Ex-Trump aide gets 2-week sentence for lying to FBI
WASHINGTON – A federal judge sentenced George Papadopoulos, a onetime aide to President Donald Trump’s campaign, to two weeks in prison Friday for lying to federal agents about conversations in which he was told the Russian government had obtained “dirt” on Hillary Clinton.
“I made a terrible mistake for which I paid dearly and I am terribly ashamed,” Papadopoulos said at his sentencing hearing. “My entire life has been turned upside down.” He was also fined $9,500.
Papadopoulos is the first former Trump aide to be sentenced in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of Moscow’s interference in the 2016 election.
Papadopoulos admitted last year that he lied to the FBI about interactions in which people he thought were linked to the Russian government described Moscow having “thousands of emails” with damaging information about Clinton.
The exchanges came shortly after he joined Trump’s campaign and months before U.S. authorities learned that Russian intelligence officers had stolen troves of emails from Democratic political organizations. When they came to light, they triggered the investigation that has loomed over the first two years of Trump’s presidency.
Papadopoulos’ lawyer Thomas Breen had asked for leniency for his client. He emphasized that Papadopoulos’ lies to investigators happened after Trump’s inauguration in January 2017 and after the president had called the Russia investigation a “witch hunt.”
“The president of the United States hindered this investigation more than George Papadopoulos ever could,” Breen said. “The message for all of us is to check our loyalty, to tell the truth, to help the good guys.”
Prosecutors had told Judge Randolph Moss that Papadopoulos should spend up to six months in prison. His crime, they said in a court filing last month, “was serious and caused damage to the government’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.”
The judge had been considering a 30day prison sentence but said at Friday’s hearing that Papadopoulos had shown “genuine remorse.”
The charges centered on an interview in January 2017 in which FBI agents asked Papadopoulos about his conversations with Joseph Misfud, a professor he believed had connections to Moscow.
Papadopoulos told the agents, falsely, that his conversations with Misfud happened before he joined Trump’s campaign in March 2016 and that he did not think they were important.
Prosecutors said in a court filing that Papadopoulos’ “lies negatively affected the FBI’s Russia investigation, and prevented the FBI from effectively identifying and confronting witnesses in a timely fashion.”
Partly as a result, they said, agents were unable to “effectively question” Misfud when he visited the United States two weeks later. “The defendant’s lies undermined investigators’ ability to challenge the Professor or potentially detain or arrest him while he was still in the United States,” they wrote.
Papadopoulos has been a central figure in the Russia investigation since it began. The FBI launched its investigation of possible links between Russia and the Trump campaign after learning that Papadopoulos had boasted to an Australian diplomat that the Russian government had political dirt on Clinton more than a month before Moscow’s hacking efforts were known publicly.
For a time, Papadopoulos also looked to be a key informant. A federal court kept his July 2017 arrest secret for more than two months after Mueller’s office argued that making it public would “significantly undermine his ability to serve as a proactive cooperator.”
But in a court filing last month, prosecutors said Papadopoulos ultimately did little to aid their work. Instead, they said, Papadopoulos gave them little valuable information and did so “only after the government confronted him with his own emails, text messages, internet search history.”