Campaign aide gossip led to FBI probe
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 might 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.
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.
Papadopoulos has pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI and is now a cooperating witness.
In response to questions, Papadopoulos’ lawyers declined to provide a statement.
Some of Trump’s advisers have derided Papadopoulos
as an insignificant campaign volunteer or a “coffee boy,” but spies frequently target peripheral players as a way to gain insight and leverage.
Interviews and new documents show that Papadopoulos 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.
Interviews and previously undisclosed documents show that Papadopoulos played a critical role in the Russian 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.
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 contacts between Russian officials and Trump advisers.
Russia, he said, had tried to “suborn” members of the Trump campaign.
Papadopoulos, then an ambitious 28-year-old from Chicago, was working as an energy consultant in London when the Trump campaign, desperate to create a foreignpolicy team, named him as an adviser in early March 2016. His political experience was limited to two months on Ben Carson’s presidential campaign before it collapsed.
Papadopoulos had no experience on Russia issues. But during his job interview with Sam Clovis, a top early
campaign aide, he saw an opening. He was told that improving relations with Russia was one of Trump’s top foreign-policy goals, according to court papers — an account that Clovis has denied.
Traveling in Italy that March, Papadopoulos met Joseph Mifsud, a Maltese professor at a now-defunct London academy who had valuable contacts with the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The two eventually had a joint goal to arrange a meeting between Trump and President Vladimir Putin of Russia in Moscow, or between their respective aides.
Before the end of the month, Mifsud had arranged a meeting in London between Papadopoulos and Olga Polonskaya, a young woman from St. Petersburg whom Mifsud falsely described as Putin’s niece. Mifsud also connected Papadopoulos to Ivan Timofeev, a program director for the prestigious Valdai Discussion Club, a gathering of academics that meets annually with Putin. The two men corresponded for months about how to connect the Russian government and the campaign.
When Trump and his foreign-policy team gathered for the first time at the end of March in Washington, Papadopoulos said he had the contacts to set up a meeting between Trump and Putin.
If the campaign wanted Papadopoulos to stand down, previously undisclosed emails obtained by The Times show that he either did not get the message or failed to heed it. He continued for months to try to arrange some kind of meeting with Russian representatives, keeping senior campaign advisers abreast of his efforts. Clovis ultimately encouraged him and another foreign-policy adviser to travel to Moscow, but neither went because the campaign would not cover the cost.
Papadopoulos was trusted enough to edit the outline of
Trump’s first major foreignpolicy speech on April 27, an address in which the candidate said it was possible to improve relations with Russia. Papadopoulos flagged the speech to his newfound Russia contacts, telling Timofeev that it should be taken as “the signal to meet.”
Polonskaya wrote that she was pleased that Trump’s “position toward Russia is much softer” than that of other candidates.
Stephen Miller, then a senior policy adviser to the campaign and now a top White House aide, was eager for Papadopoulos to serve as a surrogate, someone who could publicize Trump’s foreign-policy views without officially speaking for the campaign.
In late April, at a London hotel, Mifsud told Papadopoulos that he had just learned from high-level Russian officials in Moscow that the Russians had “dirt” on Clinton in the form of “thousands of emails,” according to court documents. Although Russian hackers had been mining data from the Democratic National Committee’s computers for months, that information was not yet public. Even the committee did not know.
Whether Papadopoulos shared that information with anyone else in the campaign is one of many unanswered questions. He was mostly in contact with the campaign via emails. The day after Mifsud’s revelation about the hacked emails, Papadopoulos told Miller in an email only that he had “interesting messages coming in from Moscow” about a possible trip. The emails obtained by The Times show no evidence that Papadopoulos discussed the stolen messages with the campaign.
Not long after, however, he opened up to Downer, the Australian diplomat, about his contacts with the Russians. It is unclear whether Downer was fishing for that
information that night in May 2016.
It is also not clear why, after getting the information in May, the Australian government waited two months to pass it to the FBI. In a statement, the Australian Embassy in Washington declined to confirm that the meeting occurred.
The FBI declined to comment.
Once the information Papadopoulos had disclosed to the Australian diplomat reached the FBI, the bureau opened an investigation that became one of its most closely guarded secrets. Senior agents did not discuss it at the daily morning briefing, a classified setting where officials normally speak freely about highly sensitive operations.
Besides the information from the Australians, the investigation was also propelled by intelligence from other friendly governments, including the British and Dutch. A trip to Moscow by another adviser, Carter Page, also raised concerns at the FBI.
With so many strands coming in, FBI agents debated how aggressively to investigate the campaign’s Russia ties, according to current and former officials familiar with the debate. Issuing subpoenas or questioning people, for example, could cause the investigation to burst into public view in the final months of a presidential campaign.
It could also tip off the Russian government, which might try to cover its tracks. Some officials argued against taking such disruptive steps, especially because the FBI would not be able to unravel the case before the election.
Ultimately, the FBI and Justice Department decided to keep the investigation quiet, a decision that Democrats in particular have criticized. And agents did not interview Papadopoulos until late January.