Australia’s longest-serving foreign minister Alexander Downer has been accused of acting suspiciously by a former member of US President Donald Trump’s foreign policy advisory panel.

A former foreign policy adviser to US President Donald Trump has launched an attack on “weak link” Australia, saying Americans need to be wary of their longtime allies.

George Papadopoulos, who served as an aide to the US President during his 2016 presidential election campaign, was later jailed for 12 days for lying to the FBI about making contact with the Russian government while working on the Trump campaign.

Five months after his release, Papadopoulos, who has become highly active on Twitter, launched a spectacular attack on Australia, saying investigators should be putting pressure on Australia and other US allies, calling them “weak links in the chain” and adding “there was a co-ordinated effort here to take us down”.

“Expose the Australians,” he said in another tweet, urging investigators to subpoena former foreign minister Alexander Downer, along with James Clapper, the former US director of national intelligence. “They need us. We don’t need them!”

Papadopoulos said Mr Downer, Australia’s longest-serving former foreign minister, was an “FBI asset” and claimed the director of the FBI, James Comey, tried to “entrap” Trump staffers during the presidential campaign. Papadopoulos then issued a series of warnings to US investigators to focus their new investigations on Australia, as well as other US-allied countries, including the UK and Italy.

The tweets are in response to a review by US Attorney-General William Barr of the 2016 Robert Mueller investigation into whether there was any Russian interference in Mr Trump’s election campaign — what’s been called an “investigation into an investigation”.

My advice to the investigators: keep the heat on the UK/Australia and Italy/Malta (the weak links in the chain). There was a coordinated effort here to take us down. These countries have no loyalty anymore to the previous admin. Political change has rocked Europe. Leverage it! — George Papadopoulos (@GeorgePapa19) May 28, 2019

America: remember this, the FBI under Jim Comey was trying to entrap Americans working for president Trump. FBI assets like Joseph Mifsud and Alexander Downer will all be exposed. The Russians were non existent. Keep the heat on the UK/Australia/Italy and have them flip on Comey. — George Papadopoulos (@GeorgePapa19) May 29, 2019

Alexander Downer’s fake testimony against me helped launch a witch-hunt. My real testimony against him has launched an unprecedented investigation into the deep state and its global actors in Italy-Ukraine-UK-Australia. Downer will forever b remembered as the Clinton errand boy. — George Papadopoulos (@GeorgePapa19) May 25, 2019

Clapper was spending a lot of time in Australia trying to cover his tracks along with Downer’s and the Australian government as a whole. Supoanea him and expose the Australians. They need us. We don’t need them! — George Papadopoulos (@GeorgePapa19) May 26, 2019

After Papadopoulos’s guilty plea, Mr Trump, who had five aides working in similar roles to the then 30-year-old, described him as a “young, low-level volunteer named George who has already proven to be a liar”. Mr Trump claimed very few people who worked on the presidential campaign knew who Papadopoulos was.



In his new book, Deep State Target: How I Got Caught in the Crosshairs of the Plot to Bring Down President Trump, Papadopoulous gives a “first-hand account that proves the attempted sabotage of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign by American and international intelligence services”.

“I was faced with a choice: accept the charges that I lied or face FARA charges,” he said of his guilty plea that him sent to jail. “I made a deal. A deal forced on me.”

The Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) is administered by the Counterespionage Section of the US Department of Justice,

“My story is part of a larger story. The story of Trump and the story of stopping Trump or trying to,” Papadopoulos writes in the book.

“The Trump presidency was the primary target of all this insanity.”

Papadopoulos became a central figure in the investigation into Russian collusion in the US election, with the former Trump aide meeting with a series of high-level figures after being announced as a Trump policy adviser in March 2016.

One such meeting was with Joseph Misfud who Trump’s lawyer and former mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani, recently described as a “Maltese counterintelligence guy”.

When Misfud met with Papadopoulos on March 24, Papadopoulos claims Misfud brought along a woman he falsely claimed was Vladimir Putin’s niece. Misfud has disputed this claim.

When they met again in April, Misfud told Papadopoulos that Russians had gotten their hands on thousands of emails that could be damaging to Hillary Clinton.

Papadopoulos then met with Mr Downer, who was then serving as the Australian High Commissioner in London, at a posh bar in London. The May 2016 meeting has come under scrutiny ever since.

Papadopoulos said he felt Mr Downer was spying on him, saying he was playing with his phone and recording him, and he felt he was being “profiled” during the encounter. Mr Downer remembers the meeting differently — as a single, casual drink on his way home. He said if he handled his phone during the meeting, he was likely checking a text or email.

Mr Downer said they discussed the possibility of Trump winning the election and claimed Papadopoulos said he was confident.

“He said one of the reasons was that the Russians might release some information which could be damaging to Hillary Clinton,” Mr Downer told the ABC. Mr Downer then sent a cable to Canberra relating the information, which was later passed on to US authorities and formed part of their investigation into Russian collusion into the US election.

Papadopoulos strenuously denies saying those things to Mr Downer, saying he has “no memory” of the pair discussing the emails.

The former Trump aide did admit to telling other people about the Clinton emails, including Greece’s foreign minister, but maintains he did not tell Mr Downer.

Papadopoulos claims Mr Downer, along with other figures posing as diplomats and government employees, “worked to invent a Russian conspiracy that would irreparably damage the Trump administration”.

Mr Downer has consistently dismissed Papadopoulos’s claims.