On this second anniversary of The Mark Steyn Club, we're proud to present the first of a special two-part edition of The Mark Steyn Show in which I talk with George Papadopoulos, the first Trump campaign member to plead "guilty" in the Mueller investigation. I've seen plenty of three-minute telly hits with Mr Papadopoulos and always wanted to know more, so I figured, after a year or more of waiting, that I might as well interview him myself.
There were two reasons I was intrigued - first of all, because (as I've written before) young Papadopoulos seemed to me to be obviously the "mark" of multiple high-level well-connected figures from America, Britain, Italy, Australia and elsewhere, but also because several of those persons such as Boris Johnson and Alexander Downer were known to me personally. George Papadopoulos has now set down his account of what happened these last four years of his life in a new book called Deep State Target, which I highly recommend. And just within the last twenty-four hours the Attorney-General has appointed a prosecutor, John Durham, to investigate the origins of the FBI's "Crossfire Hurricane" - the "counter-intelligence" operation that targeted Papadopoulos and other Trump campaign staffers.
That's quite something: the cabinet officer to whom the FBI is politically accountable needs a special investigation to figure out what a subsidiary of his department was up to during the last election campaign. There is much more to come out.
So we begin where George's story begins - with a young Beltway think-tank wonk watching an unlikely presidential candidate descend an elevator in a Fifth Avenue skyscraper. Click below to watch:
Part Two of my interview with George Papadopoulos will air in a few days' time - and, if you want to know more about how "Crossfire Hurricane" got cooked up, George's book is available at Amazon (for the moment). We'll discuss the Papadopoulos case on tomorrow's Clubland Q&A live around the planet at 4pm Wednesday North American Eastern Time/8pm Greenwich Mean Time.
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