This is how the Deep State crushes disobedience by the unwashed American public. It indicts not only ham sandwiches but, apparently, political infants in diapers too, if that’s what it takes. Hence the sudden notoriety of Baby George Papadopoulos, who pled guilty to "lying" about an essentially immaterial date to the FBI.
Oh, and by all signs and signals that plea came after this 30 year-old novice had been wearing a wire for several months.
So here’s how this noxious act of bullying by Robert Mueller’s Federally-deputized thugs came down. It seems that during the early months of 2016, when Trump was winning primary after primary against all mainstream media expectations, the Donald’s establishment betters began attacking his foreign policy credentials with special malice aforethought.
That was mainly owing to his sensible suggestion that it would be better to seek rapprochement with Russia rather than pursue Hillary’s Cold War 2.0 and that 25 years after the disappearance of the Soviet Union from the pages of history that NATO was obsolete.
Since this totally plausible (and correct) viewpoint was deeply offensive to the Imperial City’s group think and threatened the Warfare State’s existential need for a fearsome enemy, Trump’s ruminations about making a deal with Putin were belittled. They were, in fact, attributed not to a fresh look at the realities abroad or the possibility that homeland security does not require a global empire, but to the candidate’s lack of any pedigreed foreign policy advisors.
Indeed, when it came to the Republican-oriented foreign policy establishment – nearly all of which had joined the Never Trump cause – the Donald added insult to injury. That is, by suggesting he got his foreign policy views watching TV (like most of Washington) and that he could do a better job against terrorism than the Pentagon generals (not hard).
At length, however, the "who are your foreign policy advisors" meme got so relentless that the Donald relented. On March 21, 2016 he announced a group of five advisors that exactly no one who was anyone in the Imperial City had ever heard of, and for good reason.
The group included two recycled DOD flunkies, an anti-Muslim fanatic from the Lebanon religious wars and two kids of no accomplishment in the foreign policy field whatsoever. In a word, the foreign policy establishment’s boycott of the Trump campaign at that stage was 100% effective.
Indeed, under a snarky headline the next day about how the new Trump foreign policy team "baffles GOP experts", Politico laid on the disdain good and hard:
“I don’t know any of them,” said Kori Schake, a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and a former official in the George W. Bush State Department. “National security is hard to do well even with first-rate people. It’s almost impossible to do well with third-rate people.”
One of the five, of course, was Carter Page who had actually spent time in Moscow years earlier working as a stock broker and didn’t exactly share Hillary’s fulminations that Putin was Adolph Hitler incarnate.
So Politico made very clear that Mr. Page was apparently some kind of Kremlin stooge for uttering true facts about Russia.
To wit, that Russia had not "invaded" Ukraine, but to the contrary, the February 2014 coup on the streets of Kiev was fomented, funded, and illegally installed in power by Washington agents on the ground. Among others, these included the US Ambassador to Ukraine, Assistant Secretary Victoria Nuland ("Yats is our man"), CIA operatives under embassy cover, the National Endowment for Democracy and its NGO subalterns and, especially, the War Party’s roving Viceroy, Senator John McCain:
Page, who has worked for Merrill Lynch in Moscow, has accused the State Department’s top official for Ukraine and Russia, Victoria Nuland, of "fomenting" the 2014 revolution that overthrew Ukraine’s government. That charge is often lodged by pro-Kremlin media outlets but is strongly disputed by the Obama administration.
In this context, Politico made short shrift of young Mr. Papadopoulos and properly so. This kid had no more qualifications to be named among the top five foreign policy advisors to the then near-presumptive GOP nominee than anyone else in the DC phone book – although at the time Baby George was called to duty he was apparently domiciled in London and perhaps listed in its phone book.
Indeed, after rounding up an ex-Pentagon bean counter, a washed-up general who had "managed" (not well) the US "occupation" of Baghdad in 2003-2004 and Walid Phares, the Lebanese war veteran who claimed that the Moslem Brotherhood had infiltrated the State Department and was fixing to spread "Sharia law" to the towns and villages of America, you almost have the impression that the Donald instructed Ivanka and Jared to check out the Mar-A-Logo sandbox for candidates to round out the rooster.
