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Yesterday, the Daily Caller posted a story on an exclusive interview given them by Simona Mangiante, the wife of George Papadopoulos. For the most part, it is what you’d expect: a wife trying to convince the world that her husband has been unfairly prosecuted for something he didn’t do. But there is one interesting part in which she gives the reason for Papadopoulos pleading guilty:

“George had nothing to do with Russia,” said Mangiante, who has acted as a sort of spokeswoman for her husband in the months since his plea deal.

Mangiante also said Papadopoulos “pled guilty because [Mueller’s prosecutors] threatened to charge him with being an Israeli agent.”

Admit it. You knew that this was going to happen eventually, didn’t you? I mean if Israel could get thousands of Jews out of the World Trade Center to avoid the 9/11 attack, then manipulating a mere election would be child’s play.

As an aside, you may believe Mangiante is Italian and so might the people at the EU where she worked, but she isn’t:

Marshall: "From what I can tell, it’s basically an open secret that no one thinks Simona Mangiante Papadopoulos is Italian. Everyone thinks she’s Russian – press, law enforcement, basically everyone" (Prime access) https://t.co/VfitU6ynPT pic.twitter.com/2YjsSsmRAT

— Talking Points Memo (@TPM) June 5, 2018

Now @joshTPM says Simona Mangiante is Russian-born or something.#yikes https://t.co/wYWaIscPbQ

— John Heaner (@JohnHeaner) June 5, 2018

The Washington Post interprets this to mean an “unregistered agent,” or a violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. In short, that Papadopoulos was acting as an unregistered lobbyist. Now color me skeptical on this claim but unless a lot is getting lost in the translation, Papadopoulos would have been very unwise to plead out to lying to the FBI in exchange for not being charged under FARA. There has not been a successful standalone prosecution under FARA since 1966:

Since 1966 there have been no successful criminal prosecutions under FARA and only 3 indictments returned or informations filed charging FARA violations.

The only way such a deal would make sense would be if Papadopoulos were threatened with the Jonathan Pollard treatment.

Now let’s look at the evidence. This is from John Schindler, former professor at the Naval War College until he was fired for sending penis-related imagery to persons to whom he was not married and who were unimpressed by what they saw. He set himself up as a super-spook on Twitter based on his short career as a National Security Agency analyst.

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.

I’m not sure Ted Cruz ever denied his father shot JFK, either.

The notion is hardly implausible. Before joining the Trump campaign in early March 2016, Papadopoulos was a self-styled energy consultant who was known for taking strongly pro-Israeli positions in print. To boot, during the 2016 campaign, he met with an Israeli settler leader and assured him that Donald Trump, if elected president, would take a favorable view of Israeli settlements in the West Bank…

Then there’s the backstory to Papadopoulos’ infamous May 10, 2016 meeting at an upscale London wine bar with Alexander Downer, the Australian high commissioner (i.e. ambassador) to Britain. At that hard-drinking affair, the young Trump staffer informed Downer that Russia possessed derogatory information about Hillary Clinton—a claim the Australian diplomat found so troubling that he shared it with Australian security officials, who passed it on to their American partners, thus officially beginning the FBI’s investigation of Trump’s Kremlin ties.

That fateful boozy chat was set up by an unnamed Israeli diplomat. This fact, namely that “the meeting came about through a series of connections involving an Israeli diplomat who introduced Papadopoulos to an Australian counterpart,” was reported at the end of last year, “sourced from four current and former American and foreign officials.” This revelation has not been rebutted, nor has it received the attention it deserves. Given that a high percentage of Israeli diplomats serving abroad are spies, this story needs further investigation.

The High Commissioner, Alexander Downer, says the meeting was short and only one drink (don’t know if that is one regular drink or one Australian drink) but it was facilitated by an Israeli diplomat.

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.

Yeppers.

And from there we go to the other Trump Tower meeting reported on by the New York Times:

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.

And the grand finale:

Indeed, some counterintelligence pros in Washington have a rather different take on the Mueller inquiry than most Americans do…

[Trump’s] ties to Israel, however, are much plainer to see. Based on the available evidence to date, Team Trump’s 2016 links to shadowy Israelis appear just as troubling as those to dodgy Russians—indeed, in some cases they are the very same people. As a veteran counterspy in our Intelligence Community whom I’ve known for years recently asked me with a wry smile, “What if the real secret of the Trump campaign isn’t that it’s a Kremlin operation, rather an Israeli operation masquerading as a Russian one?”

…Unlike so many of Trump’s assertions, his claim that he’s tougher on Moscow than President Barack Obama happens to be true from any policy perspective.

But not so with Israel. Unlike Obama, Trump has gone whole-hog for the Israeli right-wing, boosting Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu, who openly despised Obama, at every opportunity. The recent move of our embassy to Jerusalem, long desired by the Israeli Right, is merely the most prominent of Trump’s gifts to his pal Bibi and his ruling Likud party. Sending a right-wing American Jew who has compared his more liberal co-religionists to Nazi collaborators to serve as our ambassador sent a clear message to Israel, as did the Trump administration’s recent inability to say anything negative about the IDF’s shooting last month of more than a thousand Palestinians at the Gaza border fence, killing 60 of them. Instead, the White House blocked a United Nations resolution condemning that Israeli deed, serving as a tacit endorsement of using automatic weapons for crowd control.

Few of America’s friends around the world are happy with the Trump administration, given its habit of gleefully trashing our longstanding alliances and declaring trade wars on our allies. Israel stands as a significant exception, however, and it’s no wonder that Mueller and his investigators are trying to get to the bottom of what certain Israelis were doing in 2016 in secret to boost the Trump campaign. That answer may eventually prove just as important as Mueller’s inquiry into the Kremlin and its clandestine attack on our democracy two years ago.

There is no doubt this story will have legs in the coming weeks. Mueller is inevitably going to find there was no collusion with Russia. But no one has yet explained why Ivanka converted to Judaism.