Buried
in the first wave of blockbuster reports about the indictment of Paul
Manafort and Rick Gates was the revelation that a close foreign policy
adviser to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign had pleaded guilty to
lying to the F.B.I. about his contacts with Russians. Most Americans had
never heard of the adviser, George Papadopoulos,
before Monday afternoon, but his is the name to remember. That’s
because his guilty plea is far more immediately ominous to the president
and his inner circle than the charges against Mr. Manafort and Mr.
Gates.
Why?
Though the White House will surely try to deny it — indeed, on Monday,
its spokeswoman, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, insisted that Mr. Papadopoulos
was merely a volunteer — the plea agreement says plainly that Russia
reached out to Mr. Papadopoulos because of his status as a
named foreign policy adviser to the campaign. For all of the talk about
collusion with Russia since Mr. Trump’s election, this is by far the
most damning evidence of it.
For
starters, the plea describes Mr. Papadopoulos’s efforts to gather
negative information on Hillary Clinton from officials in the Russian
Foreign Ministry and a Russian professor who told Mr. Papadopoulos that
Moscow had “thousands of emails” of “dirt” on Mrs. Clinton. This paints
perhaps the clearest picture so far of Russia’s attempt to provide
assistance to the Trump campaign — and the willingness of at least some
campaign staff members to accept that assistance.
A
footnote in Mr. Papadopoulos’s plea agreement includes a detail that is
particularly damning when combined with previously reported
information: Mr. Manafort wanted to be sure that Mr. Trump himself would
not accept a Russian invitation to travel to Russia. In March 2016,
George Papadopoulos sent an email to seven campaign officials, including
Mr. Manafort and the campaign manager at the time, Corey Lewandowski,
saying that Russian leadership wanted to meet with the Trump team. Mr.
Manafort forwarded that email to Mr. Gates with a note saying: “We need
someone to communicate that D.T. is not doing these trips. It should be
someone low level in the campaign so as not to send any signal.”
Second,
while Mr. Manafort and Mr. Gates’s Eastern European misadventures,
beginning in 2005, were extensive and seamy, they have no immediate link
to Mr. Trump’s campaign activities or even to his many financial
adventures in Russia before he was a candidate. Connecting the dots to
Mr. Trump’s own financial misdeeds — if there are any dots to connect —
will be a long and laborious process. Not so with Mr. Papadopoulos.
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Third,
a paragraph in the plea agreement indicates that Mr. Papadopoulos
pleaded guilty on Oct. 5 and the plea was sealed so that he could act as
a “proactive cooperator.” The meaning of that phrase is unclear. But
one nerve-racking possible implication is that Mr. Papadopoulos has
recently worn a wire in conversations with other former campaign
officials. This will surely have members of Mr. Trump’s inner circle
agonizing about the possibility and wondering who else might have been
similarly cooperating with the investigation.
Fourth,
the plea agreement makes clear the Trump campaign knew about the
hacking of Democratic National Committee emails well before it was
publicly revealed. The email account of the chairman of Mrs. Clinton’s
campaign, John Podesta, was hacked
March 19, and Mr. Papadopoulos was approached with the offer of
thousands of emails on April 26, at least a month before it was
generally known and several months before WikiLeaks released any of the
emails.
Fifth,
the episode that prompts the guilty plea is a virtual carbon copy of
the infamous July 9, 2016, meeting that Mr. Manafort, Jared Kushner and
Donald Trump Jr. attended with a Russian lawyer. That meeting was set up
through an email exchange between Mr. Trump Jr. and one of Donald
Trump’s former business associates who told the younger Mr. Trump that a
senior Russian government official had documents “that would
incriminate Hillary” and that “would be very useful to your father.” Mr.
Trump Jr.’s email response: “I love it.”
If
any of the principals in the July 9 meeting lied to the F.B.I. about
what transpired, they are in immediate criminal jeopardy for the same
reasons for which Mr. Papadopoulos had to plead guilty. No doubt Mr.
Kushner and Mr. Trump Jr. are huddling with their lawyers and wondering
if they are next.
While
Mr. Manafort and Mr. Gates are much bigger fish than Mr. Papadopoulos,
his case may the more portentous one. He clearly has a wealth of
information on the campaign and Mr. Trump’s inner circle. And much more
important, he is already providing it.
Harry Litman, a former
United States attorney and deputy assistant attorney general, teaches at
the University of California, Los Angeles, Law School and practices law
at Constantine Cannon.
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