Papadopoulos Email Claims Trump Campaign Approved Meeting With Putin’s Office - Intelligencer ( New York Magazine )

Papadopoulos Email Claims Trump Campaign Approved Meeting With Putin’s Office

By

Margaret Hartmann

Who told the “coffee boy” they’d meet Putin’s people?

Following Monday’s revelation that his campaign adviser George Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to lying to federal agents about his contact with Kremlin-linked Russians, President Trump tried to distance himself from Papadopoulos, saying, “Few people knew the young, low level volunteer named George, who has already proven to be a liar.”

That’s a hard claim to swallow, since Papadopoulos was in regular contact with top campaign officials and met with a number of foreign officials as a Trump surrogate. Trump once called him an “excellent guy.” The Washington Post reports that he even sat next to future attorney general Jeff Sessions at a dinner for campaign advisers weeks before the Republican National Convention.

If Team Trump can’t convince the public that Papadopoulos was a nobody, they’d at least like people to believe that his repeated efforts to set up a meeting between the campaign and the Russian government were rebuffed by more senior Trump officials. For instance, an attorney for Sam Clovis, the campaign’s national co-chairman, suggested he was just “being polite” when he encouraged Papadopoulos to meet with Russian officials, and was actually trying to brush him off.

But an email from Papadopoulos included in the court filings made public on Monday suggests someone in the Trump camp may have actually okayed a meeting between campaign officials and the Russian government. Per Bloomberg:

Writing to the Russian contact a week before the Republican National Convention, Papadopoulos proposed a meeting for August or September in the U.K. that would include “my national chairman and maybe one other foreign policy adviser” and members of Putin’s office and Russia’s foreign ministry.

“It has been approved by our side,” Papadopoulos wrote.

The campaign officials aren’t named in the document, but Paul Manafort was campaign chairman at the time, and Clovis was in place as national co-chairman.

There’s no evidence that the meeting ever occurred, but the email makes it sound like Trump officials put some planning into it (as opposed to suggesting that Papadopoulos conduct the meeting himself, if he felt like it).

However, there’s reason to doubt Papadopoulos’s claim. It’s possible that he didn’t receive any approval and was just bragging to his Russian associate. (Trump’s right that Papadopoulos has now been proven to be a liar.) Furthermore, the email was included in an FBI agent’s affidavit supporting the criminal charges against Papadopoulos, but it’s not mentioned in the court documents describing his guilty plea and cooperation with Special Counsel Robert Mueller. That may be because Mueller’s team determined that his assertion was untrue.

Still, the email casts more doubt on the Trump’s team’s claim that they had no interest in a meeting with Putin’s office. Last week, Clovis was questioned by Mueller’s team and testified before the investigating grand jury. Senator Pat Roberts said he’s been “a fully cooperative witness” in the Senate Intelligence Committee’s probe, so perhaps he’ll shed some light on the matter in future disclosures.

