Miranda Devine: Alexander Downer needs to spill on his role in the attack on Donald Trump
Thanks to an unexplained meeting with a Trump campaign aide, ‘Clinton errand boy’ Alexander Downer has embroiled Australia in the Democrat’s attempts to tear down the US President, writes Miranda Devine.
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Australia is now embroiled, with the Ukraine, in America’s Trump impeachment drama. We have Alexander Downer to thank for that.
The former UK High Commissioner has placed our country in a diabolic position, and it’s beyond time that he fessed up.
Downer has never properly explained his connection to the FBI probe into the Russia-collusion hoax which has bedevilled Donald Trump’s presidency.
So, it is perfectly reasonable for Trump to ask Scott Morrison to assist US Attorney-General William Barr’s efforts to discover the origins of the FBI investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
It’s perfectly reasonable for Morrison to oblige. Downer has never explained his meeting with a Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos in May, 2016, over gin and tonics at the Kensington Wine Rooms in London.
He’s never explained why he instigated the meeting, apparently at the behest of the Australian girlfriend of an Israeli diplomat in London.
He’s never explained whether his link to a shadowy security firm, Hakluyt, run by former MI6 spooks, was a factor. The upshot of that meeting was that Downer gave Australian intelligence agencies information he claimed came from Papadopoulos, that the Russians had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton in the form of “thousands of emails”. Australian spooks passed that information to the FBI.
Two months later, in July, when Wikileaks released thousands of emails stolen by Russian hackers from the Democratic National Committee, the FBI launched an investigation into Trump’s campaign, aimed at finding he colluded with the Russians to discredit Clinton. This became the FBI’s Mueller probe which spent two years and $50 million finding no collusion between Trump and Russia.
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Trump is now on the rampage, determined to prove the FBI investigation was corrupt. He blames the “Deep State” which has tried to sabotage him from Day One, and Barr has set in train a number of investigations.
Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s investigation into the conduct of the FBI is due this month. US Attorney John Durham is looking into the origins of the Trump-Russia investigation and US Attorney John Huber is probing allegations of corruption at the Clinton Foundation. No wonder the anti-Trump intelligence leaks are at fever pitch.
“What I’ve done is I’ve declassified everything,” Trump told reporters last month. “[Barr] can look and I hope he looks at the UK and I hope he looks at Australia and I hope he looks at Ukraine. I hope he looks at everything, because there was a hoax that was perpetrated on our country.”
Somehow Downer ended up in the middle of it. The final report of the Mueller probe named his meeting with Papadopoulos as the catalyst. Now Morrison has pledged to help Trump find out why, Downer knows that others will tell the story on his behalf.
Papadopoulos, who spent two weeks in jail for lying to the FBI, described Downer on Twitter yesterday as “a wannabe spy and Clinton errand boy”.
He also claimed to have testified against Downer “to help launch Durham’s investigation”.
Downer’s account of their Kensington meeting differs markedly from Papadopoulos’ account.
He claims he was targeted in May, 2016, after helping write then-candidate Trump’s first foreign policy speech attacking the Bush and Obama administrations for mistakes in Iraq, Egypt, Libya and Syria which threw the region into chaos and helped create ISIS. Trump sought common ground with Russia and China, an unwelcome prospect for some in the intelligence establishment.
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Two days later, Papadopoulos was phoned by a contact at the Israeli embassy in London, “political officer” Christian Cantor, who wanted to introduce him to his Australian girlfriend, Erika Thomson, an assistant to Downer. Papadopoulos claims when he met her, Erika badmouthed Trump as a “menace … He’ll be a pariah. No one will ever take him seriously. Downing Street hates him.” She said if Trump won the election, “the world is going to coalesce against him”.
A few days later he wound up on the front page of The Times calling on British PM David Cameron to apologise for denigrating Trump’s immigration policy. Three days later, Erika emailed to say Downer was “eager to get acquainted” and talk about “US-Australian relations”. Four days later the three gathered at the Kensington Wine Rooms. Downer, “oozing aggression”, told Papadopoulos: “Tell your boss [Trump] he needs to leave my friend David Cameron alone.”
Downer said “he’s connected to a British security firm called Hakluyt. He boasts about being a board member … He tells me he's very pro-Clinton [Hillary] and he hates Obama”.
Then, according to Papadopoulos, Downer said: “I used to be the UN envoy to Cyprus and what you are talking about in Cyprus is wrong and it’s a threat to British interests.”
Papadopoulos was bemused. “Isn’t this guy supposed to be representing Australian interests?”
In Downer’s telling, Papadopoulos then told him a secret he had been told by Joseph Mifsud, a Rome-based academic, that the Russians had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton.
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But Papadopoulos claims he doesn’t remember telling Downer. He says Downer may already have known what Mifsud told him.
“Was he trying to bait me into saying something … that could spark an investigation? I believe so,” he said.
Papadopoulos points out that Downer, as Foreign Minister, engineered one of the Clinton Foundation’s biggest donations, $25 million.
What he doesn’t write is that British officials raised concerns when Downer was appointed high commissioner in 2014 because he had been on Hakluyt’s advisory board since 2008. Downer quit the board when he was posted to London but reportedly continued to attend Hakluyt client conferences.
When Downer is asked about any of this, he is coy. “I had a conversation with this guy and I passed on one element of the conversation to the Americans,” he told the ABC yesterday. “There’s just nothing more to it.”
That’s not what Papadopoulos has testified, and it doesn’t seem to be what Trump thinks either.
Miranda Devine will be based in New York for the next 18 months covering current affairs for The Daily Telegraph