George Papadopolous: an Israeli agent? According to his wife, who might be lying, of course,

[pnwmom]

Mueller threatened to charge him with being an Israeli agent.

The thing that gives this some credibility is that we know Netanyahu and Trump are allies, and that Kushner is connected to some Israeli supporters of DT.

http://observer.com/2018/06/muellers-investigation-into-trump-russia-turns-focus-on-israel/

A genuine bombshell dropped yesterday, seemingly out of nowhere. It came in an interview with Simona Mangiante, the wife of George Papadopoulos, the Trump campaign foreign policy advisor who pled guilty last October to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russian agents—especially Joseph Mifsud, the mysterious Maltese professor with suspicious Kremlin ties—during the president’s election campaign. As expected, Mangiante explained that her husband, whom she married just three months ago, is innocent of what he admitted he did, and in no way was working for Russian intelligence.

“George had nothing to do with Russia,” she explained, seemingly in an effort to convince the White House that Papadopoulos lacks any dirt on the president’s Kremlin connections that could assist Special Counsel Robert Mueller in his investigation of Team Trump. However, what Mangiante said next was the real shocker: her husband “pled guilty because [Mueller’s prosecutors] threatened to charge him with being an Israeli agent.”

According to his wife, who insists that George Papadopoulos has nothing to do with Russia, he was facing criminal charges of being a spy for Israel. An attentive reader of her interview will note that Mangiante at no point denied that this accusation is true.

SNIP

Moreover, there are strange Israeli footprints all over the Trump-Russia story. Quite a few of the shady figures close to the president and his business affairs are American Jews of Soviet heritage who possess connections to Israel. Felix Sater and Michael Cohen are only the best-known of this dubious crew. Those men are also connected to Chabad of Port Washington, a Jewish community center on Long Island that is part of the worldwide Chabad movement—which just happens to possess close links to Vladimir Putin and his Kremlin. The recent BBC report that Cohen accepted at least $400,000 from the Ukrainian government to set up a substantive meeting with President Trump last year included the tantalizing detail that this dirty deal ran through Chabad of Port Washington.

[manor321]

1. Also

Also remember that an Israeli businessman was at "Trump Tower Meeting 2".

[pnwmom]

3. Right. The article mentions that meeting. Here:

That day, Nader brought with him Joel Zamel, an Israeli expert in several things that were of interest to Team Trump, including social media manipulation. Zamel is known to possess a close relationship with a bunch of former Israeli intelligence officials, and Nader reportedly paid him a large sum, perhaps as much as $2 million, after Trump’s election as compensation for Zamel’s shadowy social media assistance to the president-elect’s campaign in 2016 (both men visited the White House as well).

Zamel is best known as the founder of Wikistrat, a private intelligence firm that was founded in 2010, ostensibly as a “crowdsourced” geopolitical analysis outfit. Although it’s based in Washington, D.C., as The Daily Beast recently uncovered, “Wikistrat is, for all intents and purposes, an Israeli firm; and that the company’s work was not just limited to analysis. It also engaged in intelligence collection.” For this reason, Wikistrat is under investigation by Team Mueller, whose investigators have interviewed Zamel, while FBI agents have traveled to Israel to dig deeper. Several prominent Wikistrat staffers formerly worked for Israeli intelligence—and some experienced espionage professionals in our nation’s capital wonder if they still do.

[RockRaven]

2. Is this an angle to play Trump for a pardon?

I can totally see that working on Trump, even if it is bogus.

[jberryhill]

4. There are a lot of Russian/Israelis

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1990s_Post-Soviet_aliyah

[lapfog_1]

5. Misfud is still missing I believe... probably dead at this point.

On February 27, 2018, Buzzfeed News reported that Mifsud claimed to his former girlfriend that he was friends with Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov.[14] Mifsud has subsequently gone missing, having been seen last on October 31, 2017

[C_U_L8R]

6. The Trump admin is riddled with spies and traitors

They are as corrupt as they are incompetent. We need strong disinfectant, Director Mueller.

[muriel_volestrangler]

7. Apparently, a lot of people think she is Russian, and not Italian as she claims

Put simply, when I listening to Simona Mangiante Papadopoulos last night she didn’t sound like she’s Italian.

Let me be clear what I mean. Mangiante is purportedly an Italian national who grew up near Naples. But to my ear she didn’t sound like a native Italian speaker speaks English. The accent seemed off to me. When I was much younger, I taught myself a very limited conversational Italian which I’ve now mainly forgotten. But obviously I’m not a native Italian speaker or even an English speaker who’s conversant in Italian. So I wouldn’t go by my ear. I just chalked it up to something weird and figured that others with more experience with these would have said something if there was an issue. Who knows what dialect or personal history might affect her inflection?

But then this morning I spoke to an Italian-American colleague who as it happens just spent two weeks in Italy. “Are you sure she’s Italian? She doesn’t have an Italian accent.” Okay, now I was a bit more curious. So I made a few calls and did some quick research. A lot of people on the Internet have asked the same question. Still, Internet conspiracy theories. What’s new? So I made some more calls, very much fearing I was falling into a rabbit hole.

The upshot is that I talked to some very knowledgable people and from what I can tell it’s basically an open secret that no one thinks Simona Mangiante is Italian. Everyone thinks she’s Russian – press, law enforcement, basically everyone. But ‘think’ isn’t proof. I confirmed on good authority, for instance, that she travels on an Italian passport. It seems like her claim isn’t easily disproven. Even she says that no one seems to believe she’s Italian, but she is. WTF?

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/prime-beta/what-the-f-is-going-on-here

[tanyev]

9. Hey, thanks!

GMTA!

[pnwmom]

11. Maybe she is. But it's also true that many of the people involved seem to have

Russian-Jewish connections. There is a chief rabbi in Russia who is close to Putin.

[tanyev]

8. Does anyone have Talking Points Memo Prime? Josh wrote a post about Simona's interview

called "What The F Is Going On Here?" that starts out very interesting, but the most interesting part is only available to those who have a subscription:

I’ve been poking around this morning and the George Papadopoulos/Simona Mangiante Papadopoulos situation is way, way weirder than I’d come close to realizing. As I noted this morning, for whatever reason the couple has now glommed on to Trump’s “spygate” conspiracy theory. As I noted, not only is this troubling. It doesn’t even add up in any obvious way in self-interested terms. Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to a relative minor felony, lying to federal agents. With cooperation he should get a light sentence. Shifting gears and playing for an anti-Deep State pardon seems very hard to figure. But something else happened when I was listening to that interview last night.

Put simply, when I listening to Simona Mangiante Papadopoulos last night she didn’t sound like she’s Italian....

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/

[MelissaB]

10. K&R

Thanks!