February 12
On This Day In 2018
Trump’s 2016 campaign was often happy to accept “information” that could prove damaging to Hillary Clinton. And they didn’t seem to care if it came from foreign governments.
The most notorious instance was when a Russian agent informed Trump aide George Papadopoulos that they had “dirt” on Hillary which they would like to pass along, in the form of thousands of emails.
This led the U.S. to open its counter-intelligence investigation into Donald Trump.
Trump’s team tried to play down the whole saga by pretending Papadopoulos was a nobody. After all, if he’s only a minor player, how bad could the Russian interference actually be?
So, according to Trump Advisor Michael Caputo, “He was the coffee boy.” Press Secretary Sarah Sanders phrased it as: “He was somebody that played a minimal role, if one at all.” And Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), the disgraced chair of the House Intelligence Committee, actually had the nerve to tell Fox News that Papadopoulos “never even had met with the president.”
The truth: But OTDI 2018, these denials were revealed to be lies. As PolitiFact put it, “Those descriptions might conjure images of someone whose role amounted to little more than putting up lawn signs and licking envelopes, but there was more to Papadopoulos’s position than that.”
Even Trump had referred to him as one of campaign's key foreign policy advisers: “He's an oil and energy consultant, excellent guy.” And pictures re-surfaced of him “in the room where it happens,” with candidate Trump. Where did that pic come from? Trump’s personal Insta, of course.
So perhaps it’s no wonder they targeted George as a conduit for the damaging Hilary material.
Papadopoulos was later convicted, via a plea deal, of lying to the FBI, and sent to prison.
Sources/Links for further reading
The “Coffee Boy” burns Trump in the Russian Saga