Unlikely source propelled Russian meddling inquiry
WASHINGTON — During a night of heavy drinking at an upscale London bar in May 2016, George Papadopoulos, a young foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign, made a startling revelation to Australia’s top diplomat in Britain: Russia had political dirt on Hillary Clinton.
About three weeks earlier, Papadopoulos had been told that Moscow had thousands of emails that would embarrass Clinton, apparently stolen in an effort to try to damage her campaign.
Exactly how much Papadopoulos said that night at the Kensington Wine Rooms with the Australian, Alexander Downer, is unclear. But two months later, when leaked Democratic emails began appearing online, Australian officials passed the information about Papadopoulos to their U.S. counterparts, according to four current and former U.S. and foreign officials with direct knowledge of the Australians’ role.
The hacking and the revelation that a member of the Trump campaign may have had inside information about it were driving factors that led the FBI to open an investigation in July 2016 into Russia’s attempts to disrupt the election and whether any of President Donald Trump’s associates conspired.
If Papadopoulos, who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI and is now a cooperating witness, was the improbable match that set off a blaze that has consumed the first year of the Trump administration, his saga is also a tale of the Trump campaign in miniature. He was brash, boastful and underqualified, yet he exceeded expectations. And, like the campaign itself, he proved to be a tantalizing target for a Russian influence operation.
While some of Trump’s advisers have derided him as an insignificant campaign volunteer or a “coffee boy,” interviews and new documents show that he stayed influential throughout the campaign.
Two months before the election, for instance, he helped arrange a New York meeting between Trump and President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi of Egypt.
The information that Papadopoulos gave to the Australians answers one of the lingering mysteries of the past year: What so alarmed U.S. officials to provoke the FBI to open a counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign months before the presidential election?
It was not, as Trump and other politicians have alleged, a dossier compiled by a former British spy hired by a rival campaign. Instead, it was firsthand information from one of the United States’ closest intelligence allies.
Interviews and previously undisclosed documents show that Papadopoulos played a critical role in this drama and reveal a Russian operation that was more aggressive and widespread than previously known. They add to an emerging portrait, gradually filled in over the past year in revelations by federal investigators, journalists and lawmakers, of Russians with government contacts trying to establish secret channels at various levels of the Trump campaign.
The FBI investigation, which was taken over seven months ago by special counsel Robert Mueller, has cast a shadow over Trump’s first year in office — even as he and his aides repeatedly played down the Russian efforts and falsely denied campaign contacts with Russians.
They have also insisted that Papadopoulos was a low-level figure. But spies frequently target peripheral players as a way to gain insight and leverage.
FBI officials disagreed in 2016 about how aggressively and publicly to pursue the Russia inquiry before the election. But there was little debate about what seemed to be afoot. John Brennan, who retired this year after four years as CIA director, told Congress in May that he had been concerned about multiple contacts between Russian officials and Trump advisers.