Italy’s prime minister says that contrary to an apparently baseless right-wing theory promoted by President Trump, Italian intelligence agents “played no role” in events that led to the investigation of Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. election, reports the New York Times.
Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte told a news conference in Rome on Wednesday that Attorney General William Barr has met twice with Italy’s intelligence agencies after Barr asked them “to clarify their role in a 2016 meeting between a Maltese professor and a Trump campaign adviser on a small college campus in Rome, Link Campus University,” the Times says.
Barr has made several trips overseas to look into various conspiracy theories touted by Trump, an unusual assignment for a U.S. attorney general.
Special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the U.S. election says that after their 2016 meeting, the Maltese professor, Joseph Mifsud, told the Trump adviser, George Papadopolous, that Russia had obtained damaging information about Hillary Clinton in the form of “thousands of emails.”
“Mr. Trump and his associates have asserted, without evidence, that Mr. Mifsud is not a professor with links to Russia, as the special counsel’s report states, but a Western intelligence asset working as part of an Obama administration plot to spy on the Trump campaign,” the Times says. “That theory, once relegated to the far-right margins, has become a frequent talking point of Mr. Trump’s as he seeks to undermine the special counsel’s report.”
Papadopolous claims that Mifsud was actually a spy who was activated by the Italian prime minister at the time, Matteo Renzi, “at the behest of Mr. Obama to spread false information about Russian interference,” the Times says.
But Conte says that the head of Italian intelligence made it clear to Barr in a meeting on Sept. 27 “that our intelligence is unrelated to the affair.”