126 Million People May Have Seen Russia-Linked Facebook Posts - TIME

126 Million People May Have Seen Russia-Linked Facebook Posts Posted: 30 Oct 2017 04:42 PM PDT WASHINGTON — Facebook says a Russian group posted more than 80,000 times on its service during and after the 2016 election, potentially reaching as many as 126 million users. The company plans to disclose these numbers to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, according to a person familiar with the testimony. The person declined to be named because the committee has not officially released the testimony. Twitter plans to tell the same committee that it has uncovered and shut down 2,752 accounts linked to the same group, Russia’s Internet Research Agency, which is known for promoting pro-Russian government positions. That number is nearly 14 times larger than the number of accounts Twitter handed over to congressional committees three weeks ago, according to a person familiar with the matter. This person requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the new findings ahead of the hearing on Tuesday. Facebook, Twitter and Google will testify at three Capitol Hill hearings Tuesday and Wednesday. Colin Stretch, Facebook’s general counsel, plans to tell the Judiciary panel that 120 pages set up by Russia’s Internet Research Agency posted the material between January 2015 and August 2017. The company estimates that roughly 29 million people were directly “served” these items in their news feeds from the agency over that time period. Some of those people received the posts because they liked one of the agency’s pages, or because a Facebook friend liked or commented on a post. Others shared the Russia-linked posts, helping them spread widely. Stretch’s prepared testimony, however, makes clear that many of the 126 million people reached this way may not have seen the posts. These “organic” posts that appeared in users’ news feeds are distinct from more than 3,000 advertisements linked to the agency that Facebook has already turned over to congressional committees. The ads — many of which focused on divisive social issues — pointed people to the agency’s pages, where they could then like or share its material. On Twitter, the Russia-linked accounts put out 1.4 million election-related tweets from September through Nov. 15 last year — nearly half of them automated. The company also found nine Russian accounts that bought ads, most of which came from the state-backed news service Russia Today, or RT. Twitter said last week it would no longer accept ads from RT and Sputnik, another state-sponsored news outlet. It will donate the $1.9 million it has earned from RT since 2011 to support external research into political uses of Twitter. Facebook has said it will take steps to fix the problem. Last week it said it will verify political ad buyers in federal elections and build transparency tools to link ads to the Facebook pages of their sponsors. Twitter has also said it will require election-related ads for candidates to disclose who is paying for them and how they are targeted. The companies have been under constant pressure from Congress since it was first revealed earlier this year that Russians had infiltrated some of their platforms. Facebook has already spent more than $8.4 million lobbying the government this year, according to federal disclosure forms. The three tech companies this week are expected to face questions about what evidence of Russian interference they found on their services — and, likely, why they didn’t find it earlier. They will almost certainly do what they can to convince lawmakers that they can fix the problem on their own, without the need for regulation. A bill unveiled earlier this month would require social media companies to keep public files of election ads and require companies to “make reasonable efforts” to make sure that foreign individuals or entities are not purchasing political advertisements in order to influence Americans. Facebook and Twitter — though not Google — have publicly outlined steps they are taking to give the public more information about who buys and who sees political advertising on their site. The moves are meant to bring the companies more in line with what is now required of print and broadcast advertisers. The issue goes far beyond ads. Fake news, fake events, propaganda and other misinformation spread far and wide on the platforms in 2016 without the need for paid advertisements. But regulating online speech would be more difficult for U.S. lawmakers. In addition, analysts and online speech advocates have warned that policing internet election ads is not the same thing as doing so in print newspapers or on TV. Automated advertising platforms allow basically anyone with an internet account and a credit card to place an ad with little or no oversight from the companies. Facebook has said it is building machine learning tools to address this issue, but didn’t provide details.

The newest developments in the Trump-Russia scandal, explained - Fox News

The newest developments in the Trump-Russia scandal, explained

Vox

US President Donald Trump and Russia President Vladimir Putin hold a meeting on the sidelines of the G20 Summit in Hamburg, Germany, on July 7, 2017.

In the past several days, major developments on the Trump-Russia front have given Democrats new ammunition to bolster their claim that the Trump campaign colluded with Moscow, given the Trump administration new ammunition to bolster its counter-claim that the whole scandal has been ginned up by its enemies, and led a senior Republican lawmaker to question whether the White House was going soft on Moscow for nefarious reasons.

It's a lot to unpack, and we're here to help.

The first revelation is that Hillary Clinton's campaign helped finance the compilation of the infamous "Steele dossier," an ex-British spy's investigation into Trump's Russia ties that surfaced some of the more vivid allegations against the president. The second is that Cambridge Analytica, a shady British data firm employed by the Trump campaign, asked WikiLeaks' Julian Assange for help in "finding" Hillary Clinton's missing emails. The third bit of news is that Sen. Bob Corker — the anti-Trump Republican who warned that the president might start "World War III" — raised questions about an over three week delay on Trump administration implementation of congressionally mandated sanctions on Russia.

