RUSSIA/РОССИЯ THREAD—ASSANGE CHRGD W/ SPYING—DJT IMPEACHED TWICE-US TREASURY SANCTS KILIMNIK AS RUSSIAN AGNT

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☑︎#VoteDemocrat

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Dracudiddy said:
Sorta unrelated but: How this company got the market cap it does if 15% of election ads is $3Ms and they were out there soliciting that deal?

How much for the whole thing? $25? Weird to me
.
Click to expand...
Twitter is fukked....it seems. Cause they don't collect that much data compared to FB/Google/etc (I mean how can they), they seem starved for cash, and their stock is performing like shyt.



low-key, Reddit should be on Capitol Hill too :sas2:
 
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What we know about ‘The Professor’ at the heart of Russian collusion probe
1 day ago

This handout photo taken on April 19, 2016, shows Ivan Timofeev, right, and Joseph Mifsud in Moscow, Russia.

Valdai Club/AP

At the heart of the allegations of collusion between Donald Trump's presidential campaign and the Russian government are a Maltese professor who has gone quiet and an apparently defunct London academy with no forwarding address.

The guilty plea entered by Mr. Trump's one-time foreign affairs adviser George Papadopoulos – who admitted to charges of making false statements to the FBI about his campaign-time contacts with Russian officials – sent shockwaves through the U.S. political establishment after it was published on Monday. It's now believed that Mr. Papadopoulos, the first person convicted in a wide-ranging probe into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, has been co-operating for months with the investigation headed by special counsel Robert Mueller.

Mr. Trump's one-time campaign director, Paul Manafort, and his associate Rick Gates, were separately indicted on Monday on charges relating to their work for Ukraine's former Moscow-backed president, Viktor Yanukovych.

Read more: Investigation into Russian collusion deals double blow to White House

Explainer: Trump and Russia: Who's who in the many investigations into 2016's election-meddling

The evidence made public as part of Mr. Papadopoulos's plea bargain created a new mystery: Who was the man, referred to only as "The Professor" in the court documents – a "citizen of a country in the Mediterranean" and a "professor of diplomacy based in London" – who put Mr. Papadopoulos in contact with his friends in Moscow?

It took journalists a few hours on Monday to identify "The Professor" as Joseph Mifsud, a Malta native who was the director of an obscure institution called the London Academy of Diplomacy. But by the time Mr. Mifsud's name was publicly linked to Mr. Papadopoulos's, the professor's mobile phone was switched off, with an answering machine picking up after a single ring.

(Before apparently switching off his phone, Mr. Mifsud spoke to The Daily Beast news website long enough to confirm that he knew Mr. Papadopoulos, while dismissing the allegations contained in the U.S. District Court filing as "a laughing matter.")

On Tuesday, there were almost no trace of "The Professor," or the London Academy of Diplomacy. While the academy once shared office space with three other educational institutes in a five-floor building in London's Aldgate district, the receptionist at the building said on Tuesday that the London Academy of Diplomacy had moved out six months earlier. "I honestly don't know where they are now," she said. The academy's London phone number appeared to have been disconnected before Monday.

Prof. Mifsud was equally hard to find. His Facebook page that existed Monday night – showing a network of friends around the world that included Mr. Papadopoulos as well as several low-level Russian officials – was deleted overnight, as was his professional page at the London Centre of International Law Practice, another unheralded institution that until Monday claimed Prof. Mifsud as its "Director: International Strategic Development."

Prof. Mifsud told an interviewer several years ago that the London Academy of Diplomacy taught diplomatic skills – everything from how to dress for a diplomatic function to how to advance your country's interests using social media – to "people who would like to work in areas adjacent to diplomacy," such as businessmen or staff at non-government organizations.

The article, printed in The Times of London, gave no information about how many people worked or studied at Prof. Mifsud's academy. Nor did it mention any prominent alumni. Carla Figueira, a lecturer on international cultural diplomacy at the University of London, said that in her field "the London Academy of Diplomacy is not known at all."

