>>1403024
methinks Papadoppleganger was the actual FBI Plant
www.businessinsider.com/papadopoulos-fiancee-simona-mangiante-
•Simona Mangiante, the fiancée of former Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos, described in an interview with Business Insider this week what her life has been like since Papadopoulos was arrested and put on house arrest last July.
•Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with a Russia-linked professor, and Mangiante soon found herself in Mueller's crosshairs, too.
•Mangiante says she and Papadopoulos are trying to keep their relationship as normal as possible, and are planning an engagement party later this year. www.businessinsider.com/papadopoulos-fiancee-simona-mangiante-
<snip>"We had traveled to Mykonos, to Athens, and to Capri," Mangiante said. "He had finished his work for the campaign and I had left my job at the European Parliament. We spent every second together."<snipMangiante said she did not hear from him again until five days later, on August 1.
Mangiante flew to Chicago to see Papadopoulos and was promptly served with a subpoena by a federal agent working for special counsel Robert Mueller. Mueller is investigating potential collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, and had charged Papadopoulos with lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russia-linked foreign nationals during the election. Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to the charge.
"It was something, just, unreal," she said. "When he came to deliver my subpoena, my first reaction was to contact the Italian embassy."
The embassy told her that they could find an American lawyer to represent her in Chicago. But the rate would be about $800 per hour — money she said she didn't have. So she went into the interview without one.
"The interview lasted about two hours, and they asked a lot of questions about Joseph Mifsud," Mangiante said, referring to the London-based professor who told Papadopoulos in April 2016 that the Russians had "dirt" on Hillary Clinton in the form of "thousands of emails."
"It was shocking to me that they wanted me as a witness, but I have nothing to hide," she added. "And I think they were happy with the interview."
'I knew something was wrong from the first day I arrived'
The FBI's interest in Mangiante makes sense given the three months she spent working for Mifsud — from September through November of 2016 — at the London Centre of International Law Practice.
The organization listed Mifsud as its director as recently as October, but his biography was deleted from the website following Papadopoulos' indictment. The special counsel's statement of offense outlined Papadopoulos' contact with a London-based "professor" who was later identified as Mifsud in news reports.
Mangiante said she first met Mifsud when she started her job at the European Parliament in 2009. He struck her as a lobbyist who worked "to connect people from different governments," she said.
When her contract was up in September 2016 with the European Parliament in Brussels, Mangiante wanted to move to London. Scouring LinkedIn, she noticed that Mifsud's organization was looking to hire people with experience working for the EU.
"I knew something was wrong from the first day I arrived there," Mangiante said. "It all felt very artificial. I had worked in real diplomatic environments and this didn't feel that way at all. I never even had clarity about who [Mifsud] actually was."
Mangiante left the organization in November 2016. By that point, she had already begun chatting with Papadopoulos, who had messaged her on LinkedIn two months earlier after seeing that they shared a mutual professional connection — Mifsud.
"How do you know him?" Mangiante said Papadopoulos asked her at the time, referring to Mifsud. "What does he do?"
"Not even George really knew anything about him," Mangiante said. <snip>The diplomat relayed the details of his conversation with Papadopoulos to Australian government officials, who in turn relayed it to the US government shortly after news surfaced that the Democratic National Committee had been hacked. Papadopoulos' inadvertent disclosure, combined with the massive data breach, is what triggered the FBI's Trump-Russia probe.
Before it was scrubbed, Mifsud's London Centre biography said he had "lectured extensively throughout the world," "worked in a number of universities," "attended and chaired conferences" and "organized major ministerial and institutional meetings on pan-Mediterranean dialogue." He also worked for the government of Malta, where he is from. (more - follow link)