Hello and welcome to Four Corners.
Tonight - secrets, spies, and useful idiots.
In the second part of our special series
on Donald Trump and his Russia connections,
we bring you the story of two key players,
central to the allegations of collusion
between the Trump campaign and Russia.
It's a story of spycraft, secret sources,
and an unlikely tip-off from a former Australian foreign minister.
As the 2016 presidential campaign gathered steam,
two of Donald Trump's foreign policy advisers
became targets of Russian interest.
What happened next led to the opening of an FBI investigation
that has since transformed
into the special prosecutor's wide-reaching probe
of Russian interference in the US election.
The story of these men could come from the pages of a spy thriller,
except that it's real.
In the heart of Moscow
is the place that best represents what Vladimir Putin stands for.
The Lubyanka.
The headquarters of the old KGB.
Putin sees himself still very much as a member of that cooperation,
as a member of the brotherhood.
That brotherhood is now called the FSB,
but it still operates inside the Lubyanka.
Next door is a large toy store with a giant neon Pinocchio.
A reminder that in this city,
spies like Vladimir Putin have always been the puppet masters.
Whenever he can,
he has reaffirmed his allegiance to the Russian secret police.
He is still a KGB agent.
That's how he sees himself.
MAN: I think you have to remember how things work in Russia.
No big decisions are made.
They all go to one guy - Putin.
So certainly what Putin is doing
is waging warfare against the United States.
That wouldn't be going on without not just his acquiescence
or his blessing, but his active direction.
And again, remember his background as a KGB product.
James Clapper was Obama's director of national intelligence -
the most senior intelligence official in the US
during the election campaign.
There's a long history of their trying to involve themselves
and influence elections in our country since at least the 1960s,
but never, ever as aggressive, direct and multi-dimensional
as this interference in our election process.
They clearly were interested - the Russians were -
I think in penetrating the Trump campaign.
MAN: And the next president of the United States,
Mr Donald J Trump!
Throughout the 2016 campaign,
grassroots support for the rogue Republican candidate grew,
as Trump continued to welcome the endorsement of the Russian leader.
Putin called me a genius.
Putin said, "Donald Trump is a genius."
They all said... WOMAN: But you are!
Thank you. She said, "You are." That's very nice.
But Putin said good things about me.
He said, "He's a leader and there's no question about it.
"He's a genius." I love you all. Thank you, Ohio!
When news broke that Russia had hacked the emails
of the Democratic National Committee,
directly interfering in the election,
Trump not only defied political convention,
he flirted with notions of treason.
Russia, if you're listening,
I hope you are able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.
I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.
(AUDIENCE APPLAUDS)
By the time of the first presidential debate in late September, 2016...
How are you, Donald?
..Russian espionage during the campaign was a hot topic.
I was so shocked when Donald publicly invited Putin
to hack into Americans.
That is just unacceptable.
It's one of the reasons why 50 national security officials
who served in Republican administrations...
MAN: Your two minutes has expired. ..have said that Donald is unfit
to be the commander-in-chief.
I don't think anybody knows it was Russia
that broke into the DNC.
She's saying, "Russia, Russia, Russia."
But I don't... Maybe it was.
I mean, it could be Russia, but it could also be China.
Could also be lots of other people.
It also could be somebody sitting on their bed
that weighs 400 pounds, OK?
Only a week earlier,
as the candidates were doing their debate prep,
a former spy arrived discreetly in the US capital
on a mission involving the presidential election.
Not a Russian spy in this case, but an ex-MI6 agent and Russia expert,
now working as a corporate investigator.
His name was Christopher Steele.
MAN: He was hired in the spring of 2016 by Fusion GPS, a lobbying firm.
The ultimate client was the Democratic Party.
Chris didn't know that.
But the question was, what is Donald Trump's relationship with Russia?
So he funnelled this out to his secret sources and he waited.
Steele was an MI6 agent in Moscow in the 1990s.