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The Clinton story has gotten the most attention, but it's not quite so telling as it seems to Trump defenders — and neither, for that matter, is the Cambridge Analytica story as devastating as Trump critics would have it. The Russia sanctions story, by contrast, is arguably being underplayed. It's a clear indication of the stakes of the Trump-Russia scandal: the real possibility that Russia may well be exerting undue influence on the way the Trump administration makes policy.

What follows is a guide to these stories — what we really learned this week, and why it really matters.

The Clinton story doesn't vindicate Trump

Before trying to draw big conclusions from the Clinton story, published in the Washington Post late on Tuesday, it's important to be clear on what it does and doesn't say.

The Steele dossier, so named because it was compiled by ex-MI6 agent Christopher Steele, is a compilation of allegations of Russian influence over Trump that's breathtaking in its scope and specificity. It's where, for example, the "pee tape" rumors come from — the notion that Russia is blackmailing Trump with videotapes of him with Moscow prostitutes whom he hired to urinate on a bed President Obama once slept in.

The Post's big scoop was that some of Steele's work had been funded by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee through go-betweens. Marc Elias, a Clinton campaign lawyer, hired a political research firm called Fusion GPS to assist Clinton's campaign on Trump. Fusion paid for Steele's research using DNC and Clinton cash.

This matters because it could land some important people in hot water. Elias reportedly

Kenneth P. Vogel ✔@kenvogel

When I tried to report this story, Clinton campaign lawyer @marceelias pushed back vigorously, saying "You (or your sources) are wrong." …

9:38 AM - Oct 25, 2017

earlier this year when he was asked point blank about the document, telling reporter Ken Vogel that "you (or your sources) are wrong" about a connection between him and Steele.

More significantly, leading Democrats — including Clinton campaign chair John Podesta and former DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz — reportedly denied any knowledge of this arrangement when asked by congressional investigators, per a CNN report on Thursday afternoon. Lying to such investigators is a crime, so if they did know, they'd potentially be in very serious trouble.

The implication that Trump allies are drawing from this is a bit more dubious. They are claiming the Steele dossier can be discarded entirely as a work of propaganda from a Clinton campaign hack, and even that the Post's piece is proof that Clinton was colluding with foreigners to influence the election.

"This is a profoundly vindicating day," Mollie Hemingway, a senior editor of the Trump-friendly publication the Federalist said on

Fox News ✔@FoxNews

Hemingway: "This is a profoundly vindicating day. It turns out the Clinton campaign was doing what it accused the Trump campaign of doing."

9:51 AM - Oct 26, 2017

on Wednesday. "It turns out the Clinton campaign was doing what it accused the Trump campaign of doing."

There are three problems with this interpretation of the news.

The first is that the Clinton campaign did not fund Steele's research alone. His work investigating Trump and Russia actually began in September 2015, during the Republican primary. According to Vanity Fair's Howard Blum, "the funding came from a 'Never Trump' Republican and not directly from the campaign war chests of any of Trump's primary opponents." Clinton's camp only started picking up the tab in April 2016, according to the Post, which makes it hard to dismiss its entire contents as the results of a secret Democratic plot.

Second, the notion that the Clinton campaign paying Steele is the same as Trump (allegedly) colluding with Russia is laughable.

The former involves paying an experienced private investigator — remember, Steele is a retired British agent — to conduct research. The latter involves working with a hostile foreign government to influence the outcome of a US election, and potentially aiding and abetting a crime (the hack and theft of Clinton campaign and DNC emails) in the process.

Third, and most importantly, attacks on the provenance of the Steele dossier would only matter if it were the only real source of allegations about Trump and Russia. It's not.

We know, for example, that Russia engaged in a massive information campaign designed to help bolster the Trump campaign, including by spamming pro-Trump and anti-Clinton messages through US social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. We know that the Trump campaign employed several people, including former campaign manager Paul Manafort, who have known financial ties to the Kremlin or its allies. We also know that Donald Trump Jr. took a meeting with a Kremlin-linked attorney who promised dirt on Clinton and said Moscow wanted to help Trump. These things all raise profound questions about Trump's ties to Russia independently of the Steele dossier.

