George Papadopoulos, a former Trump campaign adviser, faces a maximum possible sentence of five years in prison after pleading guilty to giving false testimony to investigators. | City of Alexandria, Va. Mueller seeks September sentencing for Papadopoulos

Special counsel Robert Mueller is asking that George Papadopoulos, a former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser, be sentenced in September on the false-statement felony charge he pleaded guilty to last fall.

In a court filing on Friday evening, Mueller’s prosecutors and defense attorneys in the case asked U.S. District Court Judge Randy Moss to set Papadopoulos’ sentencing for Sept. 7, or a date in October if the judge is unavailable.


If the hearing goes forward as scheduled, Papadopoulos could become the second defendant sentenced in Mueller’s investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.

In April, Alex van der Zwaan, a Dutch attorney, was sentenced to 30 days in federal custody for the same charge: lying in the course of a federal investigation. Van der Zwaan admitted that he misled prosecutors about contacts related to work his law firm did as part of a campaign aimed at burnishing the image of Viktor Yanukovych, the president of Ukraine at the time.

Papadopoulos was secretly arrested by the FBI last July as he returned to the U.S. on a flight from Germany. He was initially charged with making false statements and with obstruction of justice for misleading the FBI about his contacts with pro-Russia advocates during the 2016 campaign.

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Last October, Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to the false-statement charge in a sealed courtroom in Washington, becoming the first person to admit guilt in the course of the Mueller investigation.

Papadopoulos, 30, faces a maximum possible sentence of five years in prison. However, judges typically follow sentencing guidelines that call for more lenient sentences for defendants with no criminal record, particularly if they plead guilty. It is possible the former Trump adviser could not be sentenced to jail at all.

The timing of the planned sentencing suggests either that Papadopoulos will not be a witness in other cases or that he is likely to receive a relatively light sentence regardless of the impact of his testimony, so there is no need to delay the sentencing.

In recent weeks, Papadopoulos’ wife, Simona Mangiante, has been publicly urging President Donald Trump to pardon her husband. Mangiante has argued that it’s possible he was the victim of some kind of a sting operation carried out by FBI informants.

Papadopoulos, an energy consultant, was part of a relatively thin bench of foreign policy advisers touted by the candidate at a time when few figures in the Republican establishment were willing to assist him, but he played a pivotal role in the launching of the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation.

In May 2016, Papadopoulos told an Australian diplomat, Alexander Downer, that the Russians had access to information on Hillary Clinton that could be damaging to her campaign. A couple of months later, another Australian diplomat relayed that information to the FBI, which opened an investigation.