As a private investigator, he'd worked on Russian cases for decades.
MAN: The former head of our Secret Service
had a very high opinion of him
and his professional colleagues that I know also had a good opinion
as to his professional honesty and commitment.
Like any senior...
..British intelligence officer, he would have had close relations
with various branches of US intelligence.
In mid-2016, Steele's sources had provided shocking answers
to the question about Trump's links to Russia.
What his sources were telling him
was that essentially there was a conspiracy.
First of all there was a real-time espionage operation
to try and affect the outcome of the 2016 election
and to push Donald Trump across the line.
Steele first passed the information to the FBI,
but believing they'd taken no action,
decided to meet with a hand-picked group of journalists,
including veteran Washington reporter Michael Isikoff.
It was at a private room at the Tabard Inn and it was all business.
I mean, Steele was there.
It was clear he took this matter very seriously.
I think that he thought he was sitting on
some bombshell information that deserved to get out.
The former spy had gathered raw intelligence into a dossier
about members of the Trump campaign and their links to Russia.
The information Isikoff focused on was about the recent trip to Moscow
of a Trump foreign policy adviser called Carter Page.
He told me that Page had meetings in Moscow
in which he discussed the Trump campaign
and help that the Russians could provide the Trump campaign
in exchange for which Trump would be favourably disposed
to lift sanctions on Russia.
But what really got my attention
was he said that he had reported this to the FBI
because he believed it was a national security matter.
It reached a source in the US Government
who was aware of the particular allegations
in this Steele dossier about Carter Page
and confirmed to me that the FBI was indeed taking this seriously,
was indeed investigating.
It was the first story to report that there was an investigation
by the US intelligence community
into somebody involved in the Trump campaign and their ties to Moscow.
(SIRENS WAILING)
The ritzy streets of Midtown Manhattan,
home to Trump's headquarters
and former Moscow banker and naval officer Carter Page.
Page was barely known in political circles
when Donald Trump named him as an adviser in March 2016.
Two years later,
he is still embroiled in the Trump-Russia investigation.
MAN: In every way, it's a witch-hunt.
There is zero basis for anything
related to the controversy surrounding myself.
What do you mean by "witch-hunt"?
Well, let's look at the definition of a witch-hunt, right.
This is a situation where you're trying to explain away
things that you don't expect to happen,
so you start attacking individuals.
And that's exactly the situation
that we have in this instance, right?
How did an obscure Russophile like Carter Page
get catapulted into Trump's advisory team?
Wouldn't it be great if we actually got along with Russia?
Am I wrong in saying that? Wouldn't it be great?
It would be really nice if we got along with Russia.
And wouldn't it be nice if we teamed up with Russia?
MAN: The boss, Mr Trump, wanted better relations with Russia
and he wanted that as one of his top priorities.
Putin said some very good things about me.
Putin is saying nice things about me. OK.
He's a strong guy.
JD Gordon was director
of the Trump campaign's national security committee.
In early 2016, the candidate came under pressure
to explain where his foreign policy advice was coming from.
President Trump was criticised
because he told the media the truth about his foreign policy advice.
He says he "watched the shows."
He got his information from people on Saturday shows, Sunday shows,
and he got criticised for that quite a bit.
So, he was basically put in a position
where he had to come up with a foreign policy team right away.
Trump brought a list of advisers
to an interview with the Washington Post.
TRUMP: Thank you.
In the chaos of the Trump campaign,
Carter Page wasn't a first pick.
Had the list that Senator Sessions and I had been working on
made it first to President Trump,
Carter Page obviously would not have been on that list
because we did not know who he was.
Every presidential campaign, and I am a veteran of 10,
forms a foreign policy advisory committee.
They have no authority to speak for the campaign.
They are zealous.
In the case of Carter Page, he's smart enough to know
that if you can get on the committee
that that's a marketable quality abroad,
and he's in the business of making money.
If he does it legally, there's nothing wrong with that.
