Image via George Papadopoulos’s LinkedIn account
Did the CIA or FBI try to pay former Trump adviser George Papadopoulos $10K in cash to ultimately set him up for a FARA [Foreign Agents Registration Act] violation?
That’s what Papadopoulos says he believes and he’s hoping Attorney General Bill Barr will look into the matter. In fact, he’s traveling back to Greece — where he stashed the cash — to retrieve the money and get it into the hands of investigators.
Last Sunday, Papadopoulos told Maria Bartiromo on Sunday Morning Futures he informed authorities in May he thought they should be looking at the money trail and that “‘the whole setup’ by the ‘FBI likely, or even the special counsel’s office,’ was intended to ‘bring a FARA [Foreign Agents Registration Act] violation against me.’ The FARA statute played a key role in the prosecutions of former Trump aides, including Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort.”
He’s retrieving the cash from Athens, where he left it with his attorney, because he thinks it contains marked bills that may irrefutably lead back to James Comey’s FBI or even Bob Mueller’s Russia collusion report team.
According to Papadopoulos, the circumstances surrounding the cash handoff made him suspicious — although he did accept the gift.
Papadopoulos said he was given the money in Israel during the summer of 2017 from a guy he believes was a spy but turned the moolah over to his attorney for safekeeping in Greece.
“A man named Charles Tawil gave me this money under very suspicious circumstances. A simple Google search about this individual will reveal he was a CIA or State Department asset in South Africa during the ’90s and 2000s. I think around the time when Bob Mueller was the director of the FBI,” he told “Sunday Morning Futures” on Fox News.
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“The money, I gave it to my attorney in Greece because I felt it was given to me under very suspicious circumstances. And upon coming back to the United States I had about seven or eight FBI agents rummaging through my luggage looking for money,” he told Mario Bartiromo.
Papadopoulos served 12 days in federal prison for lying to investigators about his contacts with Russian assets during the 2016 election, and is one of the key players in the mystery of Joseph Mifsud whom he met with in London and reportedly was told the Russians had dirt on Hillary Clinton.
Papadopoulos has maintained he was being used as part of scam to link the Trump campaign to Russia, and told Bartiromo that democrats are playing a game they may regret if they try to entrap him using FARA (recall that the FARA statute was used in the prosecutions of Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort).
“If the Mueller team is going around entrapping campaign associates and Trump associates, the way they did to me — I am sure it wasn’t just me they did it to — it’s going to open up a massive can of worms,” Papadopoulos said.
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