POLITICS 10/30/2017 10:31 am ET Updated 11 minutes ago

Trump Campaign Foreign Policy Adviser Pleads Guilty In Russia Probe

George Papadopolos admitted lying to the FBI.

By Ryan J. Reilly

WASHINGTON ― A foreign policy adviser to President Donald Trump’s presidential campaign has pleaded guilty to a charge of lying to FBI agents.

George Papadopoulos, 30, pleaded guilty on Oct. 5, but the case wasn’t unsealed until Monday, when two other Trump associates were indicted by a federal grand jury.

Papadopoulos reached a plea deal with prosecutors, and has since been cooperating with special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Prosecutors’ statement of the offense alleges Papadopoulos “made material false statements and material omissions” during a Jan. 27 interview with the FBI. He was arrested July 27. Prosecutors agreed to recommend between no prison time to six months under the plea agreement.

Papadopoulos told the FBI an overseas professor had “told him about the Russians possessing ‘dirt’ on then-candidate Hillary Clinton in the form of ‘thousands of emails,’ but stated multiple times that he learned that information prior to joining the campaign,” according to court documents. In fact, Papadopoulos was contacted after he learned he’d be joining the campaign, and the professor only mentioned the “thousands of emails” after he’d been on the Trump campaign for more than a month.

The professor, the statement indicates, had “substantial connections to Russian government officials” even though Papadopoulos claimed the professor was “a nothing.”
Papadopoulos, The Washington Post reported earlier, is a 2009 graduate of DePaul University. Previously, he was an adviser to Ben Carson’s presidential campaign and was the U.S. representative at the Geneva International Model United Nations in 2012. \\

 https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry...b07fdc5fbfa210