(National Sentinel) Fake News: Earlier this week British paper The Guardian published a “bombshell” report claiming that Paul Manafort visited WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange three times prior to accepting a position on the 2016 Trump campaign.
The report claimed that Manafort visited Assange at the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, where he has been given asylum, in 2013, 2015, and 2016.
But an evaluation of Manafort’s passports by The Washington Times found that he never traveled to London during those years.
The review of two of Manafort’s passports indicates he entered Heathrow Airport since 2008 on two occasions: Once in 2012 and one other time where the stamp is blurred, showing either 2010 or 2016.
The Times said that prosecutors have entered two of three passports into evidence. Manafort, meanwhile, has maintained that he’s never met Assange, and WikiLeaks’ Twitter account mocked The Guardian‘s story the day it was published.
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According to The Guardian:
Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort held secret talks with Julian Assange inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and visited around the time he joined Trump’s campaign, the Guardian has been told.
Sources have said Manafort went to see Assange in 2013, 2015 and in spring 2016 – during the period when he was made a key figure in Trump’s push for the White House.
It is unclear why Manafort would have wanted to see Assange and what was discussed. But the last apparent meeting is likely to come under scrutiny and could interest Robert Mueller, the special prosecutor who is investigating alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
A well-placed source has told the Guardian that Manafort went to see Assange around March 2016. Months later WikiLeaks released a stash of Democratic emails stolen by Russian intelligence officers.
“Remember this day when the Guardian permitted a serial fabricator to totally destroy the paper’s reputation. @WikiLeaks is willing to bet the Guardian a million dollars and its editor’s head that Manafort never met Assange,” the whistleblower organization tweeted.
As we noted in our own assessment of The Guardian‘s story, any visits to Assange during the aforementioned timeframes would have been noted by the FBI because Manafort was under surveillance by the feds for possible illicit lobbying activity on behalf of Ukraine.
And if the FBI had that information, it would have been leaked given what we now know about the “Spygate” scandal and how President Obama politicized and weaponized the Justice Department, FBI, and intelligence community in an effort to prevent POTUS Donald Trump from winning the Oval Office and then undermine him after his victory.
Special counsel Robert Mueller noted in an Oct. 31, 2017 filing, after Manafort had been indicted on fraud charges, that he maintained three passports and was a flight risk.
Manafort was convicted by a jury in Alexandria, the Times reported. He pleaded guilty to fraud charges in U.S. District Court in D.C. in September.
The Mueller filing said that, in the past year, Manafort “traveled to Dubai, Cancun, Panama City, Havana, Shanghai, Madrid, Tokyo, and Grand Cayman Island.”
One destination not listed: London.
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