What's more, the Steele dossier itself has been deemed credible at the highest levels of the US intelligence community, to the point where both Presidents Obama and Trump were briefed on it before its existence was made public. Independent intelligence experts have pointed out that many of its claims — though not the pee tape — have been confirmed by subsequent investigations.

"Steele and his company appear serious and credible," John Sipher, a 30-year veteran of the CIA, wrote at Slate in September. "Well before any public knowledge of these events, the [Steele dossier] identified multiple elements of the Russian operation including a cyber campaign, leaked documents related to Hillary Clinton, and meetings with Paul Manafort and other Trump affiliates to reportedly discuss the receipt of stolen documents."

Put most simply, the new Washington Post story just doesn't do what Trump and his allies claim. The Clinton campaign may have helped fund the Steele dossier — and then lied about doing so — but the reasons to worry about Trump's possible collusion with Moscow didn't start with the dossier, and don't end with it.

The Cambridge Analytica story doesn't damn Trump

The second big piece of news this week concerns Cambridge Analytica, the UK-based company that ran the Trump campaign's data operation beginning in June 2016. Special counsel Robert Mueller is investigating Cambridge as part of his look into the Trump-Russia mess, with the company's work with disgraced former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn raising a particularly big red flag.

"We know that congressional and DOJ investigators believe that Trump's campaign might have helped guide Russia's voter targeting scheme and that Flynn, who worked for Trump's campaign and with Cambridge Analytica, is suspected of having extensive ties with Russian operatives," my colleague Sean Illing explains in a vital profile of the group.

The scoop this week, first reported by the Daily Beast's Betsy Woodruff on Wednesday morning, is that Cambridge CEO Alexander Nix reached out to WikiLeaks head Julian Assange to try to acquire 33,000 emails that had been deleted from Clinton's private server.

This matters for two reasons. First, it suggests a willingness on the part of Trump allies to reach out to foreign sources with anti-American agendas (Assange is no fan of the USA). Second, it could in theory point to a pathway through which information traveled from the Kremlin to the Trump campaign: We know that Assange published emails Russia passed to him after stealing them from Clinton allies.

"If true, HOLY COW!" tweeted

Clint Watts ✔@selectedwisdom

If true, HOLY COW! US pol campaign seeking help of US adversary doing damage to US, to then damage another American

4:05 AM - Oct 26, 2017

Trump Data Guru: I Tried to Team Up With Julian Assange

The head of Cambridge Analytica said he asked the Wikileaks founder for help finding Hillary Clinton’s 33,000

, a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute who tracks Russian involvement in US politics. "US political campaign seeking help of US adversary doing damage to US, to then damage another American."

This, like the Post's Clinton scoop, is legitimately interesting — but is also being overinterpreted by people who believe it confirms their overarching view of the Russia scandal.

First, there's no evidence (yet) that the Trump campaign was behind Nix's outreach. While he informed Trump allies of the idea of working with WikiLeaks afterward, there's no reason to believe they told him to write the email — which suggests it wasn't a "political campaign seeking help of US adversary," as Watts wrote.

"No one from the Trump campaign was copied on the email," CNN reported in a follow-up to the Daily Beast's piece. "It is not clear whether he sent it before or after Cambridge Analytica was brought onto the campaign."

Second, and more importantly, there's no evidence that the Cambridge-WikiLeaks connection actually went anywhere. Assange tweeted that he refused to help Nix; while he's not especially credible, that's also what Woodruff's sources said.

"Assange told the Cambridge Analytica CEO that he didn't want his help, and preferred to do the work on his own," she writes.

So while the Cambridge Analytica report is certainly suggestive, it doesn't on its own confirm very much.

The Russia sanctions story show the stakes in all of this

Finally, we have the Russia sanctions story.

This story concerns a new set of sanctions on Russia passed overwhelmingly by Congress earlier this year as a kind of punishment for the election hack. The bill required the Trump administration to, by October 1, identify which Russian entities, precisely, would be hit by the new sanctions.