You weren't a well-known figure in foreign policy circles
but you did have some substantial experience in Moscow.
Tell me about that.
You know, and this is another misnomer, right,
where people play up that I'm just the Russia guy, right,
and I think that was part of the reason
I was such a central target
when they wanted to start this witch-hunt, false storyline
about, you know, some corrupt intent or "collusion" with Moscow.
Well, here's someone who actually lived there and worked there.
Carter Page worked in Moscow for US bank Merrill Lynch in 2004
for three years.
At the time, Sergey Aleksashenko was chairman of Merrill Lynch Moscow.
He worked with Carter Page.
Aleksashenko was also deputy chairman of the Russian Central Bank.
He spent several years in Moscow
but he was not able to speak Russian fluently.
Did he stand out in the company?
No. No.
He left Merrill Lynch, it seems to me it was in 2007,
end of 2007, when he recognised he will not be promoted.
At least from the time I know him, he was very naive
and as I read what he said in the interviews, what he read in Moscow,
how he behaved himself in Moscow, he was very naive.
He said he was an informal adviser to the Kremlin.
Does that sound like the Carter you know?
Nothing close to the truth.
Look, he was...once again, he was a very, very medium-level guy
with no exceptional relationships.
I honestly am not sure I can sort him out in my own mind
whether he was doing something nefarious or was just naive.
I don't know.
But I do know that he was a matter of concern to the FBI
since he was on their scope since about 2013
for his interaction with known Russian operatives.
With no proper vetting of its hastily announced team,
the Trump campaign was unaware that only a few years earlier,
Carter Page was groomed as an asset by Russian spies.
The spies were based here
at the Russian Mission to the UN in New York.
The mission is used as cover for Russia's foreign spy service,
the SVR, to carry out espionage on US soil.
Deep inside the building is a special room used for secret communications.
In 2013, the FBI found a way to listen in.
According to the FBI, Russian spies used the secure room
to transmit their reports back to Moscow Centre.
It sounds like something out of a Cold War novel,
but the reality is deadly serious.
The FBI was able to get around the security here
and record two Russian agents discussing their latest target,
Carter Page.
The two agents were Victor Podobnyy and Igor Sporyshev.
"I also promised him a lot -
"that I have connections in the Trade Representation,
"meaning that you can push contracts.
"This is intelligence method to cheat.
"You promise a favour for a favour.
"You get the documents from him and tell him to go fuck himself."
How did Podobnyy approach you? How did you come across him?
This was another complete nothing of a story, right?
I met this junior diplomat, twenty-something-year-old guy,
and we had a chat at the Asia Society up on Park Avenue here.
And we had a chitchat, you know, no big deal, we exchanged cards,
we stayed in touch a little bit.
The way that they work, sometimes they'll spot someone
who looks like they might be potentially of some interest
and they'll take a look at him
and see whether the person has interesting access -
that is, to powerbrokers in the United States,
and then whether they might be suitable for clandestine operations.
In a series of meetings in New York,
Page gave Podobnyy information on the energy market
that was publicly available.
The level of interaction and engagement with him
and the types of things we talked about,
you know, if you talk about intelligence gathering,
let's just put it this way -
that it was at a much lower level
than my average student sitting in my classroom at NYU.
In the FBI transcripts of their conversations,
the spies focused on Carter Page's interest
in Russia's biggest energy company - Gazprom.
"He went to Moscow and forgot to check his inbox,
"but he wants to meet when he gets back.
"I think he's an idiot.
"He got hooked on Gazprom
"thinking that if they have a project, he could rise up.
"Maybe he can. I don't know.
"But it's obvious he wants to earn lots of money."
"Without a doubt."
"For now, his enthusiasm works for me."
They're talking about Gazprom, right?
I know some of the top people in that company.
If they were actually gonna bribe me or try to do some crazy scheme
to...for whatever purpose,
I don't know whatever conspiracy theory you wanna throw out there,
you think, you know, they might do that more directly
with some better contact
either in Moscow or London or something
rather than this 20-something-year-old kid
in New York.
