South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Papadopoulos details prison time at ‘Camp Cupcake’ in Wis.
George Papadopoulos was headed to prison — and he was scared.
He had pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI and was sentenced to two weeks hard time at a minimumsecurity federal facility in rural central Wisconsin. The 31-year-old Trump campaign aide who was a focus of special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe was told it’d be no big deal, just some white-collar criminals caught up in financial crimes, “stuff like that,” he wrote in his new book, “Deep State Target.” But, still, it was prison. “All I knew about prison was what I’d seen in the movies — gang violence, prison rapes, segregation, abusive jailers,” Papadopoulos recounted in the book. “On top of everything, it was going to be freezing cold, with crappy weather. I wasn’t sure I would last a day.”
But when he showed up at the Federal Correctional Institution in Oxford, Wis., in late November, he realized he had nothing to worry about.
In his telling, Papadopoulos arrived at the facility by car and dashed inside, trying to avoid camera crews and photographers looking for a perp walk visual.
Inside, he got a warm welcome.
“I’m not speaking for the Bureau of Prisons, but as a private citizen,” he says one employee told him. “I want to say that I think what happened to you was terrible . ... We just want the situation to be as pleasant as possible and that no one bothers you. If you need any help, please contact us.”
This was no Shawshank, no Green Mile, he thought.
“Then I realized,” he wrote. “I’m in Trump Country — I’m going to be OK.”
Papadopoulos, whom a George Papadopoulos, who was sent to prison after lying to the FBI, appears on a Fox News show in New York City.
fellow aide once dismissed as a mere “coffee boy,” served as one of the Trump campaign’s foreign-policy advisers. He attracted FBI attention for his association with the Maltese professor Joseph Mifsud, who told him in 2016 that Russia had dirt on Hillary Clinton, court papers say. Papadopoulos then relayed this to Australian diplomats in a London bar, which helped spark the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into Trump’s campaign.
Papadopoulos finished his sentence in December and began to claim that he was “set up” by Western intelligence officials who were opposed to President Donald Trump. Every page of his book, all of which sport a pair of crosshair annotations, seems to underline his assertion: he was targeted.
It’s this fighting spirit, he said, that endeared him to both the guards and the inmates at FCI Oxford.
In an interview with MSNBC’s Ari Melber last week, Papadopoulos claimed his association with Trump and his rabblerousing about the charges leveled against him gave him “street cred” at the prison.
“Uh, let’s say I had some street cred,” he said. “They considered me as that, as a fighter, and that counts for street cred when you get into a place like that.”
In his book, Papadopoulos said the guards were friendly.
One of them called Papadopoulos’ sentence “bulls---,” he said, then told him, “Listen, you don’t have to worry in here. This is Camp Cupcake.”
But that was nothing compared to the reception he said he got when he walked into the TV room.
“Somebody let out a whoop, people were looking in my direction,” he wrote. “The guys started clapping — the prisoners and the guards — and rising to their feet. They gave me a standing ovation ... They knew I’d gotten a raw deal.”
A spokeswoman for the prison did not respond to questions about the veracity of Papadopoulos’ account. His lawyers have requested a presidential pardon and, if granted, Papadopoulos said it would be an “honor” to accept. He has said that there is a lot of “disinformation” and “misunderstanding” about him and he just wants to move on. Turns out, prison may have been the easy part.