Miranda Devine: Don’t worry, Downer — Hockey is here to help
It’s the biggest political story in America involving an attempted coup against Donald Trump. We have Alexander Downer to thank for starting it — and Joe Hockey for cleaning our mess up, writes Miranda Devine.
It’s the most momentous political story in America, involving an attempted coup against Donald Trump, impending impeachment and an FBI spying operation to entrap Trump’s campaign.
And it was Australia’s own Alexander Downer who started the whole misadventure, according to an important report into the origins of the FBI’s Russia-gate probe, released yesterday by US Inspector General Michael Horowitz.
But all is not as it seems.
Downer is mentioned 144 times in the 476-page report, under the descriptor “Friendly Foreign Government”, or FFG.
The FBI, Horowitz found, based its entire Trump surveillance operation, Crossfire Hurricane, on a tip-off from Downer that Russia was colluding with Trump’s campaign to gather dirt on Hillary Clinton to fix the 2016 election.
But, until yesterday, we did not know just how equivocal Downer’s tip-off was and, therefore, how flimsy were the FBI’s grounds for investigation, with the clear inference that Downer was used as the pretext for a Deep State coup.
“This was an attempted overthrow of government,” Trump thundered yesterday, “and a lot of people were in on it and they got caught. They got caught red-handed.”
Downer was Australia’s UK High Commissioner on May 6, 2016, when he invited a low-level unpaid Trump campaign adviser, 30-year-old George Papadopoulos, to cocktails at the Kensington Wine Rooms in London.
This much we knew.
MORE FROM MIRANDA DEVINE: Alexander Downer needs to spill on his role in the attack on Donald Trump
But now Horowitz has revealed exactly what Downer said when he tipped off the Obama administration that the Trump campaign was up to no good: “George Papadopoulos ‘suggested the Trump team had received some kind of suggestion from Russia’ that it could assist in the election process with the anonymous release of information during the campaign that would be damaging to candidate [Hillary] Clinton and President Obama.”
It was a “suggestion” of a “suggestion”. Hardly, you would think, justification for the unprecedented FBI surveillance of a US domestic political campaign.
Downer wrote up a report of his meeting and sent it to Canberra, saying he didn’t take Papadopoulos seriously.
But two months later, on July 22, Wikileaks published hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee.
It was three days before the Democratic National Convention, and Clinton was ready with a defence in case the 30,000 emails she had deleted from her unauthorised private server were ever leaked.
Her campaign told the media the Wikileaks email dump was a Russian hack done to help Trump.
When Downer heard about the dump he had a “holy cow” moment, according to an Australian source.
Four days later, on July 26, Downer contacted Elizabeth Dibble, the Chargé d’Affaires of the US embassy in London, about an “urgent matter” that required an in-person meeting, wrote Horowitz.
This was an unorthodox way of relaying intelligence, which would usually go via the AFP or ASIO to their US counterparts.
If Downer had used official channels, perhaps his tip-off would not have taken on such a weighty, Chinese-whispers significance.
MORE FROM MIRANDA DEVINE: Was Downer a patsy or just unlucky?
In any case, Downer told Dibble, a former Hillary Clinton state department high-flyer about Papadopoulos’ “suggestion”.
And that was it.
The FBI opened Crossfire Hurricane four days later, on Sunday, July 31, and anti-Trump FBI agent Peter Strzok flew to London that day to interview Downer.
Horowitz accepts that Downer’s flimsy tip-off was sufficient to launch its Trump investigation.
But, considering the FBI didn’t even bother interviewing Papadopoulos for another six months into its investigation, there are grounds to suspect that Downer was used as a patsy to justify spying on Trump’s campaign.
Attorney-General Bill Barr suggested as much yesterday, saying it is “clear that the FBI launched an intrusive investigation of a US presidential campaign on the thinnest of suspicions that, in my view, were insufficient to justify the steps taken.”
In fact, Horowitz found the FBI based at least part of its investigations on the discredited “Steele Dossier”, a farcical farrago of salacious stories about Trump cavorting with prostitutes in Moscow.
The FBI knew the dossier, written by former intelligence officer Christopher Steele, had been paid for by the Clinton campaign, and knew there were “significant questions about [its] reliability, yet it “played a central and essential role” in the year-longwire tap of Trump campaign aide Carter Page.
When the dossier was exposed as fantasy, Downer’s tip-off took on an outsized significance, plunging Australia into the centre of an American political maelstrom.
Downer’s role in sparking the wild goose chase which has convulsed the US for three years might have been a diplomatic fiasco for Australia if not for the efforts of Ambassador Joe Hockey and the active co-operation of the Morrison government as recently as last weekend.
Conspiracy theories about Downer have run rampant in Washington, with claims he is involved with British intelligence and has ties to the Clintons.
Senator Lindsay Graham, one of Trump’s closest allies, has questioned his motives, as have three of the best books I have read on Russia-gate: Lee Smith’s The Plot Against the President, Kimberley Strassel’s Resistance, and Andrew McCarthy’s Ball of Collusion.
But Hockey, who is close to Trump, has managed to reassure the President’s team that Downer was just trying to do the right thing.
Proof of Hockey’s success came yesterday when Barr released a second statement specifically to praise Downer and Australia: “I want to emphasise that this FFG did the right thing in supplying that information; the FFG has acted at all times just as we would hope a close ally would. We are grateful that we have such friends.”
Lucky Australia to have had such an adept ambassador in awkward times.
Miranda Devine is in New York through 2020 to cover current affairs for The Daily Telegraph
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