So you wanna bet someone offered her money??
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She’s Italian and a lawyer. Used to work for the EU, based in Brussels, helping estranged parents retain (or in some cases obtain) parental rights across international borders.
Not to me — which may only mean that she’s a good one.
She was all over TV in June asking Trump for exactly that.
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If Papado’s wised up to her game—my God, he met her through Mifsud, I just read—then they may not be living together as a traditional man and wife. I can’t speak for him, but for me, being a Russian spy who doesn’t actually love or even very much like me was always a deal-breaker.
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For whatever it’s worth, Gates does not have the unfettered right to withdraw his guilty plea at this point. The court already accepted that plea last October. Per Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure 11(d), acceptance of the plea means Papadopolous would have to demonstrate to the court “a fair and just reason for requesting the withdrawal.” It’s questionable whether “Deep State conspiracy, derp derp!” would meet that standard. He would be an idiot to attempt something like this, but then again he did think that joining the Trump campaign on the basis of his experience in model U.N. cosplay was a good idea.
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Ms. Mangiante (sissimang@gmail.com)
I will be very happy taking your husband’s case and being
remembered by #History. I have a law degree from Trump
University, and expect to be admitting to the bar in Granada
in “a very short period of time” (ha ha). I look forward
to meeting you. You are very pretty. Your husband, no.
Sincerely,
Jake Spidermonkey
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I get that, but the absurdity of it all just cracks me up. Bitch, pick up the phone and call him. Tell him over dinner. Why are you bringing this to Ari Melber? What’s he going to do other than quote some rap lyrics and tell you, “We’ll have to leave it there” and then make fun of you in the next segment?
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I think it’s very likely Mangiante is a Russian asset or worse. Why did she marry a man with such a grim future? It’s surely not going to be easy for Pop to pull out of his guilty plea. I suspect Mangiante may be part of a large plot to discredit the entire Mueller investigation and have the Supreme Court declare the entire operation unconstitutional. Roger Stone’s associate, Andrew Miller, is doing just that with his appeal of his subpoena from Mueller. I’m beginning to feel uncomfortable in my tinfoil hat as I consider the conspiracy to elect and protect Trump may be vaster than I ever imagined.
And WTF is this statement by Sen Richard Burr on John Brennan about? Lindsey Graham totally agrees.
Statement from Senate Intel Chairman Richard Burr on Comments by Former CIA Director John Brennan
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, Senator Richard Burr (R-NC), Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, issued the following statement on comments made in The New York Times by former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) John Brennan:
“Director Brennan’s recent statements purport to know as fact that the Trump campaign colluded with a foreign power. If Director Brennan’s statement is based on intelligence he received while still leading the CIA, why didn’t he include it in the Intelligence Community Assessment released in 2017? If his statement is based on intelligence he has seen since leaving office, it constitutes an intelligence breach. If he has some other personal knowledge of or evidence of collusion, it should be disclosed to the Special Counsel, not The New York Times.
“If, however, Director Brennan’s statement is purely political and based on conjecture, the president has full authority to revoke his security clearance as head of the Executive Branch.
Are nearly all the Republicans compromised by the Russians? John Brennan has not spoken about anything I don’t already know, and I do not have a security clearance. The most dangerous witness against Trump is Trump himself in his own words.
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I don’t know from tradition but they do live together, in Chicago.
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Plus Mangiante is on Twitter asking for a pro bono lawyer to represent Pop.
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Maybe she’s a wannabe Carter Page. I keep saying, we underestimate the power of the American insanity over celebrity in this whole mess, or we understand it so implicitly we rarely mention it. It’s like the moon in the daytime—often visible, rarely mentioned.
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Well …
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You beat me to it.
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Probably thousands of women ask themselves that every day.
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If she’s a GRU case officer, the quality of their honey traps have gone down dramatically since the 1960s and 1970s. If I were Putin, I’d be having a screaming fit at my intelligence folks. Granted, who would waste the KGB first string on someone like Pappadopoulos?