The FBI decided it was time to step in.
They called Carter Page to a meeting at the Plaza Hotel near his office
to tell him the real identity of the man he was dealing with.
It must have been a surprise when the FBI came to see you.
I had been speaking to the CIA and FBI on countless occasions
over decades, right?
No big deal.
So, surprise? No, not really. But in this case...
People reach out to me, and I'm happy to help.
You know, it's similar to my volunteering in the Trump campaign.
Sure, though, Podobnyy was an agent for the SVR.
He was the real thing, and he was trying to cultivate you as an asset.
So that's a real thing.
He never cultivated anything as an asset,
so that's a complete misnomer.
The spies were indicted for espionage in 2015
but because they had diplomatic cover they were allowed to leave the US.
Carter Page wasn't accused of any wrongdoing
but he was now on the FBI's books as a potential Russian asset.
We have some big numbers coming in.
By the middle of 2016,
Donald Trump was close to clinching the Republican nomination.
Together we accomplished what nobody thought was absolutely possible.
Behind the scenes, Page was trying to insert himself into the campaign.
It's going to be beautiful. Remember that.
(CHEERING)
I told him I didn't need to hear anything he had to say about Russia,
'cause he had all these ideas and thoughts.
And I said, "Carter, look,
"Mr Trump's world view is fairly clear.
"He wants to have better relations with Russia.
"We don't need to get into the details of that.
"You don't need that for the campaign."
Page might have continued to fly under the media radar
had he not accepted an invitation during the campaign
to deliver a speech in Russia.
PAGE: I'd spoken at a lot of the top universities in Moscow
countless times before over the years,
and I was offered...you know, invited to come then.
I advised him against it.
I thought it would reflect poorly on the campaign,
and it would generate a lot of negative publicity.
He eventually went around me to the campaign chairman
and got permission anyway, and he went.
Uh, and we've been paying the price since then, unfortunately.
Page had been selected by the Russians
to give the commencement speech
at the New Economic School in Moscow,
the same event President Barack Obama spoke at in 2009.
Page's mostly turgid address
included one section on Russia bound to please his hosts.
PAGE: Thank you very much.
Washington and other Western capitals
have impeded potential progress
through their often-hypocritical focus
on ideas such as democratisation, inequality,
corruption and regime change.
On his journey home, Page emailed the Trump campaign,
boasting of the high-level contacts he'd made in Moscow,
fuelling speculation that there was more going on than a simple speech.
He wrote:
Is it possible that you were overstating your connections
in order to make yourself look good with the campaign?
We call it "big noting" in Australia.
So, I mean...what is the basis for your conspiracy theory?
It's not so much conspiracy theory,
I'm just asking whether you were exaggerating the contacts you had.
What I can explain to you
is the nature of the constant interrogation I've had
for two years now, right?
You are typical - no offence to you - but you're typical
of what I have to deal with all the time, right?
To be straight, what we're looking for is clarity, that's all.
So, there's a series of things that have been said about you...
What you're saying is taking a step away from clarity...
Well, let's go back to...
You're just throwing more mud in the water.
Let's go back to clarity. We'll get on...
Let's get on track to that. OK.
Because obviously what happened as a result of that particular trip
is that your life went really significantly off the rails.
No, but you're insinuating that that's me.
That's not my actions.
That's the fact that they have a photo of me in Moscow, right?
So, if you have this false theory out there
and you want to attack someone,
and you have someone who's a supporter of this individual,
and a photo of him in Moscow,
this is...wonderful jackpot, this is...
And that's what it's all about.
Dan Hoffman was one of America' top spies.
He was CIA station chief in Moscow.
He's back now in the CIA homeland of Virginia.
Hoffman recognises Page's potential value
as a target for Russian espionage.
MAN: If Carter Page had asked me before he went to Moscow,
"Hey, what should I be concerned about?"
