Roger Stone and Michael Caputo’s latest disclosure to the Post is a good example: Neither Stone nor Caputo told the House Intelligence Committee when testifying under oath last year that the Russian national, Henry Greenberg, had tried to sell the campaign damaging information on Hillary Clinton. Caputo told me that didn’t remember his May 2016 interaction with Greenberg until just before his interview with Mueller’s team last month. (He says he told the agents about a second interaction he had with Greenberg at a fundraiser charity event in Miami in January 2017). Still, Caputo is not worried that he may have perjured himself before Congress—he believes Greenberg was acting as an FBI informant when he approached the campaign, and that the bureau should have to answer for its use of human sources during the election. Hours after the Post story broke, Caputo’s spokeswoman sent out a press release touting his exposure of “another FBI informant.”

“It is important to note that I disclosed this to Mueller after they asked me a very general question about whether a Russian ever approached me with information on the Hillary Clinton campaign,” Caputo told me. “It bothers me that the Obama FBI was investigating the Republican nominee for president. But it truly concerns me that they were tapping a violent Russian criminal illegal alien to join the fray.” Greenberg, who appears to have assisted the FBI between 2008-2012, was charged in Los Angeles in 1994 with assault with a deadly weapon, according to records obtained by the Post.

Papadopoulos’ wife Simona Mangiante, who has asked Trump to pardon Papadopoulos, has used a similar argument: In an interview with The Daily Caller, she said “it was George who brought up Mifsud to the FBI”—a reference to Joseph Mifsud, a mysterious Maltese professor who told Papadopoulos in April 2016 that the Russians had dirt on Clinton. (The FBI accused Papadopoulos of making materially false statements about the timing of his meeting with Mifsud.) Mangiante added that she believed the FBI used Stefan Halper, a longtime FBI and CIA source who teaches at Cambridge University, to target Papadopoulos “and infiltrate the campaign.” She claimed that Papadopoulos was the target of other “highly suspicious” approaches during the election.

Whereas Halper reportedly approached the Trump campaign at the FBI’s behest, however, there is no evidence that Greenberg was acting as an FBI informant when he offered the campaign dirt on Clinton in May 2016. Asked why he did not notify the FBI when a Russian offered him compromising information about Clinton, Caputo said he and Stone “thought Greenberg was a crackpot and of no concern, and he did not represent himself as an agent of the Russian government.” Caputo said he now believes Greenberg has been allowed to remain in the U.S. because he is still working for the FBI. He questioned why the special counsel’s team grilled him last month about his contact with Greenberg, and why the FBI agents “knew so much about this meeting” with Greenberg “that was so matterless.” (Stone has said he has not yet met with, or even been contacted by, Mueller’s team.)