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This Guardian article describes how she got mixed up with Mifsud. (Sorry, don’t know how to copy a link)
"Amid these questions, Mangiante’s own relationship with Mifsud has gotten lost in the shuffle. A native of Caserta, near Naples, she insists that she never played a part in Mifsud’s murky world. But she acknowledged to the Guardian that she may have inadvertently been sucked into a Russian intelligence plot.
Long before Mifsud and Papadopoulos ever met, it was Mangiante who was introduced to the mystery professor while she was working in Brussels, in the European parliament, as an attorney specialising in child abduction cases.
She was introduced to Mifsud in about 2012 by Gianni Pittella, a well-known Italian MEP who in 2014 became president of the Socialists and Progressive Democrats group. “I always saw Mifsud with Pittella,” she says. Pittella had no comment.
Mangiante worked for two high-powered European parliament officials, Mairead McGuinness – a vice-president – and McGuinness’s Italian predecessor Roberta Angelilli. She was also an administrator to the home affairs committee under the presidency of Martin Schulz, then a German MEP and now the leader of Germany’s Social Democrats.
When her contract expired, Pittella suggested she go to work for Mifsud in London, a city she loved. The professor offered her a job in 2016 at the important-sounding London Centre of International Law Practice. She was recruited, she now thinks, because of her extensive Brussels “contacts book”.
The job had looked like a promising career move. The reality, however, was a let-down.
The office in a smart Georgian terrace overlooking Lincoln’s Inn Fields in London was distinctly cramped. There was a single table, around which Mangiante and her colleagues perched. They brought their own laptops. The place was “very messy”, Mangiante said. “It felt like something was weird.”
Mifsud’s diplomatic activity, Mangiante now believes, was a facade. “I never met any Russians there … But the centre certainly wasn’t what it pretended to be.”
She described Mifsud as “quite intelligent”. He spoke to her in fluent Italian, had a good sense of humour and boasted of his political connections around the world.
She added, however: “He is sneaky, someone you can’t read. He was vague about everything. He wouldn’t answer questions directly. I could never understand what was behind it.”
At around the same time that she started the job, in September 2016, Mangiante received a message on the LinkedIn social network from Papadopoulos. Papadopoulos had worked at the law centre briefly before joining Trump’s campaign.
“He said ‘I see you work at the centre’. He told me he liked my picture,” she said. The exchange was “really casual”. An attempt to meet fell through. She says she never mentioned Papadopoulos to Mifsud. Nor did they discuss Russia.
Meanwhile, Mangiante was not happy with her work in London. The entire institution seemed “fake”, “artificial”, with Mifsud interested solely in organising political meetings. “I didn’t smell a culture of academia,” she said.
In late October 2016 Mangiante fired off an angry note to Mifsud, complaining she had been tricked into working for nothing. She was paying rent on her shared South Kensington flat from savings.
Mifsud replied at 1.30am on 29 October 2016 from his Stirling University email address, writing in Italian:
“Dear Simona,
I hope you are fine … I was in Moscow … Now I’m in London. Can we meet in person? I’m here until Tuesday night.
A hug.
J”
They never spoke again.
Mangiante quit her post there after three months, in November 2016. Mangiante says a colleague of Mifsud’s promised her a £2,500-a-month salary but paid her nothing. Her official iPhone stopped working.
Mifsud has told the Daily Telegraph he has nothing to do with the Kremlin and denies wrongdoing. “I have a clear conscience,” he said. Still, there are photos of him meeting a succession of Russian dignitaries, including Moscow’s ambassador to the UK, Alexander Yakovenko.
In the meantime, Mangiante’s romance with George began. After several unsuccessful efforts to get together in London, they met in March 2017 in New York. They hit it off, began dating and fell in love, she says.
By this point the FBI had interviewed Papadopoulos in connection with the collusion investigation. Papadopoulos gave federal agents a false account of his meetings with Mifsud. After an initial interview in January 2017, he deleted his Facebook account and changed his cellphone number.
