Story highlights Michael Weiss: Trump adviser George Papadopoulos was told the Russians were hacking emails well before it broke as news

Trump has either denied or doubted or downplayed Russian involvement in the DNC and Podesta breaches, Weiss notes

Michael Weiss is a national security analyst for CNN and author of "ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror." The views expressed in this commentary are his own.

(CNN) In a normal political environment, a former campaign chairman and former campaign aide being indicted on 12 federal felony counts including tax fraud, money laundering and obstruction of justice would be significant enough. But one would be forgiven for saying that Paul Manafort and Rick Gates' legal misfortunes actually bury the real lead on Monday: Members of the Trump campaign were told the Russian government was in possession of "dirt" on Hillary Clinton, specifically "thousands of emails," a month and a half before the rest of us.

George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign, pleaded guilty on October 5 to making "a materially false, fictitious, and fraudulent statement and representation" to the FBI in January of this year regarding the "timing, extent, and nature of his relationship and interactions with certain foreign nationals whom he understood to have close connections with senior Russian government officials."

Among these was a certain unnamed "Professor" based in London who, Papadopoulos understood, had serious connections with members of Vladimir Putin's government. In a separate affidavit in support of the criminal complaint, FBI Special Agent Robert M. Gibbs further described the Professor as a "citizen of a country in the Mediterranean and an associate of several Russian nationals."

One of the latter, according to Gibbs, the Professor even introduced to Papadopoulos as a "niece" of Putin. (She isn't related to the Russian president at all, according to a footnote in the complaint.)

The affidavit further states that the supposed contact of this Mediterranean academic was the Russian ambassador to Britain, who, as Papadopoulos emailed other campaign officials, "also acts as the Deputy Foreign Minister." The ambassador, unnamed in the complaint, is Alexander Yakovenko, who is indeed an extremely influential diplomat because the rezidentura, or foreign spy station, run out of the London Embassy is one of the most important for Moscow and has been ever since the Cold War.

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