How General Flynn and Sidney Powell Used the Brady Rule to Expose Obama and His Coup d’État Co-Conspirators as Traitors
Part 1: Strzok’s “Papadopoulos Entrapment” Scheme Explained
Guest post by Jerome R. Corsi, Ph.D.
On September 11, 2019, attorney Sidney Powell filed with the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., a motion to compel the production of Brady material [Brady v. Maryland, 373 U.S. 83 (1963)], i.e., exculpatory evidence the prosecution has not shared with the defendant, General Michael Flynn. The list of exculpatory evidence Sidney Powell demanded reveals that Flynn knew documents existed that would prove that President Obama and his administration co-conspirators, aided by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, had engaged in treasonous activity. It was also apparent how desperately the Obama administration had worked to keep the requested documents from the American public. Had the federal government complied with Powell’s requests for Brady material, Flynn could have established that Obama’s treasonous activity began by spying on Flynn before April 30, 2014, when Obama forced Flynn to resign as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).
The Obama administration’s treasonous activity reached a new level of intensity in a secret Oval Office meeting on January 5, 2017. In that meeting, Obama approved FBI Agent Peter Strzok’s illegal plan to ensnarl General Flynn in a “perjury trap.” The secret Oval Office meeting occurred one day after the Department of Justice (DOJ) had exonerated Flynn regarding telephone calls Flynn made as President-elect Trump’s incoming national security advisor with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak in December 2016.
Powell’s motion, filed September 11, 2019, clarifies that if Flynn had taken office, he would have proven that U.S. intelligence agencies, with the full cooperation of the U.S. Department of Justice, collaborated in 2017 with British intelligence in the Obama-approved coup d’état plan to remove Trump from the White House. He also could have exposed that President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2011 had supplied arms to the al-Qaeda splinter group that became ISIS in another covert plan that involved U.S. and British intelligence working together.
Paragraph 4 of Powell’s September 11, 2019, motion for Brady materials asks explicitly for “all payments, notes, memos, correspondence, and instructions” between, on the U.S. side, the DOJ, CIA, and Department of Defense (DOD), and the U.K. side, with several British intelligence agents going back to 2014 regarding General Flynn. Powell mentions Stefan Halper, a Cambridge University professor who seconded as an intelligence officer. As we covered in Part 1 of this series, Halper accused General Flynn of colluding with Russia during a Cambridge University Intelligence Seminar in the U.K. in February 2014 that Svetlana Lokhova attended. Lokhova was a Russian-born British scholar who was taking courses at that time at Cambridge University. Halper fabricated charges that Lokhova was a Russian spy with whom Flynn had an affair. Powell also asked for documents related to Sir Richard Dearlove of British intelligence (MI6) and Professor Christopher Andrew of Cambridge University (connected with MI5). Dearlove had a forty-year career with MI6, where he rose to serve as its head from 1999 to 2004. After graduating from Cambridge, MI6 recruited Christopher Steele (author of the infamous “Steele report”). At MI6, Dearlove was Steele’s mentor. Dearlove assisted Halper in running the Cambridge University seminar Flynn attended in 2014. Andrew was an emeritus history professor at Cambridge and an associate of Dearlove and Halper.
On the U.S. side, Powell asked for communications and correspondence involving various DIA, CIA, DOJ, and DOD. Had the government been honest, Sidney Powell would have succeeded in obtaining for Flynn’s defense documentary evidence of crimes the Obama administration committed using the intelligence and justice agencies of the U.S. government for criminal purposes. Under the Supreme Court standard of Brady v. Maryland, General Flynn had a right to demand that the federal prosecutors had to disclose exculpatory material to the defense. Flynn knew that the government had to keep the requested documents secret, or Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and a score of other Obama administration officials faced severe criminal charges, including treason. The list of Obama’s coup d’état co-conspirators that Flynn could quickly identify was extremely long. Flynn’s list would undoubtedly have included John Brennan, James Clapper, Susan Rice, James Comey, Peter Strzok, and Lisa Page.
