Ever since he was elected, there’s been a cloud hanging over Donald Trump related to a possible conspiracy he and others in his 2016 campaign were involved in with Russia. But it turns out there was another country that also provided assistance to make certain Trump became the 45th president.
On Tuesday, during an interview given by Simona Mangiante, the wife of George Papadopoulos, who has already pled guilty of lying to federal investigators about his role in the Russian collusion plot, we got a new piece of the puzzle which suggests that Russia wasn’t alone in trying to swing the election to Trump. Mangiante commented:
“[George] pled guilty because [Mueller’s prosecutors] threatened to charge him with being an Israeli agent.”
What did she say? An Israeli agent?!
As former NSA analyst John Schindler writes in The Observer, Papadopoulos was known to be working with Israel:
“Before joining the Trump campaign in early March 2016, Papadopoulos was a self-styled energy consultant who was known for taking strongly pro-Israeli positions in print. To boot, during the 2016 campaign, he met with an Israeli settler leader and assured him that Donald Trump, if elected president, would take a favorable view of Israeli settlements in the West Bank.”
And there are other connections between Trump, Israel, and the Russian plan to use social media and other forms of online anti-Clinton sabotage to benefit Trump:
“Quite a few of the shady figures close to the president and his business affairs are American Jews of Soviet heritage who possess connections to Israel. Felix Sater and Michael Cohen are only the best-known of this dubious crew. Those men are also connected to Chabad of Port Washington, a Jewish community center on Long Island that is part of the worldwide Chabad movement—which just happens to possess close links to Vladimir Putin and his Kremlin. The recent BBC report that Cohen accepted at least $400,000 from the Ukrainian government to set up a substantive meeting with President Trump last year included the tantalizing detail that this dirty deal ran through Chabad of Port Washington.”
What does all of this tell us? For one thing, it would seem to point to the 2016 election being both a Russian and Israeli effort to guarantee Trump became president:
“Based on the available evidence to date, Team Trump’s 2016 links to shadowy Israelis appear just as troubling as those to dodgy Russians—indeed, in some cases they are the very same people. As a veteran counterspy in our Intelligence Community whom I’ve known for years recently asked me with a wry smile, ‘What if the real secret of the Trump campaign isn’t that it’s a Kremlin operation, rather an Israeli operation masquerading as a Russian one?'”
And while it’s true that Israel is indeed a close ally of the United States, if they laid their thumb on the scales to help Trump get elected, that would be interference with an American election no matter how you slice it. It could also tell us that there are more indictments yet to come from Robert Mueller, and that the Israeli connection might well wind up being the one that brings the tyrannical Trump administration to an end. How’s that for irony?