George Papadopoulos urges Barr to investigate examples of ‘spying’ while he was campaign aide

Former Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos urged Attorney General William Barr to investigate “spying” that might have occurred while he worked for President Trump’s 2016 campaign.

Papadopoulos, who served 12 days of a two-week prison sentence last year for lying to FBI agents about his contact with individuals linked to Russia during the 2016 campaign, suggested elements of the FBI were directed by the Obama administration to wound Trump’s chances of winning the presidency. 

{mosads}“During my time as an adviser to the Trump campaign, federal intelligence and law enforcement organizations used operatives to contact me in person and by email on multiple occasions. Their goal? To discuss rumored coordination efforts with Russia and extract evidence of a collusion crime,” Papadopoulos wrote Wednesday evening in The Wall Street Journal.

“I have spent two years thinking about my bizarre interactions with these spooks. If Mr. Barr really wants to understand what happened, he needs to examine them and their motives. If he does, he will likely find three men and their government backers acting in concert to inflict damage on a U.S. presidential candidate whose views apparently scared the hell out of them,” he added, referring to three individuals with ties to domestic and foreign intelligence agencies.

Papadopoulos referred to Stefan Halper, a professor at the University of Cambridge who The Washington Post reported has ties to the FBI, Alexander Downer, Australian the high commissioner to the U.K. and a former adviser to the British private intelligence firm Hakluyt & Co, and Joseph Mifsud, an Italian professor who reportedly had high-level contacts in the Russian government.

The op-ed comes after Barr said last week that he believed “spying” took place as the FBI investigated members of the Trump campaign and that he would review “both the genesis and the conduct of intelligence activities directed at the Trump campaign during 2016.”

Papadopoulos first drew scrutiny from investigators during the 2016 election after he told Downer that the Russians had dirt on Hillary Clinton’s campaign, specifically referencing hacked emails. He eventually accepted a plea deal with the Mueller team but confirmed last month his lawyers have sought a pardon from the White House.

Papadopoulos, who recently published the book “Deep State Target: How I Got Caught in the Crosshairs of the Plot to Bring Down President Trump,” has long cast himself as a victim of an investigation he says was partisan in nature.

“Mr. Barr may not be able to find a smoking gun that definitively proves Obama loyalists plotted to use specious allegations to wound a Republican candidate for president. But he won’t have to look very hard to confirm the existence of spy operations. Subpoenas for the spies who approached me would go a long way. Mr. Barr could also investigate whether those operations crossed the bold line that separates a serious, apolitical investigation from paranoid prosecutorial overreach,” he wrote in The Journal.