I would have said, "You're under a microscope like you've never been.
"You are a person of interest, and they will be tracking you."
We don't know who was tracking Page on the Russian side,
but the former MI6 officer Christopher Steele
was being sent information about Page from his sources in Moscow.
Less than two weeks after Page's trip,
Steele filed a memo recording details of Page's visit to Moscow.
According to Steele, Page had met senior Russian officials,
including Igor Sechin,
head of Russian oil giant Rosneft,
Russia's second-largest state-owned energy company.
Rosneft is a huge... It's a big...
It's the biggest Russian oil company
that, OK, grabbed assets, stolen assets,
nationalised assets of other companies.
I would say it's maybe 35%, 37% of Russian oil production.
It's a really big company.
Rosneft HQ sits on the Moscow River overlooking the Kremlin.
CEO Igor Sechin is a close ally of Putin's.
Igor Sechin was personally targeted by the US sanctions
imposed after Russia's invasion of Ukraine,
the toughest sanctions ever imposed by the US on Russia.
Michael McFaul was ambassador to Moscow under Obama.
Igor Sechin had a great interest,
a profound interest in having those sanctions lifted?
Without question.
I mean, remember, he's on the sanctions list.
He can't travel to the United States.
And it's hard to be the CEO of the largest oil company in Russia
if you can't travel to the United States
when your chief partner is located in Houston.
Did you meet Igor Sechin on your visit to Moscow?
Never.
I never met him then, and I've never met him at any time in my life.
Steele's sources claimed
that Sechin offered energy deals for the US
if Trump would lift the sanctions
and a personal kickback for Carter Page.
What I can tell you for sure, without question
is there was never any discussion of any quid pro quo or anything,
I, myself or anyone I was supporting at the time could possibly do
to change that one particular policy,
which is sort of a piece of minutiae
in a much broader...you know, set of issues.
The sanctions issue isn't a minutiae issue, it's a big deal.
Whatever else we know,
we know that those people who are targeted by sanctions
would very much like those sanctions to be lifted,
so it is a significant subject.
To me, it is minutia so you're free to have your opinion.
I think now I'm free to have mine.
Page has repeatedly denied meeting Sechin in Moscow.
But under oath to a congressional committee,
he conceded he had met with another Rosneft official, Andrei Baranov.
So what? I mean, this is a complete joke.
We went to a party to watch the Euro Cup football match. Right?
You know, it's organised by a bank, a packed bar in Moscow.
There's tons of people there and we're watching a football game.
Portugal, I think, was playing Wales that day.
And everyone's focused on Ronaldo's goal. Right?
So that was sort of the topic of conversation.
We had a brief chat and so this is just sort of the desperation
of various DNC operatives to this day
trying to make something out of nothing.
So, did you discuss sanctions with Baranov?
You know, I can't say that...
I'm careful in terms of the wording, right?
Sanctions is a topic that people in the economy
talk about at some point.
Did it possibly come up? I have no recollection.
You know, I have no idea.
It may have been a couple of words in passing.
It's interesting because Page denied everything,
just sort of sweeping, "This is all nonsense.
"Nothing like this is true."
When he finally was forced to testify
before the House Intelligence Committee,
turns out that those denials were not quite as air-tight
as he initially suggested.
It does suggest that there was something real
that Steele was picking up on.
The former Moscow station chief
has a different theory about the information Steele collected.
I can tell you from my own experience,
it's extraordinarily difficult to collect intelligence inside Russia.
It's especially difficult to do it in that way
when the person who was collecting that information, Steele,
didn't travel himself to Russia.
The Russians might have been tracking him as well,
and certainly tracking his sources travelling inside to Russia
or trying to collect information inside Russia.
And then once they spotted that, if my theory is right,
then they would have used the dossier
as a conduit for their own disinformation.
He's not part of our national security or foreign policy.
When news of Page's trip to Russia broke in the media,
he was denounced by the Trump team.
