Papadopoulos Told Congress That FBI Asked Him To Spy On Maltese Professor, Joseph Mifsud At Center Of Collusion Probe

DC: Former Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos told Congress in October that an FBI agent asked him to travel to London to spy on a mysterious Maltese professor who allegedly claimed that Russia had dirt on Hillary Clinton.

“The FBI agent said, we need you to wear a wire and we’ll pay you and you can go to London and you can kind of look behind the scenes of an FBI operation. It was very bizarre, very strange,” Papadopoulos told members of the House Judiciary and House Oversight Committees in an interview on Oct. 25.

The request was allegedly made during a meeting in Chicago on Jan. 31, 2017, four days after Papadopoulos was first interviewed by the FBI about his tenure on the Trump campaign. In that first interview, Papadopoulos told FBI agents about encounters he had with the professor, Joseph Mifsud, during his time on the Trump campaign.

Papadopoulos told FBI agents in his initial interview that Mifsud told him during a meeting in London on April 26, 2016 that Russia had “thousands” of former presidential candidate Clinton’s emails. Though Papadopoulos shared that detail with the agents, he later admitted making false statements about the extent and full timeline of his contacts with Mifsud.

Papadopoulos suggested in his congressional interview that the request from the FBI came after he said that Mifsud had recently attempted to contact him through Facebook.

“I believe Mifsud was reaching out to me around that time, and I kept ignoring him,” he said. “And he was sending me messages on Facebook, trying to reach out to me.”

“We want you to wear a wire to go after Joseph Mifsud or to get some sort of information about him,” Papadopoulos said he was asked by the FBI, according to portions of his testimony published Wednesday by The Epoch Times.

“I rejected it,” he told lawmakers of the request.  more here