Powell’s motion also asked for any information regarding Joseph Mifsud. Joseph Mifsud was a Maltese-born academic associated with Link Campus University, a school established in 1999 as the Rome branch of the University of Malta. Mifsud played a central role in the setup of George Papadopoulos. The Democrats on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence have asserted that the Russians, in their approach to Papadopoulos, “used common tradecraft and employed a cutout—a Maltese professor named Joseph Mifsud.” But the evidence is otherwise. Mifsud is an academic by training and profession, but he also has close ties with British, Italian, and U.S. intelligence. Real Clear Investigations reporter Lee Smith tagged Mifsud as the “Maltese Phantom of Russiagate,” noting that although Mifsud has traveled many times to Russia and has contacts with Russian academics. Misfud’s closest ties are to Western governments, politicians, and institutions, including the CIA.
Experts who have studied the coup d’état against Donald Trump launched by British and U.S. intelligence have realized, “all roads in Russia-gate lead to London.” On July 31, 2016, the FBI opened Operation Crossfire Hurricane. Text messages exchanged between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page document, on August 3, 2016, only three days after the opening of Operation Crossfire Hurricane, Strzok was in London. A declassified memo from the majority staff of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) to the majority members made clear that Strzok ran the FBI counterintelligence investigation. The memo stated: “The Papadopoulos information triggered the opening of an FBI counterintelligence investigation in late July 2016 by FBI agent Pete Strzok.”
Strzok met with Claire Smith, a U.K. Joint Intelligence Committee member in London. Strzok knew Smith had worked with Mifsud at three different institutions—the London Academy of Diplomacy, the University of Stirling in Scotland, and Link University Campus in Rome. Smith was also a U.K. security vetting panel member and could brief Strzok on Mifsud, given that she had followed him from the London Academy of Diplomacy to Stirling University and Link University Campus in Rome. Smith and Mifsud were photographed together in October 2012 in Rome at Link University Campus, where they were involved in training Italian law enforcement on intelligence operations. According to reports published in Italy, Link Campus University officially terminated Mifsud’s contract when Mifsud’s role with Papadopoulos became known. Then, in November 2018, Mifsud went missing; U.S. authorities presumed he was dead. Seven months later, however, Mifsud resurfaced. It turns out he never left Rome! Italian newspapers reported that when Mifsud was missing and presumed dead, he lived comfortably in an apartment near the U.S. embassy in Rome. A Greek diplomat owned the apartment, and Link Campus University paid the rent. Strzok’s trip to London in August 2016 appears arranged to ensure the details of his Papadopoulos entrapment scheme remained hidden.
Let’s review the details Strzok engineered in a scheme designed to make it appear Papadopoulos knew in April 2016 that Russia had stolen Democratic party emails that contained information damaging to Hillary Clinton. Remember, this was the predicate Strzok needed to open Operation Crossfire Hurricane at the end of July 2016. In his book, Deep State Target: How I Got Caught in the Crosshairs of the Plot to Bring Down President Trump,[1] Papadopoulos explained step-by-step how he fell into Strzok’s trap. George Papadopoulos describes Link Campus University in Rome as “Spook University” (pp. 37-38). On April 26, 2016, after Mifsud returned from a trip to Russia, Papadopoulos met him for breakfast in London at the Andaz Hotel, near the Liverpool Street station. This breakfast meeting was the critical meeting in this Strzok’s entrapment scheme. At the breakfast meeting at the Andaz Hotel, Mifsud surprised Papadopoulos. Mifsud leaned across the table conspiratorially and whispered to Papadopoulos, “the Russians have ‘dirt’ on Hillary Clinton—emails of Clinton. They have thousands of them” (p. 60). In his book, Papadopoulos says he was shocked to hear this but didn’t know what to do with the information. “My mission is to make a meeting [between Trump and Putin] happen. End of story. Hacking, security breaches, potential blackmail—that is illegal and treasonous. I want no part in it.” (p. 61). Papadopoulos insists he did not want to pursue the subject but instead returned to the proposed Putin-Trump meeting. “But when we said goodbye, I have a feeling he’s still just spinning me” (p. 60).
