When The Stories Just Don’t Add Up

Kimberley Strassel posted an article yesterday about Mr. Downer. Mr Downer is a conservative politician who was Australia’s longest-serving foreign minister (1996-2007) and is also a former Australian ambassador to the U.K. Mr. Downer’s conversation with 28-year-old fourth-tier Trump adviser, George Papadopoulos, is supposedly what triggered the mess we know as the Mueller investigation.

There are, however, some serious problems with that premise.

The article lists a few of those problems:

When Mr. Downer ended his service in the U.K. this April, 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 US, Joe Hockey, passed the information on to Washington.”

My reporting indicates otherwise. A diplomatic source tells me Mr. Hockey neither transmitted any information to the FBI nor was approached by the U.S. about the tip. Rather, it was Mr. Downer who at some point decided to convey his information—to the U.S. Embassy in London.

However, that is not the way things are normally done. The article notes that The U.S. is part of Five Eyes, an intelligence network that includes the U.K., Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The agreement among these countries is that they share intelligence information. Under the Five Eyes agreement, Mr. Downer was obligated to share information with Australia and let them deal with it. Obviously, that is not what he did.

The article explains the significance of that:

So if Australian intelligence did receive the Downer info, it didn’t feel compelled to act on it.

But the Obama State Department did—and its involvement is news. 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.

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.

The more we learn, the more questionable this story gets. Please follow the link above to read the entire article. It is becoming obvious that the entire Russian investigation had only one purpose–to remove a duly-elected President. That is called sedition.