When news broke this week that George Papadopoulos had pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I. about his Russian contacts, the White House raced to distance Donald Trump from his former campaign foreign policy adviser. Papadopoulos, the president tweeted, was just some “low-level volunteer” who has “proven to be a liar.” Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders cast Papadopoulos as an unpaid political neophyte who went rogue. Another former Trump adviser described him as a glorified coffee boy. But court documents released by the Department of Justice tell a different story, revealing a trail of e-mails and meetings that show Papadopoulos in regular contact with senior campaign officials as he presented himself to foreign governments as a top adviser to the then presidential hopeful.

According to Robert Mueller’s team of prosecutors, Papadopoulos told investigators that Trump was present at a March 31, 2016 campaign meeting in which Papadopoulos “stated, in sum and substance, that he had connections that could help arrange a meeting between then-candidate Trump and President [Vladimir] Putin.” Trump, according to a former aide present at the meeting who spoke with The New York Times, “listened with interest and asked questions” about the arrangement. He “didn’t say yes, and he didn’t say no,” the aide added, and Papadopoulos allegedly continued communicating with his Russian intermediaries. Papadopoulos told the F.B.I. that his Russian contacts had described “dirt” on Hillary Clinton and “thousands” of her e-mails.

Later, in a July 2016 e-mail to an individual with Kremlin ties, Papadopoulos claimed that a meeting between the individual and campaign officials had been “approved by our side.” This conflicts with White House statements that Papadopoulos’s attempts to arrange a meeting between senior members of the Trump campaign and Russian officials were repeatedly rebuffed. While there is evidence that he was turned down, Papadopoulos’s wording suggests that, on at least one occasion, the foreign policy adviser may have gotten the green light to act as an intermediary.

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Though there is no evidence that the meeting occurred, and some doubt as to whether Papadopoulos was being truthful in the exchange, at least one member of the Trump campaign is confirmed to have encouraged Papadopoulos to pursue contacts with the Russians. Identified in court documents as a “campaign supervisor,” Sam Clovis—who served as the Trump campaign’s national co-chairman—praised Papadopoulos’s “great work.” In another e-mail, Clovis wrote that Papadopoulos should “Make the trip, if it is feasible.” (The meeting never took place.) Clovis’s attorney, Victoria Toensing, told The Washington Post that her client—an Iowa native—was merely “being polite” and “would always have been courteous to a person offering to help the campaign.” She added that there was a strict rule barring individuals from traveling abroad as representatives of the Trump campaign. (Clovis recently testified before Robert Mueller’s team as well as the special counsel’s grand jury, The Wall Street Journal reports.)

Despite this rule, the Journal reports that Papadopoulos—who joined the Trump campaign as a volunteer adviser in March 2016—was quoted in foreign publications on various occasions as a London-based adviser to the then presidential hopeful. And though he was reprimanded for calling on U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron to apologize for criticizing Trump’s support of a so-called “Muslim ban,” Papadopoulos was seated next to then Senator Jeff Sessions during a dinner with other campaign advisers a few months later. He also reportedly met with representatives of the British and Greek governments: according to the Journal, the Athens News Agency reported in January that Greek Defense Minister Panos Kammenos had met with Reince Priebus, the former White House chief of staff, and Papadopoulos.

In any other campaign, it is hard to imagine how an adviser like Papadopoulos could be both a “low-level volunteer” and a “coffee boy” while also liaising with foreign leaders, communicating with top-level staff, and sitting in on small meetings with the candidate. But then, Papadopoulos’s involvement is also emblematic of Trump’s struggle to attract top-tier talent. While seasoned political operatives flocked to the campaigns of establishment Republican candidates like Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, Trump’s fringe campaign was left picking for scraps. Papadopoulos’s resume, much of which was reportedly false or embellished, wouldn’t have even gotten him past the door of most presidential campaigns; he joined the Trump team after a brief stint with Ben Carson’s campaign, where he failed to impress. “We hired him, and he was basically a no-show,” said Barry Bennett, who served as Carson’s campaign manager, adding that he would not recommend Papadopoulos to future campaign positions. Now, the 30-year-old appears to be cooperating with Mueller and the F.B.I. to potentially indict his former colleagues.