That’s apparently where Papadopoulos came from because he had graduated from college only in 2009, got two more degrees by 2011 in London, functioned as a junior researcher at Hudson Institute for several years and then "worked" on Ben Carson’s presidential campaign for three months – if you consider that an actual job.
Per Politico at the time of the announcement:
One of them, George Papadopoulos, is a 2009 college graduate and an international energy lawyer. Papadopoulos had previously advised Ben Carson’s presidential campaign. According to his LinkedIn page, he was a researcher at the conservative Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C., before joining the London Center of International Law Practice, which describes itself as dedicated to "peace and development through international law and dispute resolution."
Papadopoulos’ LinkedIn page also boasts about his role at the 2012 meeting in Geneva of Model U.N., the student role-playing exercise on international diplomacy. It adds that he has "had experience lobbying foreign policy resolutions on Capitol Hill by means of coherent and concise arguments."
In a word, Baby George’s "crime" came about in the process of trying to put on his Big Boy Pants and get noticed by higher-ups in the campaign. So doing, he came into contact on about March 14 with a London professor who claimed to be plugged into Russian sources with "dirt" about Hillary.
Needless to say, the London professor, one Joseph Mifsud, who had formerly served in a high ranking government position in his native land of, well, Malta (as assistant to the Maltese foreign minister), didn’t know anybody in the Kremlin, either. That is, Mifsud was actually a no count talking to a another no count.
Prior to his appearance on the FBI’s fake stage of international intrigue, in fact, Mifsud had been a "director" of some sort at the London Academy of Diplomacy – a place that grants masters degrees to young people earnestly endeavoring a career in making diplomacy, not war. That is to say, by the standards of the Imperial City it’s a kind of Quaker Meeting for idealistic diplomats on the road to Nowhere.
As it turned out, George never made any contact with any Russian state officials, didn’t have any meetings with clandestine Putin operatives and came up with no anti-Hillary dirt at all – despite months of trying and sending loads of essentially unanswered emails up the chain of command at Trump Tower.
In fact, despite sending six emails volunteering his eagerness to set up a meeting between the Donald and Vlad Putin nothing happened. Even the government’s charging document admits these missives were based on Papadopoulos’ conversations with a "Russian National" who claimed to be Putin’s niece, but wasn’t; and someone who claimed to have contacts at Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA), but also, apparently, didn’t.
As it turns out, the latter unnamed go-between was one Ivan Timofeev, a program director at a Russian government-funded think tank called the Russian International Affairs Council. The latter was actually a glorified welcome wagon which hosts public meetings with prominent visiting politicians and public figures from the U.S. and other countries.
Indeed, one guest speaker at this forum had been none other than Obama’s former US Ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul. The latter is actually a fire-breathing Russophobe who can hardly be considered a pal of Putin’s.
In any event, the government’s charging document makes clear that Baby George’s emails got nowhere. Indeed at one point the zealous Mr. Papadopoulos got swatted away by Paul Manafort, who –
…. replied to one such request by saying that "Trump is not doing these trips. It should be someone low-level in the campaign so as not to send any signal."
So finding no contacts, no meetings, no"collusion" or anything else validly related to Mueller’s mandate, the latter’s legal gunslingers came up with the usual default "crime" when a criminal investigations comes up empty. To wit, Papadopoulos allegedly perjured himself by telling the FBI early this year that he had met the no count London professor before beginning his service as a Trump advisor.
And that was true enough – except by the lights of the hairsplitting Torquemadas on Team Mueller.
It seems young George met the London Professor on March 14, about a week before the Trump campaign’s official announcement of its Team of Five. But in the kind of twisted gotcha that only jerks with a badge and gun can come up with, Papadopoulos stands guilty of perjury by his own (coerced) plea.
That’s because at the time of the meeting he had already been recruited from the sandbox and "knew" he would be appointed to an advisory committee.
So what!
Trump apparently met with the Five only once and that was for a photo op, and no one running the campaign paid much attention to them, either.
