Someone who served as a foreign policy adviser to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign has pleaded guilty to deceiving investigators probing alleged Russian interference in last year’s election.
George Papadopoulos admitted to having made “material false statements and material omissions” during a January interview with FBI agents.
The confession, which was revealed on Monday, was the first guilty plea to come out of special prosecutor Bob Mueller’s probe into allegations of Russian meddling and Trump campaign collusion.
Papadopoulous’ plea also came on the same day that an indictment against two other Trump campaign officials were unsealed. Paul Manafort and Rick Gates were publicly charged on Monday with conspiring to break federal laws on taxes, money laundering, and foreign lobbying disclosures, and also of lying to federal agents. The pair pleaded “not guilty” at a federal courthouse in Washington.
Manafort was Trump’s campaign manager, from March until August of last year. He resigned when his past foreign lobbying work started receiving intense scrutiny–after the July publication by Wikileaks of internal Democratic National Committee emails, alleged to have come from hackers tied to the Russian government. One of Manafort’s past clients was former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich, an ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
It was, however, a minor campaign figure in Papadopoulos, who was the first to be conclusively tied to crimes related to the alleged DNC hack–though the infringements center wholly around obvious and egregious personal missteps after the election.
The London-based ex-adviser admitted that he lied to FBI agents earlier this year about the nature and timing of his conversations with well-connected Russian nationals.
Papadopolous told investigators, for example, that he met with a Russian professor who said Moscow had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton, via “thousands of emails,” but falsely claimed this happened before he joined the Trump campaign.
Filings about the guilty plea also revealed Papadopolous was attempting to set up a “history making” visit by Trump to Moscow, and that he was connected to the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs by the aforementioned academic.
Papadopolous admitted to lying to FBI investigators about this initiative by omission, when asked to describe his foreign policy work for the campaign.
The push for the trip appears to have dissipated after mid-June, when stories alleging Russian hacking of the DNC started making headlines in major newspapers.
Afterwards, until mid-August, Papadopolous pursued possible “off the record” in-person meetings between Trump campaign officials and “members of president putin’s [sic] office” and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Papadopolous was encouraged to go by a supervisor, who also told another aide “make the trip, if it is feasible,” according to the guilty plea.
In a footnote, Mueller’s team remarked that one campaign official wanted somebody on staff to publicly state that Trump was rebuffing Russia’s invitations for a visit–and that the public statement should be questionable, by design.
“It should be someone low level in the campaign so as not to send any signal,” the unidentified official stated. According to previous reporting highlighted by The Guardian, that official was likely Paul Manafort.
Trump campaigned on improving relations between the US and Russia.
The top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee reacted to the Manafort-Gates indictment by alluding to other threads Mueller might be pulling.
Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) noted on Monday she is waiting for responses to letters she sent on Friday—the first letters sent by her staff about Mueller’s Russia inquiry.
Recipients of letters from Feinstein included Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, Cambridge Analytica, and White House officials with knowledge of the activities of Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law
Cambridge Analytica is a data analysis company partly owned by Robert and Rebekah Mercer—father-and-daughter billionaires, and hardline supporters of Trump. Last week, The Wall Street Journal reported that Rebekah had reached out to Cambridge Analytica—to ask if the company could make the Wikileaks DNC email database more user-friendly and searchable.
The Trump White House reacted to the news on Monday by distancing itself from Papadopolous—the only person charged with crimes directly related to last year’s presidential election.
“It has nothing to do with the President, and nothing to do with the campaign or campaign activity,” said White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
Sanders said the indictment was about Papadopolous’ “failure to tell the truth.” She also repeated Trump allegations claiming that Clinton’s campaign was the only one colluding with Russia.
The spokesperson mentioned recent news about Democrats partially-financing the so-called Steele Dossier, which alleged that Trump hired sex workers to urinate in front of him, while in Russia.
