- The DNC claimed Friday that Joseph Mifsud might be dead.
- The allegation touched off concerns that the mysterious professor, who allegedly told George Papadopoulos that Russians had Clinton emails, had been murdered.
- But a close associate of Mifsud’s calls the claim “nonsense.”
The Democratic National Committee (DNC) on Friday floated a startling possibility: Joseph Mifsud, the mysterious professor who allegedly told former Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos about hacked Clinton emails, could be dead.
The DNC made the statement in legal papers filed in a lawsuit related to hacks of its computer systems during the 2016 election cycle. The filing states that all defendants in the case had been served with the lawsuit, “with the exception of Mifsud (who is missing and may be deceased).”
“An investigator involved in our efforts to serve him was told Mifsud might be deceased,” the DNC told reporters who asked about the claim.
But a Swiss-German lawyer who has been described as a close friend and adviser of Mifsud’s calls the allegation “nonsense.”
“I’m in a better mood today. I got it from really good sources. They say that he is alive, that he has another identity, and that he is staying somewhere, at a nice place,” Stephan Roh told The Daily Caller News Foundation on Sunday.
“I just this morning got a message, indirectly, that he is alive and that they have provided him with another identity,” added Roh, who did not describe his sources.
TheDCNF was not able to independently confirm whether Mifsud is alive.
Mifsud, a former Maltese diplomat, has not been seen or heard from since November 2017, just after special counsel Robert Mueller revealed that Papadopoulos had pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about the timing of his contacts with Mifsud. (RELATED: Joseph Mifsud Summarized FBI Interview In Email To The Bureau)
Papadopoulos told the FBI in a Jan. 27, 2017, interview that Mifsud told him in April 2016 that he had heard the Russian government had “dirt” on Clinton in the form of “thousands” of her emails.
Three months later, the FBI would open a counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign based on information about Papadopoulos. Investigators had received information from Alexander Downer, the top Australian diplomat to the U.K., who claimed that Papadopoulos told him during a May 10, 2016, meeting that Russia had derogatory information on Clinton.
Roh says he was dragged into the government’s investigation in October 2017, when he was detained at JFK International Airport in New York and questioned by the FBI about his relationship with Mifsud.
Roh, who co-owns Link Campus University in Rome, where Mifsud once taught, says Mifsud has denied to him directly that he spoke with Papadopoulos about Clinton emails.
In a recent self-published book, Roh claimed that, rather than being a Russian spy, Mifsud is associated with Western intelligence agencies.
Mifsud “had only one master: the Western Political, Diplomatic and Intelligence World, his only home, of which he is still deeply dependent,” Roh and his co-author, Thierry Pastor, wrote in “The Faking of Russia-gate: The Papadopoulos Case, an Investigative Analysis.”
“After careful consideration, yes, we must assume that the Professor was most probably part of the game, that he was in close relation to the Western intelligence world as well as to the Clinton network, and that today he is fully cooperating with and following the orders of easily identifiable intelligence agencies — and that he is certainly not a Russian spy,” he wrote.
Roh further described Mifsud’s association with Western intelligence agencies Sunday, saying the professor was not directly employed by them.
“Mifsud is not an employee of a specific agency. He is not a member of the MI6. He was working for them. But working for them does not mean he was a member of the team,” Roh said.
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