What Prof. Mifsud was known for – according to the agreed statement of facts in the case against Mr. Papadopoulos – was providing a back-channel way of communicating with Moscow. One of the most recent photographs of Prof. Mifsud available online shows him standing with Ernest Chernukhin, a diplomat at the Russian Embassy in London, who visited the London Academy of Diplomacy in July of this year.

The U.S. court documents state that it was "The Professor" who put Mr. Papadopoulos in contact with two other individuals, named only as "The Female Russian National" and the "Russian MFA [Ministry of Foreign Affairs] Connection." (The "Female Russian National" is originally introduced to Mr. Papadopoulos as the niece of Vladimir Putin, though it is later established that she was not a relative of the Russian President.)

It's also The Professor who initially told Mr. Papadopoulos – and thus the Trump campaign – that Russia had obtained information that could damage Mr. Trump's rival for the presidency, Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.

"They [the Russians] have dirt on her … they have thousands of e-mails," Mr. Papadopoulos told the Federal Bureau of Investigation earlier this year, describing what The Professor had told him.

"Following the conversation, defendant Papadopoulos continued to correspond with Campaign officials, and continued to communicate with the Professor and the Russian MFA Connection, in an effort to arrange a meeting between the Campaign and the Russian government," the agreed statement of facts reads.

The court document suggests Prof. Mifsud heard about the Clinton e-mails while attending an April, 2016, meeting of the Valdai Club, a Kremlin-sponsored discussion forum that brings together Russian officials and foreign international relations experts.

While few in London knew of Prof. Mifsud or his London Academy of Diplomacy before Monday, the Valdai Club made him a featured speaker at its April, 2016, conference in Moscow on global energy development.

Piotr Dutkiewicz, the director of the Centre for Governance and Public Management at Carleton University in Ottawa – and a regular Valdai Club participant – said he had never met or heard of Prof. Mifsud, nor seen him at any of the larger Valdai Club meetings that were personally attended by Mr. Putin.

Prof. Dutkiewicz questioned whether the Kremlin would use Prof. Mifsud – whom he called a "completely peripheral figure" – for something as sensitive as reaching out to a U.S. presidential candidate.

But Prof. Mifsud appears to have worked hard to ingratiate himself to the Russian government. Before this week, much of his public work involved speaking to Kremlin-controlled media outlets or cheerleading for Kremlin-allied regimes in the former Soviet Union.

In 2013, Prof. Mifsud was quoted by Azerbaijan's state-run news service praising the "great changes" that President Ilham Aliyev had "made on behalf of the common people" in his country.

Two years later, he was in the news in Kazakhstan, lending a foreign voice of approval to the way the country's presidential elections were run. "I can confidently say that the election campaign in Kazakhstan met all [European Union] standards. It was like a holiday for people. I saw it in many electoral districts," Prof. Mifsud told the country's official wire service.

President Nursultan Nazarbayev, a close ally of Mr. Putin who has ruled Kazakhstan since 1989, won the 2015 election with 97.7 per cent of the vote.

Prof. Mifsud was also a harsh critic of the Western-led sanctions against Mr. Putin's inner circle that were applied following Russia's move to seize and annex the Crimean Peninsula in 2014. The idea of dropping sanctions against Russia – and possibly recognizing the annexation of Crimea – was an idea Mr. Trump himself would flirt with throughout his successful run to the White House.

"I don't think that the U.S. has the energy to continue with this," Prof. Mifsud told the Kremlin-run Sputnik service late in 2014, referring to the tit-for-tat sanctions war. "The global security and economy needs partners and who is better in this than the Russian Federation?"
 
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The mysterious work of the Maltese professor identified in the FBI’s Russia probe
Written by
Max de Haldevang
Joseph Mifsud is an enigma. The Maltese academic has admitted to The Daily Telegraph (paywall) that he is the mysterious professor at the center of Trump campaign advisor George Papadopoulos’s attempts to arrange a meeting between Donald Trump and Russian president Vladimir Putin. But he insists he has a “clear conscience” and fervently denies Papdopolous’s claim that he knew the “Russians had obtained ‘dirt’ on then-candidate Clinton.”