By Wednesday afternoon, more than three weeks after the October 1 deadline, the Trump administration still had not complied. Corker, who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was angry — and he let a group of reporters know it.

"I'm going to get on the phone with someone," Corker said. "I don't have any way of evaluating whether it's purposeful or not purposeful."

It seems that Corker's inquiry got results: the State Department released the required list on Thursday evening. But Corker's Wednesday comments were still extremely telling.

In any other administration, the delayed implementation of a Russia sanctions bill would be assumed to be an innocent bureaucratic screw-up. Indeed, that was the official administration line — State claimed it was overwhelmed by sanctions work.

That could well turn out to have been true. But given Trump's long history of friendliness to Russia, it also might not have been. In the most conspiratorial-yet-still-plausible view, delaying elections sanctions was part of a quid pro quo or blackmail arrangement with Putin, one in which Trump continually obstructs US sanctions on Russia as much as possible in exchange for election help and Putin keeping compromising material on Trump from being made public.

That sounds outlandish. But as long as key questions about Trump's connections to Russia and Putin remain unanswered, there will be a pall over US-Russia policy under Trump. It will be difficult to have faith that the Trump team has America's best interests in mind — so difficult, in fact, that even a top Republican senator was spurred to raise questions about "purposeful" obstruction of measures designed to punish Moscow for a historic attack on the integrity of an American election and the broader US political system.

This story, in short, shows how the Russian election hack and subsequent investigation are continuing to sow division inside American politics — creating suspicion where none would otherwise exist.

Fact check: Team Trump uses misinformation, inaccuracies responding to Mueller probe - CNN News

Washington (CNN)President Donald Trump and his stable of surrogates have tried to discredit former campaign adviser George Papadopoulos in wake of his guilty plea to special counsel Robert Mueller, casting him as nothing more than a low-level "coffee boy" who rarely -- if ever -- interacted with senior members of Trump's campaign.

Those comments, though, belie Papadopoulos' actual role in the campaign, as laid out by Mueller's statement of charges, and use misinformation and inaccuracies to deride the former campaign adviser.

On Monday, it was revealed Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his interactions with foreign officials with Russian government connections. It was also revealed Papadopoulos was a "proactive cooperator" in the Russia probe, meaning he had been working with Mueller and his team after they caught him lying to the FBI.

The news came on the same day former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and former Trump campaign official Rick Gates were arrested.

'Coffee boy'

Caputo: Papadopoulos was a coffee boy 01:01

Claim

Former Trump campaign adviser Michael Caputo told CNN on Tuesday that Papadopoulos was nothing more than a "coffee boy" on the 2016 campaign who "never showed up at Trump Tower."

"He ... never had any interaction with any of the campaign leaders around me, and the leaders of the Washington office of the campaign didn't even know who he was until his name appeared in the press," Caputo told CNN's "New Day."

Reality

Though Papadopoulos may have not been omnipresent at Trump's campaign headquarters, describing him as a "coffee boy" ignores the fact that he attended a roundtable meeting with Trump in March 2016 and then-candidate Trump described him as an "excellent guy" in an interview with The Washington Post.

Papadopoulous was also emailing with high-level staffers, such as Manafort, about his potential Russian contacts during the campaign and received encouragement for his efforts.

Papadopoulos was also not an adviser with no campaign experience, either. Before working with the Trump campaign, Papadopoulos was an adviser on Ben Carson's 2016 campaign. When the Carson campaign ended, he joined Trump's effort with the credentials he brought from Carson's team.

When asked about why Papadopoulos joined the Trump campaign, a source familiar with the White House's thinking said, "He came from someone else's campaign. His expertise was energy. He had published papers. He looked good on paper."

'Low level volunteer named George'

Hear Trump's 2016 interview on Papadopoulos 00:47

Claim

Trump, after hours of silence about Papadopoulos, slammed his former foreign policy adviser as a "young, low level volunteer named George" who "few people knew."

