Few people had ever heard of George Papadopoulos, a former campaign adviser to Donald Trump, when the special counsel’s office announced on October 30, 2017, that he had pleaded guilty three weeks earlier to lying to the FBI. Papadopoulos’s plea was an early indication of just how much Robert S. Mueller III was doing and learning in total secrecy. After all, Papadopoulos had been arrested at Washington Dulles International Airport in July and walked unnoticed into court to enter his guilty plea in early October, with not a word leaking to the public.
This document outlines the nature of Papadopoulos’s lies to the FBI, who first knocked on the energy consultant’s Chicago door in January 2017 to ask him about Russia. Prosecutors revealed key information about the Trump team’s flirtation with Russia during the campaign. Papadopoulos acknowledged that he worked to downplay his Russia contacts to the FBI to protect Donald Trump. In fact, soon after he was named a volunteer adviser to the campaign in March 2016, Papadopoulos had been befriended by “an overseas professor” who informed him that the Russians held dirt on Democrat Hillary Clinton in the form of thousands of emails.
The professor—who has been identified as Maltese academic Joseph Mifsud—introduced Papadopoulos to a “female Russian national,” who falsely told the young aide she was Vladimir Putin’s niece, and a man described as a “Russian national connected to the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.” Papadopoulos communicated extensively with the woman and the Russian man, think tank director Ivan Timofeev—working with the two and with Mifsud to try to organize a meeting between Trump campaign staff and Russians, perhaps even a face-to-face Trump-Putin encounter. Timofeev has said his think tank’s interactions with Papadopoulos were routine academic outreach. Mifsud has confirmed that he is the professor referenced in the document but denied wrongdoing or any knowledge that Russia held Clinton emails.
The document also explained to the public that these Russian interactions were hardly a secret to Trump’s most senior aides. Among those Papadopoulos told of his efforts were his “campaign supervisor”—later identified as Trump campaign cochair Sam Clovis—as well as campaign manager Corey Lewandowski (referred to as a “high-ranking campaign official”) and campaign chairman Paul Manafort (“another high-ranking campaign official.”) According to the document, Papadopoulos even informed Trump, announcing to the candidate at a March 31, 2016, meeting in Washington, DC, that he could help arrange a meeting for him with Putin.