[Fedora]

According to the House Intelligence Committee’s Russia report, Lynch told lawmakers, “one of the possibilities the three of us discussed was whether or not to provide what is called a defensive briefing to the campaign, wherein there would be a meeting with a senior person with the campaign to alert them to the fact that…there may be efforts to compromise someone in their campaign.” The FBI, however, did not provide that briefing.

[Fedora]

April 26, 2016: Papadopoulos has a meeting with Professor Joseph Mifsud in London. According to court documents, Papadopoulos tells the FBI that Mifsud told him about a recent trip to Moscow. Mifsud allegedly said that while he was in Moscow he met with “high-level Russian government officials” that claimed to have information on Hillary Clinton. . .

May 10, 2016: Papadopoulos agrees to meet Downer at London’s Kensington Wine Room. According to Downer, they only had one drink and he was meeting to respond to Papadopoulos’s interview with The Times. It was then that Papadopoulos referred to the information Mifsud had relayed to him about Moscow having information on Clinton. Downer, in an interview with The Australian news magazine, said articles referring to a heavy night of drinking were false. He said that “by the way, nothing [Papadopoulos] said in that conversation indicated Trump himself had been conspiring with the Russians to collect information on Hillary Clinton. It was just that this guy, [Papadopoulos], clearly knew that the Russians did have material on Hillary Clinton — but whether Trump knew or not?”

Downer also indicated that “(Papadopoulos) didn’t say Trump knew or that Trump was in any way involved in this. He said it was about Russians and Hillary Clinton; it wasn’t about Trump.” In fact, he noted that Papadopoulos “didn’t say dirt; he said material that could be damaging to (Clinton). No, he said it would be damaging. He didn’t say what it was.

It was the conversation during this meeting, according to a story in the New York Times in December 2017, that would open the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation “Crossfire Hurricane,” which was to probe any coordination between the Trump campaign and Moscow.

According to Chuck Ross with the Daily Caller Papadopoulos believed Mifsud was referring to the 30,000-plus emails Hillary Clinton had deleted from her server. Andrew McCarthy in National Review noted that this scenario makes more sense because “it was those emails that Donald Trump harped on throughout the campaign and that were in the news when Mifsud spoke with Papadopoulos in April 2016. While there are grounds for concern that Clinton’s emails were hacked, there is no proof that it happened; Clinton’s 30,000 emails are not the hacked DNC emails on which the “collusion” narrative is based.”

Floating the same talking point as Veselnitskaya months before her June 2016 approach to Trump, Jr.