NY Times FAKE NEWS alert: Paper claims ‘Russia Papadopoulos bombshell’ started Russia ‘collusion’ probe, not dossier, but it FALLS APART within HOURS

(National Sentinel) Fake News: On Saturday The New York Times published what it considered a ‘bombshell’ revelation: That George Papadopoulos, a young foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign, was the individual who essentially got the “Russian collusion” investigation started, rather than the widely refuted “Trump dossier.”

“During a night of heavy drinking at an upscale London bar in May 2016, George Papadopoulos, a young foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign, made a startling revelation to Australia’s top diplomat in Britain: Russia had political dirt on Hillary Clinton,” the paper reported.

“About three weeks earlier, Mr. Papadopoulos had been told that Moscow had thousands of emails that would embarrass Mrs. Clinton, apparently stolen in an effort to try to damage her campaign,” the paper continued, adding:

Exactly how much Mr. Papadopoulos said that night at the Kensington Wine Rooms with the Australian, Alexander Downer, is unclear. But two months later, when leaked Democratic emails began appearing online, Australian officials passed the information about Mr. Papadopoulos to their American counterparts, according to four current and former American and foreign officials with direct knowledge of the Australians’ role.

The hacking and the revelation that a member of the Trump campaign may have had inside information about it were driving factors that led the F.B.I. to open an investigation in July 2016 into Russia’s attempts to disrupt the election and whether any of President Trump’s associates conspired.

Republicans in Congress have long asserted that the FBI used the unsubstantiated Trump dossier to obtain a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant from the secretive FISA court in order to justify launching a counterintelligence investigation against members of President Donald J. Trump’s campaign in 2016.

“Here’s what I think — I think Peter Strozk … Mr. Super Agent at the FBI, I think he’s the guy who took the application to the FISA court and if that happened, if this happened, if you have the FBI working with a campaign, the Democrats’ campaign, taking opposition research, dressing it all up and turning it into an intelligence document so they can take it to the FISA court so they can spy on the other campaign, if that happened, that is as wrong as it gets,” Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, told Fox Business earlier this month.

Strzok was involved in the Trump and Clinton email probes last year, and for a time was a member of special counsel Robert Mueller’s team looking into alleged Trump-Russia collusion. He was let go by Mueller over the summer after texts implicating a potential plot to keep Trump out of office surfaced.

As for Papadopoulos, he pleaded guilty over the summer to lying to the FBI and is now a cooperating witness for Mueller. But others pointed out that the information contained in the Times report was previously known.

Also, several other media outlets openly questioned the timeline of Papadopoulos’ questioning and indictment by the FBI — in the February 2017 timeframe — versus when the FBI actually obtained the FISA warrant, which was in the fall of 2016.

“So: 1) If Papadopoulos actions drove FBI probe, why wait til nearly Feb 2017 to interview him? If done to keep probe quiet before election, why wait more than two months after vote?” Byron York of the Washington Examiner tweeted.

Also, The Last Refuge tweeted out a series of statements and information directly refuting what the Times reported regarding the former Trump campaign staffer, the FBI’s inquiry timeline, and other pertinent details that run counter to the paper’s claims.

Other critics of the NY Times story note that it appeared as congressional committees are closing in on the real uses of the dossier by the Obama-era FBI, which was paid for in large part by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee.

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