After the meeting in which Mifsud “dropped the bomb” (p. 59) on Papadopoulos, intelligence-connected operatives intervened to set up Papadopoulos to meet with Alexander Downer, a leftist Australian politician who served as Australian high commissioner to the U.K. from 2014 to 2018. Papadopoulos explained in his book that Christopher Cantor, his acquaintance at the Israeli embassy in London, called him to introduce him to his girlfriend, Erika Thompson. (p. 63). Ericka Thompson, whom Papadopoulos first described as “an Australian woman in her mid-thirties,” introduced Papadopoulos to Downer (p. 64). Papadopoulos subsequently described Erika as “the Australian ‘diplomat’ who is ‘dating’ the Israeli ‘political officer’ Christopher Cantor. Papadopoulos explains: “Yes, those quotation marks are there for a reason. A high-profile reporter based in Washington recently told me that Christopher and Erika were both intelligence officers for their respective countries, something Erika has repeatedly denied” (p. 71).
On the rainy London evening of May 10, 2016, Papadopoulos met with Downer and Erika for drinks at the Kensington Wine Rooms. Now, Papadopoulos describes Erika and Downer as follows: “It’s a wet, ugly London evening on May 10, 2016, when I go meet Erika Thompson and her boss, Australian High Commissioner Alexander Downer” (p. 73). The point is that Papadopoulos is catching on that the people who approach him seemingly innocently while he is in London are all intelligence officers connected to the country of their nationality. This swanky joint boasts of having some 150 different wines by the glass. A day or two after the meeting at the wine bar, Downer reported by cable to his diplomatic superiors in Canberra that Papadopoulos knew the Russians had damaging information on Hillary Clinton. Downer, who also appears to be an informant to the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (the equivalent of the CIA), claims to have reported by cable to his diplomatic superiors in Canberra about his conversation with Papadopoulos at the wine bar.
This information appeared buried within the Australian government until July 22, 2016, when over two days, Julian Assange and WikiLeaks began making public some forty thousand stolen DNC emails that forced Debbie Wasserman Schultz to resign as DNC chair. Papadopoulos suggests that Downer shared the information with Chargé d’Affaires Elizabeth Dibble. She was the U.S. deputy chief of mission at the U.S. embassy in London. Dibble, a career diplomat, was the Deputy Chief of Mission and Chargé d’Affaires at the U.S. Embassy in Rome from 2008-2010. Papadopoulos comments in his book that Dibble was in close touch with Gregory Baker and Terrence Dudley, two presumed CIA agents posing as military attachés to the U.S. embassy in London (p. 76). Baker and Dudley were monitoring Papadopoulos in London, possibly from the first moment he arrived in March 2016. Papadopoulos explained: “The most widely reported sequence of events is that within forty-eight hours of our meeting, Downer sends a cable to Australian intelligence reporting my alleged remark” (p. 76). Once Downer’s information reached the State Department, it was conveyed to the FBI by Jonathan Winer, the former deputy assistant secretary of state who communicated with Christopher Steele during the summer of 2016.
Reporter Kimberley A. Strassel at the Wall Street Journal correctly noted that the information from Downer about Mifsud’s conversation with Papadopoulos originated with Downer and reached the FBI outside normal channels. Strassel reports the chain of communication as follows:
When Downer ended his service in the U.K. this April [2018], he sat for an interview with the Australian, a national newspaper, and “spoke for the first time” about the Papadopoulos event. Mr. Downer said he officially reported the Papadopoulos meeting back to Australia “the following day or a day or two after,” as it “seemed quite interesting.” The story nonchalantly notes that “after a period of time, Australia’s ambassador to the U.S., Joe Hockey, passed the information on to Washington.
But Strassel insists that her reporting “indicates otherwise.” She explained:
A diplomatic source tells me Mr. Hockey neither transmitted any information to the FBI nor was approached by the U.S. about the trip. Rather, it was Mr. Downer who at some point decided to convey his information—to the U.S. Embassy in London.
Why is this important? The United States is part of the “Five Eyes,” an intelligence network that includes the U.K., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. “Five Eyes” originated in 1946 as an alliance between the U.S. (National Security Agency, NSA), the U.K. (Government Communications Headquarters, GCHQ), Australia (Australian Signals Directorate, ASD), Canada (Communications Security Establishment Canada, CSEC), and New Zealand (Government Communications Security Bureau, GCSB). Each of the Five Eyes nations conducts its own interception, collection, acquisition, analysis, and decryption activities, sharing all the intelligence each obtains with the others by default.
