State Department official Andrea Thompson’s planned presence at a meeting with Russia’s foreign minister raised concerns after it was revealed she had failed to disclose ties to Maria Butina. | Thomas Peter/AP Photo foreign policy Pompeo layers over top State Dept. negotiator ahead of talks with Russia The official, Andrea Thompson, stands accused of failing to disclose ties to a GOP operative caught up in the Maria Butina affair.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo expressed concern about sending one of his top arms control negotiators, Andrea Thompson, to head a U.S. delegation meeting with Russia’s deputy foreign minister this week after it was revealed that she had failed to disclose her ties to the boyfriend of Russian foreign agent Maria Butina.

So Pompeo dispatched his deputy, John Sullivan, to lead the delegation instead. The delegation, which now includes Sullivan, Thompson and other senior U.S. officials, is attending the strategic security dialogue in Geneva, where American officials are set to talk with Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov about arms control, including what sort of arrangement might replace the International Nuclear Forces treaty that the Trump administration scuttled earlier this year.


Thompson’s presence at the meeting raised concern in some quarters of the administration after the Washington Post reported last month that she had not disclosed her personal and financial ties to Paul Erickson, the veteran GOP operative who worked with Butina to establish a Kremlin backchannel to the Trump campaign in 2016.

Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, sent a private letter to the State Department in recent days regarding Thompson’s “apparent failures to disclose required and material information to the SFRC during her nomination process,” according to Juan Pachon, Menendez’s communications director on the committee.

A State Department spokesman confirmed receipt of the letter, but declined to comment on Pompeo’s last-minute decision to send Sullivan to Geneva, or on whether the department was satisfied with Thompson’s disclosures during her confirmation process.

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Thompson failed to alert her superiors that Erickson officiated her 2017 wedding, according to two U.S. officials, and did not disclose during her Senate confirmation that her husband, David Gillian, a retired Australian Army officer, had wired Erickson $100,000 for an allegedly fraudulent investment scheme in which Gillian and others were allegedly defrauded by Erickson -- a transaction laid out by the FBI in court filings.

The failure to disclose could have serious repercussions for Thompson, former officials said, though it is not necessarily fatal to her career.

“All senior officers have to report on their finances and any connections to overseas interests. Diplomatic Security should review her clearance,” said John Sipher, who spent nearly three decades working in the CIA’s clandestine service, including a stint in Moscow. “When Erickson and Butina were all over the news, she should have reported her connection. At the very least it now puts the administration in a bind where critics can question her competence, professionalism and judgment.”

At the time of her wedding and her then-fiance’s investment in Erickson’s business four months prior, Thompson was working as national security adviser to Vice President Mike Pence. A year later, in April of 2018, she was confirmed by the Senate as undersecretary for arms control and international security.

At the time, Gillian was complaining to Erickson that he hadn’t seen the promised return on his investment, the FBI said, and received what agents described as a “lulling payment” of $5,000 -- intended to allay Gillian’s concerns -- on March 29, 2018, the month after Thompson’s Senate Committee hearing and the month before her confirmation vote.

Thompson’s alleged failure to disclose her relationship with Erickson, who was by then the subject of national news stories detailing his relationship with Butina, during her Senate confirmation has raised anxiety among Russia hawks in the Trump orbit who fear that Thompson, one of the last remaining acolytes of the president’s first national security adviser, Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, is insufficiently hard-headed and enters this week’s talks in a compromised position.

One of these officials said that Thompson’s failure to disclose her connection to Erickson indicates that her “judgment is in question.”

“She either didn’t understand what she was doing … or she did and she tried to conceal it,” this person said.

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Flynn was pushed out of the administration in February of 2017 after news reports indicated he had misled senior White House officials about the substance of his conversations with Russian officials during the transition period. He stands accused of lying to the FBI about the nature of those interactions, though he has suggested that investigators tricked him into making false statements.

In March of 2017, Thompson filed a public financial disclosure report after joining the vice president’s office. Prosecutors in the Erickson case note that her then fiancé, Gillian, had wired $100,000 to Erickson on February 28, 2017. That was just days before her paperwork was submitted, but neither Erickson’s nor Butina’s role in the presidential campaign had yet been reported.

A subsequent financial disclosure would have been due in May 2018, according to a source in the vice president’s office, but by then, Thompson was at the State Department.

In the interim, Erickson became the subject of national headlines when reports surfaced that he had made overtures to the Trump campaign offering to establish a backchannel to the Kremlin. Erickson was engaged in a romantic relationship with Maria Butina, who has since pleaded guilty to conspiring to act as an unregistered Russian agent.

Throughout the 2016 campaign, prosecutors argued, Butina, a 30-year-old graduate student, worked to forge relationships with influential Republican political organizations, including the National Rifle Association, in an attempt to create backchannels to the Russian government. She worked both to organize trips for influential GOP operatives to visit Moscow and to get access to government officials for Russian delegations visiting the U.S.

A former GOP operative and fundraiser, Erickson was indicted in February on fraud charges in February and pleaded not guilty. Prosecutors allege that he swindled upwards of $2 million from investors for three business propositions, including one to invest in a chain of elder care facilities, and did not spend the money on any of them.

Though the charges were not directly related to Erickson’s relationship with Butina, the FBI alleged that “some of Gillian’s money went to Erickson’s girlfriend, Maria Butina."