RUSSIAN INTERFERENCE IN 2016 US ELECTION & SPIN-OFF INVESTIGATIONS

[HairOfTheDog]

The filing contests the Special Counsel's assertion that Papadopoulos' falsehoods impeded Mueller's investigation.

Didn't George's lies prevent the investigators from talking to a professor who was said to have more details about "the dirt on Hillary"?

That's right.  According to the court filing, the professor specified the dirt as being thousands of emails pertaining to Hillary Clinton.  That was months before the Russian-hacked DNC and Podesta emails started being released by WikiLeaks in the weeks leading up to election day.

Snip:
Papadopoulos met in London with a Russian-linked professor Joseph Mifsud, who claimed the Russians had thousands of emails that would be damaging to Hillary Clinton, during the 2016 campaign.

Mifsud, who is not named in the court filing but has been named in news reports, introduced Papadopoulos to a Russian woman and a Russian national connected to the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Papadopoulos then communicated with the three over a period of months and discussed setting up a meeting between Russian officials and the Trump campaign.

According to court docs, Papadopoulos lied to investigators "on at least a dozen occasions," falsely saying he communicated with Mifsud BEFORE he joined the Trump campaign. After he hired a lawyer and met with investigator again in February 2017, Papadoplous still did not correct his false statements. Instead, he deactivated his Facebook account where he had communicated with the professor and Russian national and bought a new phone. (Had Papadopoulos been honest with the investigators, the professor could have been questioned before he left the U.S. on February 11, 2017.)

"The defendant’s lies also hindered the government’s ability to discover who else may have known or been told about the Russians possessing "dirt" on Clinton,” the filing says. "Had the defendant told the FBI the truth when he was interviewed in January 2017, the FBI could have quickly taken numerous investigative steps to help determine, for example, how and where the Professor obtained the information, why the Professor provided the information to the defendant, and what the defendant did with the information after receiving it."

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/...iling-says