Fresh off 12 days in prison for lying to federal investigators in the Russia probe, former Trump campaign staffer George Papadopoulos, of “coffee boy” fame, has declared he will run for Congress in the next election. Having moved to Los Angeles with his wife, Papadopoulos told The Telegraph that he is hoping to “find a little Republican enclave somewhere in this part of the country and run there.” Donors in Orange County, a traditionally red region that flipped blue last month, have already reached out to express their interest, he told Politico. The 2020 campaign, he said, is already in an “incipient stage.”

“It is true,” Papadopoulos tweeted Friday afternoon. “I will be running for Congress in 2020, and I will win. Stay tuned.”

Though his credentials are unorthodox, Papadopoulos has some traction with the MAGA grassroots, having recently re-invented himself as an innocent victim of the Deep State. Over the past few months, he and his wife, Simona, have appeared on Sean Hannity’s show and allowed themselves to become the subjects of a docuseries. (Simona, who Papadopoulos met in 2017 through LinkedIn and both had worked for a think tank run by Joseph Mifsud—the mysterious Maltese academic believed to have high-level connections to the Russian government—is planning to pursue acting and modeling.) More recently, upon completing his brief stint in prison, Papadopoulos turned up at a poorly attended conservative conference for die-hard Trump fans.

Whether his status as a tangential Trump celebrity can be parlayed into a credible congressional run remains to be seen. Certainly, his status as an ex-con hasn’t dampened his enthusiasm for America. “We all make mistakes,” Papadopoulos explained in his interview with The Telegraph. “It’s not the end of the world to forget when you met somebody a year ago. It shouldn’t preclude my future in politics in this country.”

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