You could call it The Maltese Falcon, but the title’s been taken. And The Joseph Mifsud Story doesn’t quite have a ring to it. Besides, there are so many more international players — Italians, Australians, Brits — that we need a wider cast as well as a better title. Peter Lorre, where are you? And Sydney Greenstreet?

It’s the great movie that will never be made. It would blow Hollywood’s narrative to smithereens. Robert De Niro’s head would explode. He’d release a fusillade of f-bombs the likes of which you have never heard, and probably take it out on the nearest female.

But if you’re looking for an explanation for why the world has gone crazy (at least the American part of it), if you want to know how such an outrageous liar as Adam Schiff (aka the Jussie Smollett of Congress) has been able to take center stage, if you want to know why half the country doesn’t talk to the other half, you should look no further than the story of the missing Maltese professor Joseph Mifsud.

And who is this Joseph Mifsud? Well, we don’t know for sure because he’s disappeared. For Hitchcock, it was The Lady Vanishes. In Mifsud’s case, it’s the man who vanished. We’re told he thinks someone is trying to kill him — in real life, not cinematic life — but who?

The answer to that is the reason — or a large part of it — Attorney General William Barr journeyed to Italy, apparently twice according to an article in The Guardian that — detailed as it is — curiously downplays the basic motivation behind the visits, finding out what side the mysterious Mifsud was actually on.

We’re supposed to believe he was a Russian agent who, in 2016, told a then very minor Trump aide named George Papadopoulos that the Kremlin was in possession of thousands of emails revealing “dirt” about Hillary Clinton that could help Trump’s campaign.

Indeed, James Comey told us Mifsud was a “Russian agent” and Robert Mueller assured us in his report that Mifsud had “connections to Russia.” But this is the same Mueller who avowed under oath he had never heard of the constantly discussed (for over two years ad infinitum on cable news) Fusion GPS, the same Mueller who informed us that Russians were working to get Trump elected when the Russians were the ones who were the putative source for the Steele dossier that did nothing but smear Trump. Try to reconcile that one.

Well, you can’t… unless you think Mueller’s completely senile — or a liar. Falsus in uno falsus in omnibus, as some prescient ancient Romans said.

So Barr, in the company of John Durham, his lead investigator on these matters, was in Rome talking with several people high up in Italian intelligence. They are supposed to have played for him a tape recording Mifsud left before he disappeared. If it turns out the professor was a U.S. agent or one allied to the U.S., planted to suck in the naive Papadopoulos, to make him run back to the mothership and blabber about something that wasn’t true in order to hang Trump, it is one of the greatest and most evil stories of our times. If it can be proven that what we have experienced for the entire Trump era is a put-up job linked to the previous administration, to the Brennans and Clappers of the world, Professor Mifsud is the nerdy Helen of Troy who launched the thousand ships of the Mueller investigation, resulting in impeachment currently being shrieked on every corner and, frankly, mass U.S. hysteria and hatred across our land. It is… he is… to use mystery language again, the MacGuffin of all time — or at least of American history. Whether you call it treason or sedition, it is unlike anything that has happened in our country before. It is more like the workings of the NKVD.

No wonder the Democrats are in a tizzy. And no wonder Hollywood would never make the movie, even though it would make All the President’s Men seem like the most banal afternoon special.

And no wonder Mr. Mifsud is on the run. Someone indeed is likely to kill him.

Escape from the nonstop yammering about impeachment from liberal reactionaries with a fun read. PJ Media co-founder Roger L. Simon’s new novel The GOAT is now available in several editions on Amazon.