Attorney General Barr Showing Up in Italy With US Attorney Durham Causes Mass Media Panic

Commentary

Full-blown panic ensued in the fake news media when it was announced that U.S. Attorney General William Barr was in Italy meeting with government officials about the role of Italian intelligence in what has become popularly known as “Russiagate,” the FBI’s investigation into the Trump campaign during the 2016 election.

That panic only intensified when it was revealed that not only had Barr been meeting with Italian officials, he had also been in contact with the governments of the United Kingdom, Australia, and Ukraine, and he brought John Durham with him on this latest trip.

You may recall that Durham is the U.S. Attorney for the District of Connecticut who was tapped by Barr to investigate the origins of the DOJ and FBI’s counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign.

The New York Times quickly put out a story decrying Trump’s call with the Australian prime minister.

The lede read, “The discussion was another instance of the president using American diplomacy for potential personal gain.”

Well, excuse me. This president spent the first 2 1/2 years of his first term under a dark cloud of suspicion of being a Russian agent and a traitor, and the entire country was put through that fiasco based on what is now known to have been a hoax.

How that hoax was created is something that demands investigation, even if the mainstream media that spent more than two years relentlessly hawking that hoax doesn’t think so.

Lame Damage Control

The Washington Post also quickly published an article that appears to be an attempt at damage control.

The article states:

“One area that has been of sustained interest to Barr and Durham, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive issue, is a murky figure named Joseph Mifsud. “Mifsud, a European academic, was publicly linked to Russian interference efforts in late 2017, when Mueller revealed a guilty plea by former Trump campaign staffer George Papadopoulos, who admitted he had lied to the FBI about the details of his interactions with Mifsud. “Those conversations included an April 2016 meeting in which Mifsud allegedly alerted Papadopoulos that the Russians had ‘dirt’ on Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton, in the form of thousands of emails.”

It’s now standard practice at this point for legacy media reporters to pretend that Mifsud is “a murky figure” rather than someone with a well-known and well-defined history with Western intelligence agencies. These narrative peddlers seem to think simply not mentioning Mifsud’s work at Link Campus or the London Centre of International Law Practice somehow makes these inconvenient facts disappear.

I’ve been writing for more than a year about how massively damaging it’s going to be to the Trump–Russia collusion hoax narrative when it’s proven it was Western intelligence services that sent Mifsud to Papadopoulos pretending to be a Russian agent to entrap him.

After spending two years relentlessly hawking the now-debunked Russiagate hoax, it’s kind of understandable in a way why legacy media reporters don’t feel too keen about having to start digging into that other “-gate” they’ve been pretty much ignoring up to this point: “Spygate.”

I hope they can warm up to the idea though, because that’s where things are headed—whether they like it or not.

Russiagate Was a Hoax, ‘Spygate’ Is Real

For more than two years, legacy media outlets have snidely derided Spygate as a “wild conspiracy” theory that has no real evidence to support it.

Although they have been forced to tacitly admit that Hillary Clinton funded the creation of the Steele dossier and its dissemination across various media outlets and federal agencies by her paid political operatives at Fusion GPS, it’s considered an absurd “right-wing talking point” that any of these fake allegations were utilized by any of these federal agencies to start investigations of the Trump campaign in 2016.

In fact, because The Epoch Times has been avidly following the publicly revealed evidence of Spygate from the beginning, legacy outlets have used that as a reason to discount the legitimacy of the Spygate scandal itself.

If outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, and MSNBC want to compare their legitimacy in covering this scandal with that of The Epoch Times, that’s certainly fine with me.

Mifsud Must Be a Russian Agent, Because If Not …

These legacy media reporters insist the real trigger for the Trump campaign investigation wasn’t the Steele dossier allegations but instead Mifsud’s contact with Papadopoulos in London in March 2016.

For this scenario to work, Mifsud must be a real Russian agent making a real overture from the Putin government to Papadopoulos. If he’s not, then the whole Russiagate narrative falls apart.

So it’s pretty easy to see why legacy media reporters would be concerned if it was starting to look like Mifsud wasn’t really a Russian agent at all, but instead what’s referred to in FBI lingo as an “Oconus lure.”

If evidence ends up showing Mifsud was working for the FBI and reached out to Papadopoulos as part of a Western-run intelligence sting, and then U.S. officials decided after the fact to throw him under the bus and claim to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, to the Mueller special counsel, and to the news media that he was a real, live Russian spy, imagine the implications of that.

Famed spy novelist John le Carré probably could’ve written something this good, but he would have had to really work at it.

Needless to say, it’s apparent that Barr and Durham have managed to get hold of the mainstream media’s attention with this trip to Italy and elsewhere. With the latest DOJ inspector general report expected soon, developments in Spygate could start coming fast and furiously.

Brian Cates is a writer based in South Texas and author of “Nobody Asked For My Opinion … But Here It Is Anyway!” He can be reached on Twitter @drawandstrike.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.