Guilty guy’s Putin-Trump tale clashes with AG testimony

ATTORNEY GENERAL Jeff Sessions shut down the idea of a sitdown between between President Trump and Vladimir Putin during a 2016 meeting with campaign advisers, according to reports on Wednesday.

The suggestion was made by George Papadopoulos (photo, left) as he introduced himself and bragged of connections with the Kremlin, court documents reveal.

The account of Sessions (photo, right) pooh-poohing a faceto-face meeting between Trump and Putin, first reported by CNN, counters sworn testimony he gave in June.

Sessions pledged under oath before the Senate Intelligence Committee that he knew of no one in the campaign who had “conversation with any Russians or any foreign officials.”

The former Alabama senator was already under fire for not disclosing meetings he had with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak and then saying the encounters were not campaign-related.

Kislyak told superiors in Moscow the two not only discussed the campaign, but policy issues important to Russia, according to reports.

White House officials said they don’t believe Trump remembers Papadopoulos’ initial pitch of a Kremlin confab during a March 2016 meeting with Sessions, Trump and the then-candidate’s team of foreign policy advisers.

“He didn’t say yes and he didn’t say no,” an official who was in the room told CNN of Trump.

Sessions shot the request down at the meeting, sources told the network.

The White House has refrerred to Papadopoulos as a “low-level” volunteer, and said the March meeting was the only time he met with Trump.

CNN reported Papadopoulos sat next to Sessions at another meeting of the advisory panel. Trump was not present.

Papadopoulos was arrested in July and pleaded guilty last month to lying to FBI agents in connection with special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling in the presidential election, court papers say.

The relative unknown adviser rose quickly on an unlikely path that started with the then-struggling Ben Carson campaign

“All of the foreign policy establishment, the A-listers, were working for Jeb (Bush) or Marco (Rubio),” Barry Bennett, Carson’s campaign manager, told The Hill. “So here’s this 28-yearold kid who is not terribly sophisticated, but he solved my problem of needing to put a bunch of names on a list. I’m sure he wrote some things for us, but I don’t know that we used any of it.”

Bennett hired Papadopoulos after contacting him on the jobnetworking site LinkedIn.

Bennett said he wasn’t consulted when the Trump campaign appointed Papadopoulos to its national security committee in March.

The longtime GOP operative told The Wall Street Journal he would have advised the campaign against bringing the novice into their ranks. “We hired him, and he was basically a no-show,” Ben

nett said.