Former Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos pleaded guilty on October 5, 2017 to making false statements to the FBI.
Prosecutors charged Papadopolous with lying to investigators when describing interactions with a certain foreign contact, identified as a professor, who discussed "dirt" related to emails from candidate Hillary Clinton.
He had repeated communications with that contact allegedly while serving as an adviser on Trump campaign.
Papadopoulos told the FBI that those conversations happened BEFORE he joined the campaign.
Please note that George never made any contact with any Russian state officials.
George didn't have any meetings with clandestine Putin operatives.
George came up with no anti-Hillary dirt after months of trying, and sending loads of unanswered emails up the chain of command at Trump Tower.
Finding no contacts, no meetings, no"collusion" or anything else, smarmy prosecutor Mueller claimed Papadopoulos perjured himself.
George told the FBI early this year that he had met a London professor before beginning his service as a Trump advisor.
AND THAT STATEMENT WAS TRUE.
George Papadopoulos pled guilty to "lying" about an immaterial date to the FBI.
George met the "London Professor" on March 14, about a week BEFORE the Trump campaign's official announcement of its "Team of Five".
Papadopoulos was claimed to be guilty of perjury ONLY because at the time of the meeting with the professor, he had been recruited, and already "knew", he was going to join a Trump advisory committee in the near future.
On March 21, 2016 Trump announced a group of five advisors that no one had ever heard of.
Trump apparently met with the five advisor "committee" only once for a photo opportunity.
One of the five advisors was Carter Page who had actually spent time in Moscow years earlier working as a stock broker.
Page had worked for Merrill Lynch in Moscow, and had accused the State Department's top official for Ukraine and Russia, Victoria Nuland, of "fomenting" the 2014 revolution that overthrew Ukraine's government.
Mr. Papadopoulos was not qualified to be among the top five foreign policy advisors to the then near-presumptive GOP nominee.
Papadopoulos is a 2009 college graduate and an international energy lawyer who previously advised Ben Carson's presidential campaign.
The Washington Post reported George sent at least half a dozen email requests, between March and September 2016, urging Trump or senior members of his campaign to meet with Russian officials.
Some of those emails were read to the newspaper by a person with access to them.
Papadopoulos offered to arrange “a meeting between us and the Russian leadership to discuss US-Russia ties under President Trump,” as quoted by the Post.
Trump officials, including Paul Manafort, who served as Trump’s campaign chairman, expressed concern over the proposed meetings.
Manafort told one of his colleagues: “We need someone to communicate that Donald Trump is not doing these trips.”
The government says it will offer leniency to Papadopoulos, in exchange for his cooperation, and that sentencing will be delayed before cooperation is completed.
George was a 30-year-old campaign aide who claims to have heard about Russia possessing Hillary Clinton’s emails before they became public on the Internet, mostly via WikiLeaks.
His credibility has been undermined by his guilty plea for lying to the FBI, and by the fact that he now has a motive to provide something the prosecutors might want in exchange for leniency.
According to the court documents, Papadopoulos got to know a professor of international relations who claimed to have “substantial connections with Russian government officials.”
The professor was identified in press reports as Joseph Mifsud, a little-known academic associated with the University of Stirling in Scotland.
Mifsud told The Washington Post in an email last August that he had “absolutely no contact with the Russian government” and described his ties to Russia as strictly in academic fields.
Mifsud acknowledged meeting with Papadopoulos but denied knowing anything about emails containing “dirt” on Clinton and called the claim that he introduced Papadopoulos to a “female Russian national” as a “laughingstock.”
Mifsud said he tried to put Papadopoulos in touch with experts on the European Union and introduced him to the director of a Russian think tank, the Russian International Affairs Council.
Mifsud’s insistence that he knew nothing about the emails would normally raise serious questions about Papadopoulos’s credibility on his most crucial point.
