When Donald Trump met with the Washington Post editorial board on March 21st, 2016, he named five people as his foreign policy advisers.
“…Walid Phares, who you probably know, PhD, adviser to the House of Representatives caucus, and counter-terrorism expert; Carter Page, PhD; George Papadopoulos, he’s an energy and oil consultant, excellent guy; the Honorable Joe Schmitz, [former] inspector general at the Department of Defense; [retired] Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg; and I have quite a few more. But that’s a group of some of the people that we are dealing with. We have many other people in different aspects of what we do, but that’s a representative group.”
Of the five, only Keith Kellogg landed a job with the administration. He briefly served as interim National Security Adviser after Michael Flynn resigned, and now he serves as the Executive Secretary and Chief of Staff of the National Security Council.
We know why Carter Page didn’t make the cut. His travels to Moscow and meetings with Kremlin-connected characters brought immediate suspicion and a FISA warrant to monitor his future movements. He resigned from the campaign in September. Joe Schimtz was briefly considered for Secretary of the Navy, as least according to the less than reliable Daily Caller. That obviously did not work out. I’m not sure why Walid Phares didn’t earn some kind of role, but it’s the case of George Papadopoulos that puzzled me the most.
After all, he seemed on track:
Earlier this year, as Trump prepared for his inauguration, Papadopoulos boasted to the reporters that he had Trump’s ear, was on the transition team and that Trump had written him a “blank check” for whatever position in the administration he wanted.
In fact, on the morning of Inauguration Day, Papadopoulos and Reince Priebus had a meeting with Greek Defense Minister Panos Kammenos. But then nothing happened. He wasn’t appointed or nominated to anything, and I never knew why.
But it’s now clear that he never got the chance, because of something that looks a bit curious when put on a timeline:
January 25th, 2017: FBI interviews Michael Flynn at the White House
January 26th, 2017: Acting attorney general Sally Yates briefs White House Counsel Don McGahn on Flynn’s conversation with Amb. Kislyak.
January 27th, 2017: FBI interviews George Papadopoulos for first time.
February 16th, 2017: FBI interviews George Papadopoulos for second time.
Michael Flynn had been under suspicion for a long time, ever since he dined with Vladimir Putin in 2015. He was already informed that the Justice Department was looking into his lobbying for the Turkish government. But it looks like the counterintelligence investigation was looking very closely at both Flynn and Papadopolous at the very same point in time. I suppose it’s possible that two different investigative teams conducted these interviews and that this is a great big coincidence, but it seems like Papadopolous was one of the hottest leads the FBI had very early on, which tells us that he’d aroused a lot of suspicion despite the fact that none of it had surfaced in the newspapers.
I’ll have more to say about how he might have become such a focus, but I just wanted to point this out for you here before I explore the implications.
The amazing thing is that Trump not only ignored all warnings from senior Intelligence community staff and associated himself and his campaign with these suspicious and obviously tainted people. He went out of his way to shield and protect them from investigation and prosecution, even going so far as to attempt to obstruct an investigation by the FBI.
He was warned. Instead of heeding the warnings, he sought to advantage himself by allying with Putin through these intermediaries. Anybody he could use to further his ambitions he used. It didn’t matter what their conflicts of interest or ethical shortcomings were.
And it’s all going to blow back on him now. He knows this and is desperately trying to shift the focus to Hillary Clinton: “It’s Hillary who is the corrupt one! Not me! She should be the one getting investigated!”
It’s good that Trump has just zero comprehension of his position and thinks attacking Hillary Clinton is a viable strategy for him to deflect criticism. Only Hillary didn’t win, so it just looks like vindictive prosecution of your election opponent – and that is even if Hillary was guilty of anything, which clearly she isn’t. This is a losing strategy because it’s so transparent. Only Fox News viewers will be fooled. And they are not a majority.
From what I’ve read about the Trump-Russia election affair, it seems to have multiple threads. The Flynn thread started, as you noted, much earlier and may involve actual treason (not clear with regards to public information). The Papadopolous/Carter Page/Don, Jr. thread seems separate and related to the quid pro quo that the Trump Campaign and Putin seem to have been going for. In any event, the Trump Campaign was a chaotic and shambolic affair as even Sessions has testified. On the one hand, this made it very easy for Russia to use the campaign to create problems for HRC. On the hand, whether the Trump Campaign had any masterplan for undermining HRC’s campaign and leveraging Russia’s intel resources to help them accomplish it seems quite doubtful. They seem to have just stumbled into treasonous behavior and then tried to take advantage of it.
One reason Pap came to the attention of the FBI/CIA…Pap was probably taking to Russians every EU country had under surveillance.
That should be talking not taking.
Anyone who has been reading Seth Abramson’s amazing reporting on Papadopoulos can understand why the FBI and Mueller are so focussed on him. Seth makes a convincing case that Papadopoulos may (he admits he’s speculating) even have met with Putin in Athens in late May. They were there at the same time and met with several of the same Greek politicians during that time. This is all confirmed by the Greek press (not a meeting with Putin, which is speculation). Greece is also one of the most pro-Moscow members of NATO and the EU, one Putin has carefully cultivated – and Athens the perfect “neutral city” that Papadopoulos suggested.
It’s really amazing how much the MSM has ignored, deliberately or as a result of laziness, on Papadopoulos. Anyone wishing to inform themselves should read Seth Abramason and Scott Stedman. These are not conspiracy theorists – they simply read the news, including foreign sources.
My own feeling is that the Greek and French speaking, US and UK educated Papadopoulos, co-author of several articles while at the Hudson Institute as well as op-eds in Israeli newspapers, is not the dope he’s made out to be by Trumps critics, and certainly no volunteer coffee-boy, as the Trump administration would have you believe. He seems to be a fairly sophisticated young operative. Sure, he wasn’t the expert he made himself out to be, but how may putative Washington “experts” really are? But he almost certainly had Trump’s ear and played a far greater role in communicating with the Russians than anyone understands, even those who are arguing that it was an extensive one.
If I were Papadopoulos, I’d be watching my back. I wouldn’t be surprised if he already has around-the-clock FBI protection. Now that he’s turned state’s evidence, and has almost certainly gathered information from unknowing co-conspirators, he’s the key to the entire investigation.