Indictment Charges He Pursued ‘Off the Record’ Meeting With Putin
It’s been only two hours since former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort marched into the FBI’s offices in Washington, D.C., and now we have a brand new development. Former Trump campaign foreign policy advisor George Papadopoulos secretly pled guilty to making false statements to the FBI. Those statements involve Russia.Â
Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team has just announced the news. Papadopoulos “pleaded guilty on Oct. 5, 2017, but the case wasn’t unsealed until Monday, when two other Trump associates were indicted by a federal grand jury,” HuffPost reports.
“Prosecutors’ statement of the offense alleges Papadopoulos ‘made material false statements and material omissions’ during a Jan. 27, 2017, interview with the FBI. He was arrested July 27.
He told the FBI an overseas professor had “told him about the Russians possessing ‘dirt’ on then-candidate Hillary Clinton in the form of ‘thousands of emails,’ but stated multiple times that he learned that information prior to joining the campaign,†according to court documents. In fact, Papadopoulos was contacted after he learned he’d be joining the campaign, and the professor only mentioned the “thousands of emails†after he’d been on the Trump campaign for more than a month.
Former U.S. Attorney Press Bharara, who Trump fired, weighs in:
Papadopoulos joined the Trump campaign as a foreign policy advisor when he was just 29 years old. He “previously advised the presidential campaign of Ben Carson and worked as a research fellow at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington,” The Washington Post had reported last year. “On his LinkedIn page, Papadopolous lists among his awards and honors that he was U.S. Representative at the 2012 Geneva International Model United Nations.”
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