Trump’s former adviser jailed for lying to FBI after airing Russia rumours in London pub
A FORMER adviser to Donald Trump whose remarks in a London pub set off the investigation into possible collusion with Russia was yesterday jailed for lying to the FBI.
George Papadopoulos became the first campaign aide to be sentenced in the ongoing investigation by Robert Mueller, the special counsel.
He has co-operated for more than a year with the probe into Russian interference in the US presidential election, and possible collusion with the Trump campaign.
He was handed a 14-day jail term as he told a court in Washington: “In January 2017, I made a terrible mistake for which I paid dearly. I am ashamed.”
Papadopoulos, who was a foreign policy adviser to Mr Trump, relayed to the then Republican presidential candidate that he had been told by Prof Joseph Mifsud, a Maltese academic, that he had “dirt” on rival Hillary Clinton. He also said he could set up a meeting with Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, ahead of the November 2016 election. American authorities were alerted in mid-2016 after Papadopoulos told an Australian diplomat during a drinking session in a London pub about his meetings with Prof Mifsud.
The envoy alerted US investigators, but Papadopoulos lied and said his contact with the professor happened before he joined the campaign.
The jailing came as the US president called on the attorney general to uncover the identity of the writer behind a critical newspaper article.
Mr Trump has been furious over the anonymous comment piece apparently written by a member of his administration, which appeared in The New York
Times on Wednesday, depicting a “resistance” force within the White House. Yesterday, Mr Trump called on Jeff Sessions, the head of the justice department, to open an investigation to unmask the senior official behind the critical article. “Jeff should be investigating who the author of that piece is because I really believe it’s national security,” Mr Trump said.
He added that if the author has a high-level security clearance, “I don’t want him in those meetings”. Asked if he still trusts his White House aides, Mr Trump said: “I do, but what I do now is I look around the room. I say, ‘Hey, if I don’t know somebody...’”
Meanwhile, Barack Obama has launched a bitter critique of the president and his administration, accusing him of adopting the “politics of fear and resentment”.
Mr Obama hit out at the current Republican party, calling it a “radical” organisation that has embraced conspiracy theories, attacked voting rights and rejected climate change. He also rebuked Mr Trump’s response to a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017, asking a crowd at the University of Illinois: “How hard can that be, saying that Nazis are bad?”