Strassel stressed that Downer’s job was to report his meeting back to Canberra and leave it to Australian intelligence. “We also know that it wasn’t Australian intelligence that alerted the FBI,” she wrote. “The document that launched the FBI probe [Operation Crossfire Hurricane] contains no foreign intelligence whatsoever. So if Australian intelligence did receive the Downer info, it didn’t feel compelled to act on it.” Strassel’s point is that the Obama State Department was the agency that acted on Downer’s information. “The Downer details landed with the embassy’s then-chargé d’affaires, Elizabeth Dibble, who previously served as a principal deputy assistant secretary in Mrs. Clinton’s State Department.”
Strassel put the puzzle together as follows:
When did all this happen, and what came next? Did the info go straight to U.S. intelligence? Or did it instead filter to the wider State Department team, who we already know were helping foment Russia-Trump conspiracy theories? Jonathan Winer, a former deputy assistant secretary of state, has publicly admitted to communicating in the summer of 2016 with his friend Christopher Steele, author of the infamous dossier.
But Strassel picked up on a disconnect between the Mifsud communication of what Papadopoulos supposedly said and Downer’s version.
Meanwhile, something doesn’t gel between Mr. Downer’s account of the conversation and the FBI’s. In his Australian interview, Mr. Downer said Mr. Papadopoulos didn’t give specifics. “He didn’t say dirt, he said material that could be damaging to her,” said Downer. “He didn’t say what it was.” Also: “Nothing he said in that conversation indicated Trump himself had been conspiring with the Russians to collect information on Hillary Clinton.
Her research into the Papadopoulos affair led Strassel to begin doubting the veracity of the FBI’s decision to use Papadopoulos’s remarks to Mifsud as the pretext for opening a counterintelligence investigation into Trump. She concluded:
For months we’ve been told the FBI acted because it was alarmed that Mr. Papadopoulos knew about those hacked Democratic emails in May [2016], before they became public in June [2016]. But according to the tipster himself, Mr. Papadopoulos said nothing about emails. The FBI received a report that a far-removed campaign adviser, over drinks, said the Russians had something that might be “damaging” to Hillary. Did this vague statement justify a counterintelligence probe into a presidential campaign, featuring a spy and secret surveillance warrants? Unlikely. Which leads us back to what did inspire the FBI to act, and when. The Papadopoulos pretext is getting thinner.
The truth is that Papadopoulos knew nothing about who stole the DNC emails. Papadopoulos’s goal in London was to see if he could elevate himself in Trump’s eyes by arranging for Trump a meeting with Putin. Mifsud was the operative Strzok used Papadopoulos to plant on him the “Russia stole the DNC emails to get dirt on Hillary” origin.
In London, just days after the FBI opened Operation Crossfire Hurricane, Strzok met with Downer. McCarthy noted the extraordinary nature of this Strzok meeting with Downer. “Breaking with diplomatic protocol after tense negotiations, the American and Australian governments had agreed that Strzok and another agent would be permitted to interview High Commissioner Alexander Downer, Canberra’s top emissary to London,” McCarthy wrote. “Downer had informed the American embassy that he believed Trump-campaign advisor George Papadopoulos had tipped him off to a Russian scheme to swing the presidency to Trump—mainly by hacking and releasing information that could damage Clinton, such as the tens of thousands of Democratic party emails now in circulation.” So now, the FBI was involved in international diplomatic affairs, working with British intelligence GCHQ, mixing responsibilities with the State Department and the CIA, by meeting Downer in London with obvious consent of GCHQ and the Australian government.
First, Strzok needed GCHQ to pin the Russian collusion narrative on Papadopoulos. Next, Strzok needed Australian intelligence to pass the message to the U.S. State Department in London. Strzok could not let anyone know pinning the Russian collusion on Papadopoulos was a convoluted Five Eyes intelligence operation. None of the Five Eyes countries want their intelligence agencies spying on their own citizens, and Strzok knew that if the FBI learned about the Papadopoulos escapade through GCHQ, his cover would be blown. When the State Department in London passed the information to the State Department in Washington, and the State Department in Washington passed the information to the CIA, Strzok sanitized the information to be FBI actionable. Strzok realized that the information from the Papadopoulos setup together with the Steele dossier was a sufficient predicate to open a counterintelligence investigation into Trump and his campaign officials. But the scheme would only work if the FBI got the Papadopoulos information through normal diplomatic channels, not Five Eyes.
