The world has been asking themselves who the “mystery professor” Joseph Mifsud is. The British press – Byline and Carole Cadwalladr in The Guardian – have been connecting Mifsud to Alok Sharma and Boris Johnson. Mifsud has good Russian connections and is supposed to be the person who facilitated the transfer of the Clinton emails from Russian sources to the Trump campaign.
Yet there is one Brussels politican who knows Mifsud very well. And no-one in EU circles seems to have woken up and noticed yet.
Gianni Pittella
The leader of the S&D Group in the European Parliament, and hence one of the most important and senior MEPs.
Pittella’s page on Wikipedia lists that he is a lecturer at the London Academy of Diplomacy (LAD), Mifsud’s outfit that was affiliated to the University of East Anglia and then the Univeristy of Stirling. Pittella’s role at LAD is also mentioned on his page on the S&D Group site and Pittella’s own site. There are two videos on Youtube where Pittella speaks about his role at LAD:
Pittella and Mifsud are both in the Diplomat Magazine piece about LAD. Pittella is listed as a “Visiting Professor” on the now deleted Stirling Uni page about LAD. Here is Pitella on a conference panel with Mifsud, and mentioned together with him at EMUNI. And here they are at a seminar at Link Campus Univerity too.
Pittella talks about Mifsud thus: “Joseph è un mio caro amico, non posso crederlo coinvolto nel Russiagate” (“Joseph is my dear friend, I can not believe he is involved in Russiagate“) – in an Italian news story here. This is more than people who happen to meet at events.
It is not only academic – Pittella has brought Mifsud campaigning with him – see this pic from a PD rally with him with Mifsud. There are tweets (one, two) with him and Mifsud.
And so why is this especially significant? Because Pittella went and campaigned for Clinton and attended the DNC in 2016. Him doing so was even written up in Time Magazine here.
We do not know the full siginifcance of all of this. I am laying out the connections here. We do not know what Pittella was doing for LAD exactly, or if he was paid for that. We do not know if he was privy to information passed from Russia to Mifsud. But if a few meetings between Alok Sharma and one with Boris Johnson are of interest in the UK, surely a much closer relationship with Pittella ought to be of interest in Brussels. Who, I wonder, might now like to ask the questions to work all of this out?
[UPDATE 5.11.17, 1430]
Politico vaguely looked into this issue in Thursday’s Playbook here. Strikes me they – and the rest of the Brussels EU bubble media – ought to look a little more closely than that!
Notes: this is a more detailed account of the Pittella – Mifsud connections that are in my huge original blog entry about Mifsud. Work Chris Blackburn helped me link all of this together. Every page linked in this blog entry has been archived. So don’t think of deleting anything, Gianni!
The Russians did not transfer any “Clinton e-mails,” or “dirt,” to the Trump Campaign. Mifsud was saying he could arrange a meeting with Russians, and Padapolous was trying to set up a meeting between Trump and Putin. Stephan Roh, a co-author of a book about “Russia gate,” and who knows Mifsud, claims that Mifsud feels he was set up. Mifsud claims he is far from a Russian spy or asset, and claims to be a supporter of….Hillary Clinton.
Papadapolous reportedly got drunk and told an Australian ambassador that the Russians had dirt on Hillary Clinton. This is interesting because the claim is that the dirt was “thousands of e-mails,” yet the Ambassador didn’t say the conversation was about e-mails, just dirt. Mueller’s charging documents on Papadopoulos also don’t say that he was actually talking to, or trying to get anything from the Russians, but instead from people who he believed to be Russians. And if these were indeed Russians attempting a conspiracy with Trump why the fake Putin niece story?
Recently members of the U.S. House of Representatives had a closed door interview with DOJ official Bruce Ohr. He is a democrat, supporter of Hillary Clinton, and his wife worked at FusionGPS (the firm peddling Steele’s Dossier and paid by Clinton and the DNC) He never told the DOJ that his wife worked for FusionGPS. It was believed that the Ohr didn’t start passing the DOJ and FBI Steele’s info until after he was fired from providing information to the FBI. That was untrue. Ohr was meeting with Steele and passing his info in July of 2016…When the investigation formally started. Since the FBI interviewed Papadopoulos and learned of Mifsud as the supposed broker, the FBI interviewed him once. He has been interviewed several times in Europe, and there is no one indicating he was a Russian spy, he wasn’t arrested, no extradition has been sought. So, was he really brokering anything or was this a set up by Clinton supporters? FusionGPS and Steele were hired by Perkins Coie, a law firm, by the DNC and Hillary Clinton. Why did they need to launder money through a law firm to just get opposition research (that is a campaign violation by the way, a crime that the American left is trying to stick Trump with)?
The FBI got warrants and started an investigation, they claim because of Papadopoulos getting drunk, but most of the evidence discovered so far has to do with the Dossier. Anti-Trump texter and FBI agent is put in charge of the Trump investigation. FusionGPS was hired by Hillary and the DNC,. Fusion hired Steele who acknowledges a anti-trump bias. Bruce Ohr, who’s wife worked at FusionGPS on Trump/Russia, starts feeding Steeles information to the DOJ (one such DOJ lawyer is now on Mueller’s team, and is and was a big Clinton supporter (weissman)). The Dossier needs to be backed up to use it. So Steele, and FusionGPS secretly start leaking dossier info to the media, which the FBI uses to validate it, which is circular validation. It appears to be coming separately from different sources but really is all from one source. So now you have the media as a source, Steele is an FBI source, Ohr passes info which looks like another source. Then, if that is too little, Jonathon Winer, a Clinton supporter at the State Department, gets a visit from an old friend, Sidney Blumenthal (Clinton fixer and intel guy so creepy that Obama refused to let him work with Hillary at State). He listens to Winer talk about these allegations and Blumenthal drops a bomb. He has a dossier too. WOW. This one is by Cody Shearer. Another Clinton fixer and journalist that really hasn’t wrote much at all for a long time. By a miracle his “new dossier,” mirrors the Steele dossier. And away everything goes.
It is all one big set up! This guy in your article is tied to Mifsud, and was at the DNC convention when Hillary became the nominee…………