George Papadopoulos, the former foreign policy adviser to Donald Trump’s 2016 election effort, says he knows for certain that the campaign was spied on.
Papadopoulos made his comments in a column posted on The Wall Street Journal website on Wednesday. They came after Attorney General William Barr told a Senate panel last week that “I think spying did occur.”
“The spying happened, and it happened to me,” Papadopoulos wrote.
“What drove U.S. intelligence organizations during the Obama administration to use unvetted information and inconclusive spy operations against the Republican nominee and his staff?”
Papadopoulos said during his time with the campaign he was contacted on “multiple occasions” by operatives for federal intelligence and law-enforcements organizations.
“Operatives” is a euphemistic term for these men,” he said. “Spies is a more fitting label. One is Stefan Halper, a professor at the University of Cambridge who runs intelligence seminars and has ties to the Central Intelligence Agency. The Washington Post named him as the FBI informant who approached at least three members of the Trump campaign.
“Then there’s Alexander Downer, who had the lofty title of Australian high commissioner to the U.K. and was an adviser to the British private intelligence firm Hakluyt & Co.
“Finally, there’s Joseph Mifsud, who taught at Rome’s Link Campus University, where many faculty members have ties to intelligence agencies.
“These men spied on me,” he said. “As spies, they hid behind the cloak of their public personas while trying to ferret out information about the campaign and Moscow, and prod me into corroborating their bad intelligence.”
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