Is he not part of the campaign anymore?
No. He's not.
He is certainly not part of the campaign that I am running,
meaning we don't have him.
We have a number of people, fabulous people, men and women,
as part of our national security and foreign policy team
and he is not among them.
GORDON: Unfortunately, Carter Page fell right into the trap,
he walked right into the lion's den, dragging the rest of us with him.
And deep state folks like James Comey,
they latched onto this piece of evidence
to say, "Oh ho! There could be collusion, Carter Page!"
You must have felt bad about the fact that...I think you said
that you'd caused embarrassment to the campaign.
I didn't cause embarrassment to the campaign.
Just to be clear. Mm-hm.
This is a complete smear
from people that were paid millions of dollars,
you know, this big-dollar funded propaganda campaign
to just tear someone down.
So it's pretty sad actually.
Page was investigated by the FBI but never charged with wrongdoing.
He was out of the campaign.
But another of Trump's foreign policy advisors
was targeted by Russian spies in a game with even higher stakes.
It's been a bitterly cold winter in Chicago,
another city where the Trump brand has made its mark.
This is the hometown
of Donald Trump's former foreign policy advisor George Papadopoulos...
..one of the central characters in the case for collusion.
HOFFMAN: The question you always ask
is, "Are they witting or unwitting of Russian interest in them?"
Papadopoulos may not have been witting
of Russian intelligence interest in him.
Papadopoulos was arrested last October for lying to the FBI
about his Russian contacts during the campaign.
He said that, "When I was arrested I gave your number to the agents.
"Like, say, please call her to say what has happened to me."
His wife Simona, a lawyer, is telling his story, because he can't.
Papadopoulos is cooperating with Mueller's investigation
of Trump campaign officials.
When time is right, he will share his own experience.
So as far as I know,
Russia was a priority
and they were informed of every initiative he would take.
And his purpose was to look bigger and to please his bosses.
George was a young guy in his 20s, a very ambitious guy.
But he really didn't have the qualifications
to be on the National Security Advisory Committee.
Just like Carter Page, Papadopoulos was plucked from obscurity
to join Donald Trump's team of advisers.
I inherited George and I inherited Carter and the others.
So, my job was to manage them
and to make sure that they didn't embarrass the campaign,
didn't embarrass Mr Trump.
All talk, no action.
In the end, what happened to Papadopoulos
went way beyond embarrassment.
Papadopoulos's story takes us to London,
the location of so many Russian spy stories
from the Cold War to the present day.
Here in 2016,
soon after he was named as an adviser to the Trump campaign,
Papadopoulos was cultivated by a Maltese professor, Joseph Mifsud,
who boasted of high-level Kremlin contacts.
He's not someone that Papadopoulos
would have been worried about meeting.
What you don't realise is that behind that guy
maybe there are some nefarious people with some nefarious aims.
Until this name come up,
which is Joseph Mifsud,
at the time I didn't know it was the genesis
of the Russian investigation - I didn't know any of that.
(SPEAKS RUSSIAN)
Professor Joseph Mifsud taught at universities in the UK and Europe
and ran an organisation
called the London Centre of International Law Practice.
Simona worked here for Mifsud.
They never paid me and they said, "Don't worry,
"you have to think big," they told me.
Joseph Mifsud said you have to think big,
you don't have to think about the salary.
I thought everything was a facade for something different.
I thought everything was extremely unclear and unprofessional.
And my feeling were he was the most shady person I ever met.
Did you have any sense of his connections to Russia at that point?
Uh, yes, because he was constantly in Moscow.
Professor Mifsud's first offer to Papadopoulos
was to use his connections in the Kremlin
to broker a meeting between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump.
He wish he could organise such a meeting.
Between Trump and Putin? Yes.
Excited by the prospect,
he took Mifsud's offer to a meeting of the Foreign Policy Committee,
headed by future attorney-general Jeff Sessions
with the candidate Donald Trump.
