Lawyers for Trump’s ex-campaign aide say Papadopoulos was aiming to be ‘loyal to his master’ by arranging the meeting

This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

Donald Trump “nodded with approval” at the suggestion of a meeting with 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 the investigation, but rather to “save his professional aspirations and preserve a perhaps misguided loyalty to his master”.

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Papadopoulos’s filing also states that Jeff Sessions was also in favor of a Trump-Putin meeting, which publicly contradicts the attorney general’s sworn testimony to Congress

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.

He is due to be sentenced on Friday, 7 September.

The revelation that he’d been told by a professor during the 2016 election campaign that Russia had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton in the form of emails helped trigger the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation in July 2016. That evolved into the Mueller investigation into interference by the Russians in the election, potential coordination between Moscow and the Trump campaign, and obstruction of justice.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest This undated image posted on his Linkedin profile shows George Papadopoulos posing on a street of London. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

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.

Defense lawyers say Papadopoulos was hired by the campaign in March 2016 despite having no experience with Russian or US diplomacy. That month, he traveled to Italy and connected with a London-based professor who introduced him to a woman described as a niece of Putin’s, even though that was not true. That professor, Joseph Mifsud, would later tell him that individuals in Moscow possessed “dirt” on Clinton.

When Papadopoulos returned to Washington, he was “eager to show his value to the campaign” and “witnessed his career skyrocketing to unimaginable heights”. At a 31 March 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.

“While some in the room rebuffed George’s offer, Mr Trump nodded with approval and deferred to Mr Sessions who appeared to like the idea and stated that the campaign should look into it,” defense lawyers wrote. That language is a reference to Jeff Sessions, who at the time was a Republican senator from Alabama and key campaign aide and later became the Trump administration’s attorney general.

The inclusion of that detail seems intended to show that Papadopoulos provided investigators with valuable insight, even though prosecutors have said in their own sentencing memo that he did not provide “substantial assistance to them”.

Defense lawyers acknowledge that Papadopoulos “lied, minimized, and omitted material facts” to the FBI about his foreign contacts, including about when he had learned from Mifsud that the Russians had dirt on Clinton.

“Out of loyalty to the new president and his desire to be part of the administration, he hoisted himself upon his own petard,” they wrote.

But they rejected the idea that those lies impeded the investigation, calling that argument by prosecutors speculative.

Papadopoulos was arrested on 27 July 2017 and began cooperating with federal investigators.

“He was the first domino, and many have fallen in behind. Despite the gravity of his offense, it is important to remember what Special Counsel said at George’s plea of guilty: he was just a small part of a large-scale investigation,” his lawyers wrote.