Then the story broke. Soon after Papadopoulos’s indictment and guilty plea became public, Mifsud vanished. He hasn’t been seen at the Link Campus university in Italy, where he was an academic visitor. The London Academy of Diplomacy and the law centre have closed.
On the day Papadopoulos pleaded guilty, Mangiante was at her boyfriend’s family home in Chicago. There was a ring at the door. A casually dressed man informed her that he was a federal agent. He was serving her with a subpoena from Mueller.
“I was shocked. I was scared and nervous,” she said. “I’m a lawyer myself. I couldn’t see any grounds for that.”
The letter was from the “special counsel’s office, Department of Justice”. It said that “a grand jury is conducting an investigation into a possible violation of federal criminal laws”. It asked for her “cooperation in this matter” and to make herself available for interview. One of Mueller’s assistants, Aaron Zelinsky, signed off with the words “very truly yours”.
Mangiante decided not to hire a lawyer after discovering they cost $800 an hour. She turned up alone at the Chicago FBI headquarters – “a huge intimidating grey building”.
On the walls were posters of America’s most wanted violent criminals. She was shown into a small room by the FBI agent who had served the subpoena, this time wearing a tie. With him was a female colleague.
Among other things she would not discuss with the Guardian, the FBI was interested in her relationship with Papadopoulos. Was it genuine? “They asked: “Do you love him?” I replied: “Yes”. They replied: ‘He [Papadopoulos] is lucky.’”
Recently Mangiante has given US TV interviews defending Papadopoulos, who is back in Chicago on bail. Her active media strategy is not without risk, with some wondering why she has chosen to speak out. Sceptical Twitter users accused her of sounding Russian during an appearance on ABC News – an idea she finds ridiculous.
Mangiante says she has been to Russia once – for a child protection conference in St Petersburg – and never visited Moscow.
Her parents – a professor and a teacher of English – are “scared” about her predicament, which she too finds somewhat bizarre. “I just happened to meet all these people,” she says.
Mangiante says she felt compelled to do something after senior Republicans dismissed Papadopoulos as a “coffee boy” who had exaggerated his role.
This is a lie, she says. “He was involved at the highest level. He wrote speeches for Trump. He set up the candidate’s meeting with Egypt’s President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi,” she says.
Of Papadopoulos’s decision to cooperate with the FBI, she says: “He’s put himself on the right side of history. It’s quite brave. He wasn’t obliged to cooperate. He decided to cooperate.”
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Don’t have time to pull the threads out, so will just drop these here.
As an aside, has anyone noticed how much money and how many big names seem to be connected to international for-profit “universities” and “academies”? I’ve wondered, too, if they’re being used to insert future spies into Western countries.
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Here’s a thread that splits off in a couple of different directions, both of which hit on exactly that.
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Ever heard her speak? There’s been a lot of speculation online about her diction, in both English and Italian. Turns out her English sounds Eastern European and her Italian sounds like a non-native speaker (i.e. no detectable regional diction/accent).
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He wasn’t. That’s true. He could have simply gone to jail for lying to the FBI. But he freely decided to cooperate, with “free” really the key syllable in there.
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Well, right. He pled guilty, in front of a judge, who would have quizzed him about understanding what he was doing, and he’d have had to do that himself, not through his attorneys.
And then he cooperated with Mueller’s investigators, so, quite likely, he has already confessed, and offered evidence of his own guilt in any number of other crimes. I’m not at all clear on how you take that back, without, you know, ending up in prison for life.
It is worth noting, I think, that Mike Flynn Junior has been, for months and months now, on a similar tear about his father. Claiming that his father never lied to the FBI, and all the charges are against him are phony. As if the SIGINT from his father’s conversations with the Russian Ambassador did not exist, and, as if, Flynn had not in fact, been cooperating with Mueller’s team for the past many, many months.
Maybe they are just trying to gaslight the Lying Orange Urine-Stain into pardoning them… and, at this point, who cares? It’s not like they haven’t already done about as much damage to the Russian operation as they know how to do… Mueller’s Team would not be letting them off the hook, otherwise.
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