GORDON: The one meeting we did have
with President Trump, in March of 2016,
George floated the idea of a meeting with Putin and Mr Trump.
And that meeting idea was shot down by Senator Sessions,
and the Senator asked us not to ever speak about it again,
'cause it was a bad idea for a lot of reasons.
There are contradictory accounts of what happened in this meeting.
Others at the meeting say this idea was dismissed,
but Papadopoulos has said something different.
He's told Mueller's investigators
that he believes he got a green light.
What was his understanding
about whether it was encouraged to continue?
I can't answer it straight, this question,
because, again, it's the hot topic of the investigation,
but I would give my personal opinion,
which is it's very unlikely that a young foreign policy adviser
would take an initiative or put forward an initiative
without the blessing of the campaign.
Papadopoulos says his efforts to make contact with the Kremlin
were approved by senior campaign officials.
He checked everything with the campaign.
He wasn't running around doing it himself?
No. Absolutely not. No, never.
Steve Bannon definitely, Michael Flynn.
Yes, he was touch with them. Bryan Lanza.
And all of them - Steve Bannon, Lanza, Flynn -
all encouraged him to continue his liaison with Russians?
Yes.
He was trying to set up a meeting between Putin and Trump.
He never was stopped in this purpose.
On April 26th, Mifsud invited Papadopoulos to breakfast
at a hotel in London's business district.
This was two months before the news broke
about the Russian attack on the Democratic National Committee.
Professor Mifsud had just returned from a trip to Russia.
He had astonishing news.
Over breakfast, Mifsud told Papadopoulos
that he'd met high-level Russian officials on his trip to Moscow.
Those officials, he said, had dirt on candidate Hillary Clinton
in the form of thousands of emails.
It's not clear where Mifsud got his information
or why he passed it on to the young American,
but the information was correct.
It seems likely that the Russians targeted George Papadopoulos
to pass that information back to the Trump campaign.
HOFFMAN: There's that possibility the Russians were throwing this out
as, you know, a little bit of churn in the water,
a little blood in the water there, for the sharks to come out.
And it would have been the kind of thing
that they would have been happy to give up,
and it would have served their purposes.
And the best way for Vladimir Putin,
the best way to soil our democratic process,
is link it in some conspiratorial way back to the Kremlin.
Did George tell the campaign what Mifsud had told him?
This is the objective of the investigation going on.
So, there is secrecy out of that. I can't talk about it.
For the special prosecutor looking for evidence of collusion
this piece of the puzzle could prove to be critical.
We don't know who in the campaign
Papadopoulos told about the Russian stolen emails,
but we do know he passed on the information
to another contact in London soon afterwards.
At a wine bar in South Kensington,
Papadopoulos met Australia's high commissioner, Alexander Downer.
How did he come to meet Alexander Downer?
I think he was introduced to him by his assistant.
Downer's colleague from the High Commission
organised and attended the meeting - a witness to the conversation.
It's been widely reported that Downer and Papadopoulos were drunk.
Both men deny it.
GORDON: I don't know how many they had to drink, the two guys -
the ambassador and George.
It basically fed into this witch-hunt
of here's this kid in his 20s
mouthing off to this Australian ambassador
who he probably shouldn't have even been with in the first place.
Both of them over drinks.
And then that gets through the Australian intelligence
to the US national intelligence agencies.
Papadopoulos told Downer that the Russians had dirt on Hillary Clinton
and were planning to use it.
Downer promptly cabled the startling information back to Canberra.
After careful deliberation,
it was passed on to the American authorities...
..prompting the FBI to open an investigation
and send agents to London to interview Downer.
So, the now far-reaching investigation
into whether Trump or his associates colluded with the Kremlin
may have started here at the Kensington wine rooms
with Australia's former foreign minister.
You know, opening up an investigation
about a presidential candidate's campaign in the midst of a campaign,
that's a big step to take.
