I’m just going to link to the November 2017 BUZZFEED article now being discussed here and then break it down in the next few tweets:
Papadopoulos And Flynn Client Both Tied To Israeli Consortium … – BuzzFeed

19/ When Papadopoulos was hired by Clovis, one of his few professional credentials was expertise on Israeli/Middle East oil-and-gas exploration, specifically relating to the “Leviathan” gas field off Israel’s coast. The first formal trip Trump sent Papadopoulos on was to Israel.

May 21
20/ That April 2016 trip to Israel was itself suspicious, as Trump sent Papadopoulos on it 48 hours after Papadopoulos revealed to Trump—on March 31, 2016, at the Trump International Hotel in DC—that he was a Kremlin intermediary. What did Papadopoulos discuss in Israel? Russia.

May 21

21/ Here’s a story on Papadopoulos’ April 2016 Israel trip, which a) he was sent on while Trump knew he was acting as an agent of the Kremlin, b) he was sent on while Trump knew he’d opened negotiations with Russia, and c) he was sent on to praise Russia:

May 21

22/ So Papadopoulos being sent to Tel Aviv to be on a panel with the CEO of a company called Ratio, and Ratio having a key business relationship with a *Mueller witness possibly involved in Flynn’s crimes*, is unlikely to be coincidence. See this excerpt from the BUZZFEED story:

May 21

23/ As you process the preceding tweet, remember two key facts: (a) It’s clear Papadopoulos’ plea deal cleared the way for Mueller snatching Michael Flynn with *maximum inculpatory evidence*. (b) There’s ample reason to think Flynn was behind Trump’s February 2016 NatSec hires.

May 21

24/ But the fact Flynn (as Trump’s co-NatSec chief) would definitely have had a say in Papadopoulos’ inexplicable hire, and that the plea deals of the two men appear connected in some way, and that Papadopoulos was put in touch with men in Flynn’s (criminal) orbit, isn’t enough.

May 21

25/ What seems to take the coincidences a step too far—that is, what seems to transcend coincidence—is Flynn’s NatSec team sending Papadopoulos to Israel to be on a panel with Alptekin’s business partner, and Alptekin being part of the *same organization* as Kremlin agent Mifsud.

May 21

26/ Skeptics will say it’s an organization of several hundred people—let’s put aside for a moment that that’s actually a *very* small international organization—but I’m not so sure about that. The organization’s website lists only *thirty-eight* “experts.”

May 21

27/ Even if we include “associated researchers”—usually the sort of names an organization adds to its website, a bit fancifully, to artificially expand its scope and reach in the eyes of outsiders—we get a total of only *sixty-nine* experts and researchers. But let’s dig deeper.

May 21

28/ Even if we assume those 69 experts aren’t part of the ~270 members of the ECFR, there are 2 points to make: 1) The ECFR had 50 members in 2007 and ~270 in 2018, so who knows how many it had in 2014 or 2015, when Alptekin would’ve met Mifsud? 2) Look at the *research groups*.

May 21

29/ ECFR has 4 regions of focus, and Alptekin/Mifsud would’ve intersected in both focusing on Russian-Middle Eastern issues rather than—for instance—China or Europe. The ECFR—assuming steady growth—had 190 or so total members in 2014. Mifsud/Alptekin contact is a reasonable bet.
May 21

30/ We know from the information Papadopoulos pled to that the specific point he wanted to lie to the FBI about was whether he was a member of the Trump campaign when he met Mifsud in Italy. But that lie *also* helped to obscure *how and why he became part of the Trump campaign*.

Image
Kamil Ekim Alptekin (center) stands with Namik Tan, former Turkish ambassador to Israel and the US, at an energy conference they attended 2016 as guests of Ratio Oil Exploration. Standing to their right is Aron Liel, a former Israeli envoy to Turkey who is unconnected to Ratio or Alptekin’s business dealings.
Image result for photos of Alptekin and Josef Mifsud

4 comments

  1. Gronda, the more that comes out, this witch in the White House needs to worry because Dorothy’s house has been hoisted by a tornado. This goes well beyond just Russian meddling. This is pay for play where influence is being peddled. And, it could be argued to be treasonous. Keith

    Liked by 1 person

    • Dear Keith,

      This smells to high heaven. No wonder these players wanted Donald Trump to win the presidency. HRC for all her blemishes would have sent these guys packing and they all knew it. She would not have sold out our US national security interests.

      Hugs, Gronda

      Like

  2. Dear Mz. Gronda,

    Way back near the beginning of this whole fiasco, I made the comment that it made sense to suspect that Israel had a thumb in the proverbial pie. Most people do not realize the capability the Israelis possess when it involves espionage, and computer technology. While it is not a popular thing to suggest, it has been quite obvious that Israel is some what a rogue nation when it comes to data acquisition. When it comes to spying they have no friends as they attempt to maintain their status by any means they consider necessary. I think before this investigation is over, it is quite possible that you will see a much closer alliance between Russia and Israel than has been exposed at this point.

    Liked by 1 person

    • Dear Crustyolemothman,

      Israel and Russia are definitely in cahoots especially over Syria. I did read somewhere that China is planning a summit where both Russia and Iran are invited. I’m betting that Iran has a few choice questions for Russia’s leader, Mr. Putin.

      Hugs, Gronda

      Like

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