The Italian government has determined that its intelligence services had no connection to a Maltese professor who told a Trump campaign adviser in 2016 that the Russian government had thousands of stolen emails that could damage Hillary Clinton’s candidacy, according to two senior Italian intelligence sources with knowledge of the matter.
In a series of meetings in Rome over the past two weeks, high-level Italian intelligence officials have repeatedly told cabinet members and a parliamentary oversight committee that the intelligence services did not have a relationship with Joseph Mifsud, a mysterious ex-diplomat who was a professor at a Rome university in 2016, the two sources told The Intercept.
The Italian inquiries into Mifsud’s role in the 2016 U.S. presidential election were sparked by an unfounded conspiracy theory that has gained currency in the conservative media and been seized on by President Donald Trump and his allies. According to the theory, Mifsud was an Italian intelligence operative used by the CIA or the FBI to entrap the Trump campaign adviser by pretending to act as a Russian agent and offering to share information about Russia’s efforts to tip the election in Trump’s favor. In May, Attorney General William Barr announced that he was assigning a top federal prosecutor, U.S. Attorney John Durham, to determine if the FBI or the CIA had been “spying” on the Trump campaign without a proper legal predicate to open a case. Barr has twice traveled to Italy to ask the Italian government to aid the Justice Department in its inquiry.
But the Italians did not view Mifsud in such elevated terms, according to one of the intelligence sources, who advises the Italian government. The professor “was considered to be of no value or use” by Italian intelligence, this person said. “They viewed him as a fool and saw no point of contacting him. They didn’t even debrief him after he was in the news.”
The inquiry into Mifsud is one of several efforts by the Trump administration to demonstrate that the original grounds for special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation were manufactured by Obama administration intelligence officials to take Trump down. Another conspiracy theory, that one of the Democratic National Committee’s hacked servers is in Ukraine, surfaced in the July 25 call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that was the subject of a whistleblower complaint and has led to a congressional impeachment inquiry. In the call, Trump urged Zelensky to work with Barr and the president’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, to investigate the unfounded server allegation.
While Barr was in Rome, Papadopoulos continued to assert that Mifsud was an Italian intelligence “operative handled by the CIA.” Italy, he said, held the “keys to the kingdom.” According to the Italian intelligence adviser, Mifsud didn’t work with or for either the country’s internal service, AISI, or the external service, AISE.
Italian intelligence officials have been dumbfounded, this person said, that the Conte government has asked them repeatedly for information about Mifsud. “This shows [Conte’s] inexperience, to accept the meeting with Barr,” the adviser said. “In that way, he’s like Trump.”
https://theintercept.com/2019/10/17/...-mifsud-italy/
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Originally Posted by Runnin