And the FBI is going to be cautious about doing something like that.
It doesn't necessarily mean that they think that
there's active collaboration by people in the Trump camp,
although you can't rule that out,
but you want to understand
what a major foreign adversary is doing on your soil.
Last year, six months into the new presidency,
after a summer holiday with Simona, Papadopoulos flew back to the US.
He was still hoping to secure a job in the Trump Administration.
I was with my sister in Rome, and just waiting for his flight to land.
Then he was messaging me from the shuttle train.
And then he tell me,
"I see somebody staring at me in a suit and tie,
"and it's quite weird, weird look."
I thought it was paranoia. That maybe he's jet-lagged.
The man in the red tie was an FBI agent.
He arrested Papadopoulos and took his phone.
And then silence? Yeah.
They took him to jail, then to the courtroom -
all this in the space probably of 48 hours.
And he was literally scared to death.
MAN: To the best of my knowledge,
George Papadopoulos never had a Donald Trump email address
ever in his life.
He was a volunteer, like the tens of thousands of others.
As the bearer of another scandal linked to Russia,
when news of Papadopoulos's charges broke,
he was immediately denounced by the President
and his former campaign colleagues.
MAN: He was the coffee boy.
He had nothing to do with the campaign.
And all of this contact with alleged Russians
is something completely beyond the scope of his volunteer duties.
He wasn't the coffee boy, obviously,
because then that fell into the narrative of, well,
if he's the coffee boy, why is he sitting in a meeting
with the current attorney-general
and the current president, right in the middle?
George was constantly in touch with the high-level officials.
He helped organising the meeting between Trump and el-Sisi,
the Egyptian president.
So, I mean, of course this is not a task of a coffee boy.
He really was approved in anything he did.
He was not a freelancer taking initiative on his own.
George Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI.
He surrendered his passport and is waiting for sentencing.
For now, he's bound by his deal with the Mueller investigation
to remain silent.
George is the person who was the target
identified by Mifsud to offer those hacked emails.
He decided to cooperate with the FBI
and is putting his knowledge fully at disposal of the government.
So, as I said, he's a piece of the puzzle, but he's an important piece,
and his contribution is going to make a difference.
GORDON: This is the witch-hunt of the century,
and it's a hoax meant to destroy the President
and dozens of people around him.
It's sickening, and the people who are doing these things -
the media and the members of Congress -
really need to be held accountable.
You saw your nation convulsed by division
caused by the Watergate Scandal.
How does this compare?
CLAPPER: I think what's going on now makes that pale.
That was purely a domestic thing.
We didn't have the involvement of a foreign adversary -
our prime foreign adversary, Russia, in that -
and so, to me, it's much more worrisome.
So, these are dangerous times?
They are.
You can find more of our investigation online,
on our website or the ABC News YouTube page,
where you'll find extended interviews including one with Carter Page.
Next week, Moscow rules -
we meet the woman at the centre of the most dramatic allegations
in the Russia investigation,
and we talk to the spymasters about Putin's operation
to target America.
We'll leave you with a preview.
ALL: Welcome to Russia!
(IN ANOTHER LIFE BY EMIN PLAYS)
Follow the money, follow the sex.
Hello.
MAN: Knowing his tastes and the fact that he's an extreme germophobe,
the idea of him being involved in a kinky scene I find unlikely.
ISIKOFF: I mean, it's worth knowing that sexual kompromat
was something very much in the FSB's play book.
HOFFMAN: What I think Vladimir Putin was doing
was deliberately leaving a trail of breadcrumbs
from Trump Tower to the Kremlin.
GESSEN: Some funky lawyer was being sent to Donald Trump
to try to seduce him into thinking that they could help his campaign.
MAN: I wouldn't call her just a lawyer.
What I would say is that she's a Russian operative.
I have come a long way to ask this question.
Are you a spy, or an agent for the Russian Government?
Captions by Red Bee Media
Copyright Australian Broadcasting Corporation