The idea that Joseph Mifsud, a mysterious professor who allegedly told former Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos he had access to hacked emails from Hillary Clinton, might be dead, is "nonsense," says a lawyer and a close friend of Mifsud's, Stephan Roh.
The idea that the professor might be dead was floated by the Democratic National Committee Friday, which said in papers for a lawsuit related to its computer systems that all the defendants have been served with the lawsuit, "with the exception of Mifsud (who is missing and may be deceased)."
"An investigator involved in our efforts to serve him was told Mifsud might be deceased," a DNC representative told reporters, according to the Daily Caller.
However, this speculation was cheerfully debunked by Roh Sunday.
"I'm in a better mood today. I got it from really good sources. They say that he is alive, that he has another identity, and that he is staying somewhere, at a nice place," Roh said in an interview.
Mifsud, a former Maltese diplomat, disappeared sometime around November 2017, after Special Counsel Robert Mueller revealed that Papadopoulos had pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about the timing of his contacts with Mifsud.
Many months before that, in January 2017, Papadopoulos reportedly told the FBI that it was Mifsud who told him in April 2016 about the Clinton emails. According to the Daily Caller, the "thousands" of Clinton emails came from the hands of Russian government.
Speaking in the interview, Roh claimed that Mifsud denied to him directly that he ever spoke to Papadopoulos about the emails.
"After careful consideration, yes, we must assume that the professor was most probably part of the game, that he was in close relation to the Western intelligence world as well as to the Clinton network, and that today he is fully cooperating with and following the orders of easily identifiable intelligence agencies — and that he is certainly not a Russian spy," he wrote.
"Mifsud is not an employee of a specific agency. He is not a member of the MI6. He was working for them. But working for them does not mean he was a member of the team," Roh said.