George Papadopoulos wants the FBI’s spy video of him in the Trump-Russia collusion files

George Papadopoulos, the 2016 Trump campaign staffer targeted in the FBI’s Russia collusion probe, wants to see the government’s spy video of him.

After the Trump administration on Thursday declassified documents about the origins of the Trump-Russia probe, Mr. Papadopoulos said Americans should also see the surveillance footage of his infamous May 2016 meeting with Australian diplomat Alexander Downer.

“Release the surveillance footage of my meeting with Alexander Downer and Erika Thompson. Get the U.S. embassy officials in both London and Athens to testify under oath about why they were ’bumping into me,’” Mr. Papadopoulos said on social media.

“Expose the five eyes intelligence that went into spying on the campaign going back into 2015,” he said, naming Joseph Mifsud, Azra Turk, Stefan Halper and Christian Cantor of the Israeli Embassy in London. “This then will be the real transparency that will rewrite history with facts and bring true justice.”

The May 2016 meeting at a London wine bar was when Mr. Popadopoulos purportedly told Mr. Downer that the Russians had damaging information about Hillary Clinton.

This resulted in Mr. Downer later talking with FBI officials about his meeting with Mr. Papadopoulos and triggering the Crossfire Hurricane investigation of Trump-Russia collusion in early August 2016 that followed Mr. Trump into his first term.

Mr. Downer, in a 2019 interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, denied recording the 2016 meeting or having any ulterior motive.

The secretive FBI probe, which delved into whether Mr. Trump’s first presidential campaign benefited from Russian meddling, included spying on Mr. Papadopoulos and Trump campaign policy adviser Carter Page.

The Washington Times first reported that Mr. Papadopoulos was a Trump campaign staffer who was targeted by the FBI in an off-the-books undercover operation involving two female agents launched in 2015 by Director James Comey, according to an FBI whistleblower.

In October 2017, Mr. Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to a felony charge of making false statements to FBI agents who were investigating possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

He served 12 days in federal prison. Mr. Trump later pardoned him, and Mr. Papadopoulos has consistently said the FBI was guilty of entrapment in his case.

Newly declassified Justice Department documents implicate left-wing donor George Soros in the FBI plot to spread Trump-Russia collusion allegations before the 2016 presidential election.

The once-secret material also exposes bombshell evidence of the Hillary Clinton campaign’s plot to “demonize Putin and Trump.”

The documents show that emails Russians hacked from Mr. Soros’ left-wing Open Society Foundations, authored by an employee named Leonard Benardo, laid out plans to spread the Russia collusion hoax to “leading U.S. publications” via entities connected to the FBI.

They also show that Mrs. Clinton’s campaign was enthusiastically involved in the plot and saw it as a way to draw attention away from her illegal email server and the thousands of government emails she secretly deleted while serving as secretary of state.

A Benardo email relayed that Mrs. Clinton “approved” of her campaign adviser’s “idea about Trump and Russian hackers hampering U.S. elections.”

He explained, “That should distract people from her own missing emails.”

An Open Society Foundations spokesperson rejected the accusations in the report, saying in a statement to The Washington Times that “the claim that the Open Society Foundations helped orchestrate an FBI investigation is an outrageous falsehood.”

Senior officials in the FBI and the intelligence community were determined to stop Mr. Trump from winning the White House in 2016, and they talked about removing him from office months after his inauguration, according to documents about Crossfire Hurricane released by the FBI in April.

Other government files on the Trump-Russia probe were recently made public by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.

On Aug. 3, 2016, during the final stretch of the presidential campaign, CIA Director John Brennan met with President Obama, Vice President Joseph R. Biden and other senior administration officials, including Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch, to discuss “Russian interference efforts,” according to a memo declassified in 2020 and written by Mr. Ratcliffe, who was the director of national intelligence.