TRAPPED BY THEIR OWN CONSPIRACY THEORIES:

The Daily Beast has learned that Barr and Durham were especially interested in what the Italian secret service knew about Joseph Mifsud, the erstwhile professor from Malta who had allegedly promised then candidate Donald Trump's campaign aide George Papadopoulos he could deliver Russian "dirt" on Hillary Clinton. The Italian Justice Ministry public records show that Mifsud had applied for police protection in Italy after disappearing from Link University where he worked and, in doing so, had given a taped deposition to explain just why people might want to harm him. 

A source in the Italian Ministry of Justice, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told The Daily Beast that Barr and Durham were played the tape. A second source within the Italian government also confirmed to The Daily Beast that Barr and Durham were shown other evidence the Italians had on Mifsud. 

Ever since Robert Mueller concluded his probe in March 2019, Barr has worked to blunt its impact--and investigate the investigators behind it. Barr assigned Durham to look into the Mueller probe's origins. And the Attorney General's name is listed in the whistleblower complaint about the July 25 call Trump made to the Ukrainian president to pressure him into investigating political rival Joe Biden. According to the complaint, Barr was directly involved in the president's attempt to "solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election." The minutiae of his involvement are feeding a scandal gripping Washington that changes by the nano-second. [...]

The Italian intelligence community had Mifsud on their radar for some years before he got involved in the Trump campaign's troubles. His affiliations with both the Link University of Rome and London Center of International Law Practice--both often affiliated with western diplomacy and foreign intelligence agencies--made him an easy target. So did the slew of apartments he owned in Malta that are allegedly tied to a racket involving Russians buying Maltese passports for cheap. 

Mifsud [...]  was in no position to be anyone's mentor. The Ph.D. program was bogus and Mifsud would soon be ousted in a scandal.

Ruvina eventually got a refund for the two weeks she spent at the university in 2012 and began her dissertation elsewhere. Mifsud has since shot to international prominence as a lynchpin of the investigation into Donald Trump's presidential campaign and its ties to the Russian government.

A court document made public last year by U.S. prosecutors alleged that it was Mifsud who dropped the first hint of the hacking that rocked the 2016 U.S. election when he met Trump adviser George Papadopoulos on April 26, 2016, in London and told him the Kremlin had "thousands of emails" on his Democratic presidential rival, Hillary Clinton.

An Associated Press investigation of Mifsud's career has uncovered an international trail of mismanagement and financial problems stretching over a decade. It doesn't answer the key question of whether Mifsud was acting on behalf of Russian interests -- wittingly or otherwise -- when he allegedly passed the tip to the Trump campaign team, but it does sketch out a bizarre academic career punctuated by scandals and disappearing acts.

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