Still, Baby George’s carelessness about the exact dates and sequences of utterly irrelevant and inconsequential events is enough to get him time in one of Uncle Sam’s hospitality suites:
Defendant PAPADOPOULOS acknowledged that the professor had told him about the Russians possessing "dirt" on then-candidate Hillary Clinton in the forms of "thousands of emails", but stated multiple times that he learned the information prior to joining the Campaign. In truth and fact, however, defendant PAPADOPOULOS learned he would be an advisor to the campaign in early March, and met the professor on or about March 14, 2016……
That’s all she wrote. This damning nugget appears on page 2 of the "Statement of Offense" and the balance of the 14 pages is a complete farcical joke. Papadopoulos’ failure to get anywhere with the Russians in his digging for dirt on Hillary would make for a worthy episode starring the rascals of South Park, but that’s about all.
Anyone not involved in the campaign to reverse the 2106 election and remove the Donald from office should be forgiven for splitting a gut laughing when reading this hideous and utterly bogus case against Baby George Papadopoulos.
Every single player in the cast of characters identified by Team Mueller – mostly unnamed by the prosecutors but already sussed out by the press – had no ability to influence anything, let alone 139 million voters in a US election bombarded with upwards of $20 billion worth of reported and unreported campaign expenses, and the mainstream media’s free nonstop campaign in behalf of Hillary.
Yet the document and Monday morning’s announcement are also cause for alarm. The "crime", if there was any, was the $10 million that the DNC and Clinton campaign spent on the Trump Dossier. Those scurrilous documents were actually purchased for real money on the back streets of Moscow and do cite actual, live Russian MFA sources, not allegedly "MFA-connected" people, who apparently weren’t.
But, of course, that’s not what’s coming down. The self-righteous Mueller, who turned a blind eye to the massive stench of corruption coming out of the Uranium One deal in 2009/2010 when he was FBI director, has only one mission in mind: To mug the American electorate for its audacity in electing Donald Trump President, thereby disturbing the equanimity of the Deep State’s untethered rule.
The truth of the matter, however, is nearly the opposite. Prosecuting anyone – one either side of the partisan aisle – for marginal and tangential contacts with a Russian government purportedly wishing to "influence" the US election amounts to the height of hypocrisy.
Meddling in the political life, elections and governance of virtually every nation on planet earth – enemy, foe, rival, neutral and friend, alike – is what Imperial Washington does.
It spends more than $1 billion per year on propaganda operations by the NED and the various agencies of the Board for International Broadcasting. And that’s to say nothing of the tens of billions spent by the CIA, NSA and other elements of the $75 billion per year intelligence community hacking and stealing virtually all communications that course through the worldwide web.
But all of this is lost on the beltway media brats who front for the Deep State. Here is what one of the worst of these scolds and toadies, a "journalist" named Mike Allen, had to say about the Baby George case on his pretentious Axios platform this AM:
Be smart: There is zero doubt – and piles of new evidence – that Russia manipulated our election. This next phase will show if Trump himself was aware or involved, or has any interest in doing anything about it – and how extensively America’s most powerful companies enabled the mass manipulation.
Is this guy kidding?
If there is any evidence of Russia meddling or of hacking the Podesta and DNC emails, it lies right there in the massive NSA server farms which capture all incoming communications to the US and outgoing, too. It is retrievable in an instant, but hasn’t been because it’s not there.
We didn’t need Mueller’s bully boys to bushwhack Baby George to find that out.
Then again, if you don’t recognize that the Deep State and its minions in the press and both party establishments in Washington are pushing the nation to an extra-constitutional removal of a sitting President, you simply aren’t paying attention.
So at least stay out of the casino. That’s where the temblors will hit first.
David Stockman has agreed to send every Antiwar.com reader a free copy of his newest book, Trumped! when you take his special Contra Corner offer. Click here now for the details.
David Stockman was a two-term Congressman from Michigan. He was also the Director of the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan. After leaving the White House, Stockman had a 20-year career on Wall Street. He’s the author of three books, The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed, The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America and TRUMPED! A Nation on the Brink of Ruin… And How to Bring It Back. He also is founder of David Stockman’s Contra Corner and David Stockman’s Bubble Finance Trader.
