Ex-campaign aide who lied seeks probation

Candidate Donald Trump “nodded with approval” at the suggestion of a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to a court filing that seeks leniency for a former campaign aide who lied to the FBI.

Lawyers for George Papadopoulos are seeking probation, saying the foreign policy adviser misled agents during a January 2017 interview not to harm an investigation but rather to “save his professional aspirations and preserve a perhaps misguided loyalty to his master.”

Papadopoulos is a pivotal figure in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation as the first Trump campaign aide to plead guilty and cooperate with prosecutors. The revelation that he’d been told by a professor during the campaign that Russia had “dirt” on Democrat Hillary Clinton in the form of emails helped trigger the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation in July 2016 into potential coordination between Russia and the Trump campaign.

The 16-page defense memo filed late Friday paints Papadopoulos as an eager-to-please campaign aide who was in over his head, and aims to counter the prosecution’s narrative that Papadopoulos’s deception irreparably damaged the investigation.

The defense lawyers say Papadopoulos was hired by the campaign in March 2016 despite having no experience with Russian or U.S. diplomacy.

At a March 31 meeting of Trump’s national security adviser, Papadopoulos proposed that he could leverage his newfound Russian connections to arrange a meeting between Trump and Putin.