A man claiming to be a Maltese professor who went under the radar after being named as the link between the Trump presidential campaign and Russia has released an audio file refuting the baseless and inflated claims against him and asking for “possibility of coming back to life”. 

The man purporting to be former University of Malta lecturer Joseph Mifsud said that it has been nearly two years that the “blown up story about his was presented to the world media” and that he had kept a low profile, keeping himself mentally busy, as advised by his friends.

In the audio recording, the man - who speaks in English with a Maltese accent - insisted that he had had “absolutely no contact with friends or family for a number of months”.

The recorded audio file was sent by email to Corriere della Sera on Tuesday evening. The Italian outlet said it was not able to establish whether the voice was that of Prof. Mifsud. 

“It has been very very difficult for me to live like this without any human contact, without a human experience and I believe that I should be given the opportunity to do that. It is extremely important that somebody, somewhere, decides to let me breathe again,” the man claiming to be Prof. Mifsud said.

Prof. Mifsud, who spent years within the Maltese civil service and served as director of the University of Malta’s international office before branching out into academia, shot to international notoriety in 2017 when he was named as the professor who told a member of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign team that the Russians had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton.

At that meeting, Prof. Mifsud allegedly told Trump aide George Papadopoulos that the Russians had “thousands of emails” belonging to his presidential rival. Those claims led to an investigation into potential collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign, which the current US president denies.

Prof. Mifsud was working at Rome's Link Campus University until 2017, but has gone under radar ever since. 

In his last public appearance, Prof. Mifsud denied having anything to do with the Kremlin. Speaking to journalists in late October, he described Papadopoulos’ claims as “fiction”. In July last year, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) raised the prospect that the London-based professor may be dead. 

A 'networker'

Describing himself as a networker, the man purporting to be Prof. Mifsud insisted that he was a “bridge builder” and his job was always putting people in touch with each other “for purely academic purposes”. 

“It's been almost two years to date that the whole issue - a blown up issue - has been presented to the world media and on the world stage".

He said that he had had no contact with any intelligence service during that time - at least not knowingly. 

"If I had any contact with this I have not known that this person or that person had any link with any institution,” he said. 

“It was not my intention and never was my intention to try to obtain any information to pass from one side to the other. I have never done so because I was never in possession of any information which would be useful to one or the other". 

The man claiming to be Prof. Mifsud explained that he had friends and acquaintances who were representing their own interests but that he never tried to put them in touch with anybody else.

“They never asked me and I never, absolutely never, tried to do that. Whenever I met somebody and this has been proven over and over again I tried to keep that person or that institution in mind. I've always considered myself, also according to my Catholic creed, to be a bridge builder. That is all that I wish to do,” he said.