Donald J. Trump ✔@realDonaldTrump

....came to the campaign. Few people knew the young, low level volunteer named George, who has already proven to be a liar. Check the DEMS!

11:16 PM - Oct 31, 2017

Reality

Even if "few people" knew Papadopoulos, Trump was one of them.

The then candidate brought Papadopoulos' name up during a March interview and later met with him a part of a national security meeting on March 31, 2016.

Trump himself praised Papadopoulos to The Washington Post.

Additionally, Papadopoulos was known within the campaign because, as the court document states, he regularly emailed a campaign supervisor and his messages were discussed between other campaign officials, which CNN has now identified, according to a congressional source, as Manafort and Gates.

'Never... interacting with senior management on a regular basis'

Who is George Papadopoulos? 02:53

Claim

One key to the statement of charges against Papadopoulos was that the former foreign policy adviser regularly emailed campaign officials and received encouragement from the officials to take a trip to meet with the foreign-born professor and his contacts with the Russian government.

Former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski told NBC Tuesday that Papadopoulos was "never a person who was part of a team that was interacting with senior management on a regular basis."

Reality

The former campaign manager's statement is contradicted by Mueller's statement of charges.

After a meeting where Papadopoulos' professor told him that he had met with Russian officials who have "dirt" on then-candidate Hillary Clinton, the foreign policy adviser "continued to correspond with Campaign officials ... in an effort to arrange a meeting between the campaign and the Russian government."

According to the statement of charges, Papadopoulos continued to exchange emails and calls with a "high-ranking campaign" officials and, after proposing a meeting between Russian officials and the campaign, his messages were discussed privately between two other campaign officials, which CNN has now identified, according to a congressional source, as Manafort and Gates.

At one point, Papadopoulos' campaign supervisor said he would "encourage" him to make an off-the-record trip to meet with members of the Russian foreign ministry.

"I would encourage you ... (to) make the trip, if it is feasible," the campaign supervisor wrote, according to the statement of offense.

'Long before they ... had any association with the campaign'

Fact-checking Sarah Sanders' post-indictment briefing

Fact-checking Sarah Sanders' post-indictment briefing

Claim

White House chief of staff John Kelly, in an interview on Monday, issued a blanket statement to all of Mueller's action on Manafort and Gates.

"These indictments were handed down, Paul Manafort of course, his associate Mr. Gates, and another minor aide to the Trump administration, George Papadopoulos," Fox News' Laura Ingraham asked. "What's the administration's reaction?"

Kelly responded: "All of the activity -- as I understand it, they were indicted for -- were long before they ever met Donald Trump or had any association with the campaign. But I think the reaction of the administration is let the legal justice system work, everyone's innocent until, presumed innocent, and we'll see where it goes."

Reality

Kelly is correct that Manafort and Gates' charges stem from activity that pre-dates their times with the Trump campaign. But the blanket statement that "all of the activity ... they were indicted for, were long before they ever met Donald Trump or had any association with the campaign" is not true when considering Papadopoulos.

Mueller's statement of offense for Papadopoulos clearly details how his interactions with a foreign-born professor who in turn introduced him to Russian contacts began after -- and largely because -- of his involvement with the Trump campaign.

In one passage, the complaints states that before Papadopoulos disclosed his involvement in the campaign, the professor with Russian contacts was "uninterested" in him. But once Papadopoulos disclosed his new role on the Trump campaign, the professor "appeared to take great interest" in him.

The statement of charges later details Papadopoulos' repeated interactions with Trump campaign officials, including being encouraged by a campaign supervisor to meet with Russian contacts.

The initial interaction between Papadopoulos and the professor happened in around March 14, 2016, according to the statement of offense. Trump name-checked Papadopoulos in an interview with The Washington Post a week later and then met with him as part of a broader "national security meeting" in Washington on March 31, 2016.

Additionally, while the current charges against Manafort and Gates date back years, there is nothing stopping Mueller from charging the two top aides with more charges in the future.