The texts of the Mueller probe read like minutes of a Politburo meeting, in which everyone reports a triumph and everyone is lying.
Among Monday’s many revelations, the most interesting reading came in the form of George Papadopoulos’s plea deal. Papadopoulos is the former Trump-campaign adviser who, we found out, has for months been coöperating with the special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. The text laying out Papadopoulos’s guilty plea, in which he admitted to making false statements to the F.B.I., introduced new characters into the Trump-Russia story: the Professor and the Female Russian National. It revealed that Papadopoulos had worked with the Professor and the Female Russian National to try to arrange meetings between the Trump campaign and Russian officials. The new members of the cast appear to be every bit as incompetent and mendacious as the ones we already know. This text thus moves us one step closer to understanding the scale of the great blowhard convergence that was the 2016 campaign.
Take the Female Russian National. Papadopoulos, according to the plea agreement, believed her to be Vladimir Putin’s niece. To have a niece, however, the Russian President would have had to have a sibling. All of the available biographies of Putin, both official and unauthorized, agree: the Russian President had two older brothers who died as children, before Vladimir was born. He was an only child. He doesn’t have a niece.
Then there is the London-based Professor. E-mail messages cited in the plea agreement provided enough clues to his likely identity: Joseph Mifsud of the London Academy of Diplomacy, an institution that seems to have been started as a for-profit venture by the University of East Anglia and then transferred to the University of Stirling. Stirling’s Web site lists Mifsud as a teaching fellow, with no additional details. Until about the middle of the day on Monday, Mifsud had a profile page on the site of a London law firm; he was also identified here as a “professor,” until the page was taken down. Mifsud’s presence on the Russian Web barely predates his acquaintance with Papadopoulos: starting in November, 2015, three articles with Mifsud’s byline appeared on the site of the Valdai, Putin’s personal club for Kremlin-friendly Western academics. Mifsud’s pieces, written in heavily accented English, are disjointed compilations of Euroskeptic grumblings. By Tuesday, Mifsud had confirmed, to the Daily Telegraph, that he was the professor in question and acknowledged that he had met with Papadopoulos, but he denied that he had introduced him to the Female Russian National.
According to the plea agreement, the Professor and the Female Russian National (who was not Putin’s niece) promised Papadopoulos that they would introduce him to the Russian ambassador in London. They were lying. But that’s O.K., because Papadopoulos lied, too: he reported back to the campaign that his “good friend” the Professor and “Putin’s niece” had introduced him to the Russian ambassador. A campaign supervisor praised his effort: “Great work.”
Reading the plea deal is a bit like reading the minutes of a Politburo meeting, in which every speaker rises to report a triumph and receive a round of applause and everyone is lying. Bonuses and medals are dispensed for roads constructed or steel produced in the imagination—and the ritual is the sole point of the exercise.
Or maybe it’s like watching a Donald Trump rally, or reading Trump tweets claiming that he has accomplished more than any President in history. Or like watching the June Cabinet meetingduring which members of the Administration took turns lauding Trump and thanking him for the honor of serving in his great Administration. In all of these cases, people with imaginary expertise boast of phantom accomplishments and receive praise for them.
Back in April, 2016, the Professor told Papadopoulos, over breakfast at a London hotel, that the Russians had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton to the tune of “thousands of emails.” (Mifsud has now told the Telegraph that he never said that.) At the same time, a (presumed) Russian Foreign Ministry functionary, with whom the Professor and the Female Russian National had connected Papadopoulos by e-mail and Skype, was asking Papadopoulos to arrange a visit to Moscow for Trump. Papadopoulos bombarded the campaign with requests and promises. The campaign seemed to have no interest in arranging a visit, and strung Papadopoulos along for months before finally encouraging him to go on his own. He didn’t.
Earlier, the Trump associate Felix Sater had been sending e-mailspromising to use his Kremlin connections to arrange a real-estate deal in Moscow so impressive that, as Sater wrote to Trump’s lawyer, it would “get Donald elected.” (In the same e-mail, Sater claimed that he had “arranged for Ivanka to sit in Putins private chair at his desk and office in the Kremlin.”) Sater appears to have been lying about the connections. The deal never materialized, even if the Presidency did.
At around the same time that the Professor was dangling the “dirt” carrot in front of Papadopoulos, the British music producer Rob Goldstone used the same bait to get Paul Manafort, then Trump’s campaign manager, and members of the Trump family to sit down with the Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya. But Goldstone (or Veselnitskaya) appears to have lied about having the dirt—unless, of course, it’s the Trump clan that lied about the contents of the meeting. A few months later, following the election, a new round of boasting commenced. Just as the President-elect was starting to trumpet his extraordinary accomplishments, an unknown number of Internet-ad-buying and troll-deploying executives back in Russia reported that they had succeeded in influencing the American election. Putin took a victory lap as the most powerful man in the world.
The peculiar problem of the Mueller investigation shows up in the footnotes of the Papadopoulos plea deal. “Defendant Papadopoulos later learned that the Female Russian National was not in fact a relative of President Putin,” one footnote says. “In addition, while defendant Papadopoulos expected that the Professor and the Female Russian National would introduce him to the Russian Ambassador in London, they never did.” The next one notes that the Trump campaign never had any intention of arranging a trip to Moscow for the candidate.
How do investigators decipher a story in which just about every participant was lying to just about every other participant just about all the time, usually for the sole purpose of exaggerating his own significance and power? And how do the rest of us connect it to reality?
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