Mifsud has told the Washington Post (paywall) that he’d had “absolutely no contact with the Russian government,” and reiterated to the Daily Beast that, “I do not know anybody from the Russian government…I am an academic.”

That’s not quite true. Mifsud has had contact with multiple Russian officials, as Mother Jones has reported. He met the Russian ambassador to the UK, greeted a counsellor from the Russian embassy, invited a former Russian senator to his academy, and was listed (pdf, p.9) at a conference as having advised the Russian government on “international education issues.”

The idea that he could have tried to facilitate contacts with Russian officials is “not at all” far-fetched, says a former employee at the London Centre of International Law Practice (LCILP), where Mifsud held a senior role. “Everyone he’s dealt with is foreign ambassador of this country or that country.”

The London Centre of International Law Practice
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The LCILP’s office is an undecorated backroom in a handsome Georgian building in the heart of London’s legal district. (Max de Haldevang/Quartz)
The LCILP is a curious law firm. The same former employee told Quartz that “there was a lot of secrecy going on about what they do.” After several months there, the person said, “I hardly knew what kind of business they do.”

The source described the firm, which was founded in 2014, as constantly in search of, and seemingly never obtaining, big contracts. Mifsud’s role at LCILP was to bring in potential clients—ideally governments whom the company could advise on international law, the former employee said.

George Papadopoulos also spent three months at the company, before joining the Trump campaign. It’s not clear whether he and Mifsud connected through the firm. Papadopoulos and LCILP director Nagi Idris are friends on Facebook. Idris is a British national, originally from Sudan, and has been director of 18 companies at various times since 2001, according to Companies House filings.

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LCILP didn’t respond to multiple phone and email requests for comment on this story. When a Quartz reporter visited LCILP’s headquarters inside a handsome Georgian building, he found that the office amounted to four people working in an undecorated backroom, all of whom declined to comment.

LCILP has paid rent in a series of highly prestigious locations in London’s legal district, despite ending 2016 with debts of £329,000 (pdf, p.4)—a considerable sum for a company with just a handful of employees.

Shortly after rumors about Mifsud’s connection to Russia and the Trump campaign began swirling on Oct. 30, his profile was removed from the website, along with those of all other members of staff. (They are still available in a cached format.) Mifsud’s profile lists an impressive number of geographical areas of expertise as Europe, USA, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia.

The external advisor, who was peripherally involved with the company, described the firm as “a good bunch of people.” Courtney Barklem, a human rights lawyer who had planned to do pro bono work for the firm but never found time, described them as “great.”

The London Academy of Diplomacy
Mifsud’s wide-ranging career (pdf) also includes a stint at Malta’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, presidency of the Euro-Mediterranean University, and directorship of the little-known London Academy of Diplomacy.

His role at the London Academy of Diplomacy is also unclear—as is the Academy itself (paywall). The Academy seems to have, at various points, been associated with the University of East Anglia, Loughborough University, and Stirling University (where, a spokesman confirmed, Mifsud has been a professorial teaching fellow since May).

Mifsud has been listed as both a director and honorary director of the institution. When Quartz phoned Loughborough University London to ask whether Mifsud was employed at its Academy of Diplomacy and International Governance, it was told there was no record of him in the university’s files.

In a 2014 conversation at the Valdai Club, a Russian think tank with close ties to the government at which Putin speaks every year, Mifsud foreshadowed a Trumpian sentiment, suggesting that the US would soon tire of its role as global policeman. “I don’t think that the US has the energy to continue with this. So the global security and economy needs partners and who is better in this than the Russian Federation,” he reportedly said, at a time when the Ukraine war was raging.

The following year, he observed Kazakhstan’s presidential election and said (link in Russian) that the election “actively corresponded to all norms.” President Nursultan Nazarbayev, who has ruled the country since the fall of the Soviet Union, won almost 98% of the vote. In contrast, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe described Kazakhstan’s election (pdf, p.1) as having “limited voter choice,” “stifled public debate” due to a “restricted media environment,” and “serious procedural deficiencies and irregularities.”
 
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