Strzok’s scheme was complicated, but it worked. Strzok used Mifsud to plant the “Russia stole Hillary’s email” comment on Papadopoulos. Then Downer met with Papadopoulos and passed the word on to Australian intelligence. Having informed Australia, Downer shared the statement with the State Department in London. The State Department in London told the State Department in Washington. The State Department in Washington passed the information to the FBI. The FBI opened Operation Crossfire Hurricane.
Flynn must have figured out that Strzok had invented the Papadopoulos entrapment scheme just as Strzok invented the Flynn perjury trap over Flynn’s calls with Kislyak. Powell filed the motion to get delivered to Flynn’s defense team the documentary evidence Flynn needed to expose Strzok’s ingenious circular methodology. The FBI needed a tie between the Trump campaign and Russia to claim Trump colluded with Russia to release damaging information about Hillary Clinton. Strzok estimated that Papadopoulos was an easy mark. Papadopoulos was young and inexperienced in international affairs, but Papadopoulos was also ambitious and connected to the Trump campaign. What Strzok also knew was that what he did was both criminal and treasonous. Strzok also knew that if Powell got the documents she requested in her motion to the court on September 11, 2019, Flynn would make public evidence exposing Strzok as the operational mastermind of the Obama-directed coup d’état against Trump. The threat of having to release Brady exculpatory material was most likely the last straw convincing the Obama administration to drop all charges against General Flynn.
Strzok morphed the coup d’état scheme first to prevent Trump from winning in 2016, then to remove Trump from the White House after he won the election. After the FBI decided Flynn had done nothing wrong in his telephone conversations with Kislyak, Strzok shifted to running a perjury trap on Flynn over whether or not Flynn discussed with Kislyak the sanctions Obama had placed on Russian intelligence. Strzok schemed to open the FBI’s Operation Crossfire Hurricane hoping to deflect attention from the content of the DNC emails Assange was releasing. Strzok’s original goal was to elect Hillary Clinton president. When Trump won the 2016 election, Strzok’s plan shifted to removing Trump from office for having colluded with Russia to intervene in the presidential election for his benefit. On May 17, 2017, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed Robert Mueller as special counsel. Strzok trusted that Andrew Weissman on Mueller’s team would establish enough evidence that Trump’s campaign had colluded with Russia and Julian Assange at WikiLeaks to make the DNC emails public so as to inflict maximum damage on Hillary Clinton’s presidential ambitions.
So, what is the answer to why Obama was so determined to destroy Trump? Obama knew that Flynn had the goods on him. If Flynn had been allowed to be Trump’s national security advisor, Obama’s treason would be exposed. Now, as the end game to get Flynn released from his plea deal, Powell decided to use the Brady rule to get Flynn’s defense team possession of the documents that would prove the DOJ, FBI, CIA, NSA, President Obama, and top members of Obama’s administration were all in a treasonous coup d’état criminal scheme. Powell succeeded in that the DOJ dropped all charges against Flynn. Powell also succeeded in communicating through her court filings the reality of how Strzok criminally politicized U.S. intelligence to implement Obama’s treasonous coup d’état. The time for a new Church Committee investigation is long overdue.
In 2020, Jerome Corsi published Coup d’État: Exposing Deep State Treason, from which much of this article was drawn. In 2019, he published Silent No More: How I Became a Political Prisoner of Mueller’s “Witch Hunt,” explaining how the Mueller prosecutors confronted Dr. Corsi for over two months for hours at a time in a closed conference room with no windows. Dr. Corsi effectively ended the Mueller “Russian Collusion” investigation when he refused to take the Mueller prosecutors’ plea deal, alleging he had lied to the FBI. The FBI never indicted Dr. Corsi—further proof the Mueller prosecutors were the ones telling the lies.
[1] George Papadopoulos, Deep State Target: How I Got Caught in the Crosshairs of the Plot to Bring Down President Trump (New York: Diversion Books, 2019). Page numbers are inserted into the text to identify quotations used here from the book.
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