With regard to the Obama FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation in 2016, a fundamental question that the Trump Justice Department is looking at in its investigation of the investigators is when, exactly, that anti-Trump probe began and whether there was a proper legal basis for it to be launched in the first place.
The Epoch Times reports that a seemingly minor, but potentially significant discrepancy in dates put forward by former FBI Director James Comey and former Special Counsel Robert Mueller as the starting point of the whole thing seems to suggest that one of those individuals was wrong and/or lying about the key time frame underlying everything that followed.
Comey’s date
As it is presently understood, the basic narrative about the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation goes back to May of 2016 when Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos met in London with then-Australian High Commissioner (equivalent to ambassador) to the United Kingdom Alexander Downer, along with an aide name Erika Thompson, allegedly telling him that the Russians had “dirt” on Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton — in the form of her emails — and would soon release it to the public.
Papadopoulos has denied ever saying anything about Russian “dirt” on Clinton, but he has admitted to meeting with Downer, and both Downer and Papadopoulos say that the meeting took place on May 10, 2016. Downer reportedly passed that information along to his own government in Canberra, which eventually forwarded it to the FBI in June of 2016 after WikiLeaks began releasing the emails of the Democratic National Committee, which were supposedly obtained via Russian hacking.
According to sworn testimony before Congress on December 7, 2018, Comey stated that the origin of the Trump-Russia probe, which centered on the suspicion that Americans were working with Russians to interfere in the election, began in late July of 2016 after “we received information from an allied nation about the conversations their ambassador had in England with George Papadopoulos. That was the beginning of it, which is the first time we turned to trying to figure out whether any Americans were working with the Russians.”
Mueller’s date
Comey was fired by President Trump in 2017, and Mueller essentially took over the Trump-Russia investigation a brief time later as special counsel, and two years after that produced a final report that failed to establish any sort of collusion or coordination between any American citizens and Russia.
Mueller’s report, however, twice referenced the date of May 6, 2016 — and not May 10 — as the key date on which Papadopoulos allegedly told a “representative of a foreign government” about the supposed Russian “dirt” on Clinton. Interestingly, May 6 is the date that Papadopoulos was first contacted via email by Thompson, Downer’s aide, to set up the May 10 meeting, and there is no indication from Mueller, Papadopoulos, or the Australian government that anything regarding Russia or Clinton’s emails was discussed between Papadopoulos and Thompson at that time.
Thus, we are left with the question: Who presented the wrong date as the origin of the Trump-Russia investigation — May 6 or May 10 — Comey or Mueller? Efforts by The Epoch Times to clarify the discrepancy in dates with Comey and the now-defunct special counsel’s office both went unanswered.
Who’s right?
The Epoch Times noted that this seemingly small discrepancy is actually quite significant in that it goes to a fundamental assumption upon which the entire investigation was based — that Papadopoulos possessed “exclusive information” about the Russians and Clinton’s emails which would place him under suspicion of having been colluding with that foreign government to interfere in the 2016 election.
If, in fact, Papadopoulos and Thompson had discussed such things on May 6, such an assumption might be valid. However, if the mention of Russian “dirt” didn’t occur until May 10, then the whole assumption crumbles and becomes debunked.
That is because it was on May 9, at the latest, that talk of the Russians possessing Clinton’s emails had become common knowledge and was a subject of discussion across the globe. It was on May 9 that Fox News judicial analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano told host Megyn Kelly that “there’s a debate going on in the Kremlin…about whether they should release the 20,000 of Mrs. Clinton’s emails that they have hacked into.”
If Mueller got the date wrong, it arguably underscores the incompetence of his team and call into question some of his other findings. If Comey got the date wrong, it would seem to suggest that he lied under oath and could very well have been covering up the true date — which may have been far earlier than even May 6 — on which the Trump-Russia investigation was first launched, or at least contemplated.
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