JOSEPH MIFSUD Where are you?

All Roads Lead To Stirling, Scotland

Where Evidence Links

Joseph Mifsud to

Clair Smith

Redacted from copy by Elizabeth Vos at https://disobedientmedia.com April 4, 2018. Follow the link to read original text.

Joseph Mifsud strongly denied claims that he was associated with Russian intelligence, telling Italian newspaper Repubblica that he was a member of the European Council on Foreign Relations and the Clinton Foundation.

Mifsud had a close working relationship with Claire Smith of the UK Joint Intelligence Committee and eight-year member of the UK Security Vetting panel. Joseph Mifsud had been photographed standing next to Claire Smith at Mifsud’s LINK campus in Rome. Claire Smith had been attending a: “…Training program on International Security which was organised by Link Campus University and London Academy of Diplomacy during October, 2012.

First, the training program Smith attended with high-ranking members of the Italian military was organized by the London Academy of Diplomacy, where Joseph Mifsud served as Director, as noted by The Washington Post. That Claire Smith was training military and law enforcement officials alongside Mifsud in 2012 during her tenure as a member of the UK Cabinet Office Security Vetting Appeals Panel, which oversees the vetting process for UK intelligence placement.

The connection between Mifsud and Smith does not end at bumped elbows in a photograph. Mifsud’s LinkedIn profile lists the University of Stirling as a place of occupation in connection with his service as Director of the London Academy of Diplomacy (LAD), where Claire Smith served as a visiting professor from 2013-2014. Claire Smith was a member of the UK Cabinet Office Appeals Board from May 2009 until April 2017, and a Visiting Professor at the University of Stirling between 2013 and 2014 in Scotland. Claire Smith also hosted a seminar titled “Making Sense of Intelligence” at the University of Stirling.

A particularly compelling factor indicating that Mifsud’s working relationship with Claire Smith suggests his direct connection with UK intelligence is Smith’s membership of the UK’s Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), a supervisory body overseeing all UK intelligence agencies. The JIC is part of the Cabinet Office and reports directly to the Prime Minister. The Committee also sets the collection and analysis priorities for all of the agencies it supervises.

Claire Smith is not the only British official associated with Mifsud. He was a speaker at an event by the Central European Initiative alongside former British diplomat Charles Crawford, whose postings included Moscow, Sarajevo, Belgrade and Warsaw. Crawford is listed as a visiting Professor with the same London Academy of Diplomacy (LAD) where Mifsud served as Director, associated with Stirling University in Scotland. This adds more weight to the idea that Mifsud is a familiar figure among the upper echelons of the UK intelligence and foreign policy establishment.

* Mifsud allegedly discussed that Russia has ‘dirt’ on Clinton in the form of ‘thousands of emails’ with George Papadopoulos in London in April 2016.

* The following month, Papadopoulos spoke with Alexander Downer, Australia’s High Commissioner based in London, about the alleged Russian dirt on Clinton while they were drinking at a Kensington bar, according to The Times.

* In late July 2016, Downer shared his tip with Australian intelligence officials who forwarded it to the FBI.

Alexander Downer is also a member of the advisory board of London-based Hakluyt & Co, an opposition research and intelligence firm set up in 1995 by three former UK intelligence officials and described as “a retirement home for ex-MI6 [British foreign intelligence] officers, but it now also recruits from the worlds of management consultancy and banking”. That seems to be a counterpart to the U.S. organization set up by radio entrepreneur Gordon McLendon of Dallas, with his friend and CIA agent, David Atlee Phillips of Fort Worth, Texas.

Yet another UK link is to British music promoter Robert Goldstone, who was reported to have organized a meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and Russian nationals in June 2016. In the email chain setting up the Trump Tower meeting, both before and after the meeting, is the originating story suggesting collusion with Russia, But Goldstone later admitted to having "hyped" those emails to suggest something that was not true.

As soon as Goldstone's name emerged in the press, Goldstone – like Christopher Steele and Joseph Mifsud – went into ‘hiding’. Multiple press reports claimed he had done so out of fear for his safety, a claim also made about Christopher Steele when his name first became public. The UK government is reported to have issued a 'D Notice' concerning Steele and his relationship to British Intelligence.

The New York Times summed up the contents of Christopher Steele’s dossier: “Mr. Steele produced a series of memos that alleged a broad conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russian government to influence the 2016 election on behalf of Mr. Trump. The memos also contained unsubstantiated accounts of encounters between Mr. Trump and Russian prostitutes, and real estate deals that were intended as bribes.”

Steele was paid $168,000 by Glenn Simpson’s company Fusion GPS, who were in turn paid by Mark Elias of law firm Perkins Coie, lawyers to both the Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC.

In his thread on the role of UK intelligence interference in the 2016 US Presidential race, Julian Assange of WikiLeaks noted that Christopher Steele used Sir Andrew Wood (former UK ambassador to Moscow), to funnel the 'dossier' to Senator John McCain.

According to The Guardian, Robert Hannigan, former head of British intelligence agency GCHQ, announced that he would resign his leadership position just three days after the inauguration of President Trump, on 23 January 2017. Jane Mayer in her profile of Christopher Steele published in the New Yorker also noted that Hannigan had flown to Washington D.C. to personally brief the then-CIA Director John Brennan about the allegations being made against President Donald Trump.