Leave my lying husband alone
Ex-Trump aide’s wife rips Mueller plea deal
For better or for worse, George Papadopoulos' wife is doing her best to torpedo the plea deal her husband struck with special counsel Robert Mueller's office last year.
A day after Mueller recommended a sentence of six months for the former Trump campaign adviser, his better half tweeted her frustration with the probe into Russian election meddling.
“George wasn't ‘cooperative enough' in the Muller's [sic] recommendation,” Simona Mangiante tweeted Saturday. “He cooperated for 1 year and helped his country. He has been loyal to the truth and not to anyone's agenda. His cooperation is considered pointless as it didn't reveal any wrongdoing by the campaign?”
Prosecutors suggested Friday that Papadopoulos should do some prison time after lying to the FBI during their investigation into possible coordination between the Kremlin and President Trump's campaign.
Court documents revealed that the 31-year-old Chicago native hampered the probe because he lied repeatedly during a January 2017 interview.
Those lies, they said, led the FBI to miss a chance to question a professor who told Papadopoulos the Russians possessed "dirt" on Hillary Clinton during the campaign.
Hacked emails from Clinton's campaign and the Democratic National Committee were made public ahead of the 2016 presidential election. Mueller indicted 12 Russian intelligence officers in relation to the hacking last month.
Before Mueller recommended a six-month sentence for her husband, Mangiante embarked on a media blitz to complain that Papadopoulos was unfairly treated. She also used Twitter to seek a lawyer to take up her hubby's case “pro bono.”
“Your biggest reward will be #History. Your name will go down on history,” she tweeted.
Mangiante told MSNBC on Thursday that she no longer trusts Mueller, and cryptically said new evidence in the case leads her to believe Papadopoulos should back out of his plea deal.
"I trusted the institutions until they proved me wrong," Mangiante told MSNBC, adding that she had been made aware of "exculpatory evidences that fully justify him to drop off his plea agreement."
Mueller's team mentioned Mangiante's embrace of the media when it proposed Papadopoulos's sentence.
Prosecutors are “aware that the defendant and his spouse have participated in several additional media interviews concerning his case,” they wrote.
Papadopoulos has played a central role in the ongoing Russia probe. His drunken boasts about contacts with the professor prompted the counterintelligence investigation.
Trump and the White House have tried to downplay Papadopoulos' role with the campaign, calling him a "coffee boy." Mangiante bristles at that suggestion, and has said repeatedly that her husband was in on policy discussions.
Mangiante created a GoFundMe page in June, asking for donations to cover “financial support for lawyers and living.” The fundraiser had around $4,500 of its $75,000 goal as of Saturday.
Mueller's probe led to guilty pleas on charges of lying to investigators from Papadopoulos and two other former Trump campaign officials — disgraced former national security adviser Michael Flynn and campaign aide Richard Gates.
Papadopoulos is scheduled to be sentenced Sept. 7.