In August 2016, Papadopoulos will propose to the Trump campaign—specifically to the man who hired him, Sam Clovis—that he travel to Moscow to meet with Kremlin officials on Trump’s behalf. Clovis will tell him that, if he determines the trip is feasible, he should “make the trip.”80 The Washington Post will summarize the exchange this way: “[Trump’s] national campaign co-chairman urged a foreign policy adviser to meet with Russian officials [in August 2016] to foster ties with that country’s government.”81
At the time of the Papadopoulos-Clovis email exchange, there was no doubt that Russian hackers were attacking America’s infrastructure. On June 14, 2016, the Washington Post had run a story whose headline read, in part, “Russian government hackers penetrated DNC.”82 By July 2016, public discussion had already moved to accusations by the Clinton campaign that Russian government hackers were specifically working to help elect Trump, as evidenced by WikiLeaks releasing hacked emails only from the DNC and doing so during the Democratic National Convention.83
Trump tells the New York Times his National Security Advisory Committee is made up of “very good” people “recommended” to him by “people I respect.” But the group, including its “shadow” adjunct Michael Flynn, includes three individuals who at some point will be suspected of being foreign agents: George Papadopoulos, suspected by Mueller’s investigators of being an Israeli agent in 2016; Carter Page, suspected by the FBI of being a Russian agent in 2013; and Flynn, a confirmed unregistered Turkish agent throughout much of the presidential campaign—which the campaign knew pre-inauguration and did not reveal to anyone.84 What they have in common, as summarized by the New York Times, is that “many on the team embraced a common view: that the United States ought to seek a rapprochement with Russia after years of worsening relations during the Obama administration. Now, however, their suspected links to Russia have put them under legal scrutiny and cast a shadow over the Trump presidency.”85
Though not a member of the committee, Paul Manafort is sent many of the most sensitive emails produced by committee members, including emails from Papadopoulos about setting up a Trump-Putin meeting in Moscow or the United States.86 In the two years before Manafort joins the Trump campaign, for part of his time on the campaign, and for many months afterward, the FBI uses a FISA warrant to conduct surveillance on Manafort because of his suspected activities as a foreign agent for Russian and Russia-allied interests.87 As CNN reports, “Some of the intelligence collected [from the Manafort wiretap] sparked concerns among investigators that Manafort had encouraged the Russians to help with the campaign, according to three sources familiar with the investigation.”88
Annotated History
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Almost immediately after the Sessions hire, Trump national cochair Sam Clovis hires a young and inexperienced George Papadopoulos to be the third official member of Trump’s National Security Advisory Committee. According to Papadopoulos’s October 2017 plea documents, on March 6, 2016, Clovis told Papadopoulos that “a principal foreign policy focus of the Campaign was an improved U.S. relationship with Russia”—echoing Flynn’s position on the question.
During the same two-week period that Michael Flynn became an official Trump adviser and Manafort told Barrack he had to “get to” Trump so he could offer his services for free as a convention manager, the Internet Research Agency, a Russian troll farm, finalized its plans to support Trump’s candidacy by spreading discord and misinformation on American social media.89 In the two weeks after that, Trump hired Jeff Sessions; Manafort and Trump entered into discussions about Manafort coming aboard the campaign; and Clovis hired Papadopoulos and then—it appears—sent him off to Italy.
In late October 2017, Clovis, then serving as the Department of Agriculture’s senior White House adviser, withdrew his pending nomination to become the agency’s chief scientist. One ostensible reason was that the Washington Post had published the fact that he “has no academic credentials in science or agriculture,” but it is widely believed the real reason had to do with his role in the ongoing Russia investigation.90
In May 2018, Clovis told the Washington Examiner that he had testified to the grand jury convened by the special counsel, been interviewed by Mueller’s investigators, and answered questions for the two congressional intelligence committees investigating Trump-Russia ties for a total of nineteen hours.91 He implied that one of the primary lines of questioning in each instance focused on his role as the liaison between the National Security Advisory Committee and the Trump campaign—as well as being the man who supervised the construction and composition of the committee. He denied any wrongdoing, however. “As far as I know,” he told the Examiner, “no one in the campaign lifted a finger to get to the 30,000 [Clinton] emails [Trump said were ‘missing’]. I don’t think it was in their interest. Anytime anybody approached me about oppo, I deleted it. Oppo research against Hillary Clinton? We had plenty of material. It’s not like it’s not a target-rich environment.”92
Clovis’s comment confirmed that he was approached multiple times via email or another method about pursuing “oppo” (opposition research) on Clinton that involved her “missing” emails. But Clovis’s alleged lack of interest in the hunt for Clinton’s emails is in question. When Peter W. Smith, a GOP researcher and operative, was looking for assistance in finding Clinton’s emails, he listed Clovis—along with Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, and Michael Flynn—as one of four Trump campaign officials who had explicitly endorsed and were supporting his effort.93 Jonathan Safron, a former Smith assistant, said Smith “spoke to him of knowing Clovis . . . and that he had seen Smith email Clovis about matters unrelated to Clinton’s emails. . . . [But] he does not know whether Clovis . . . ever replied.”94
As of October 2017, Clovis was considered a “cooperative witness” in the Mueller investigation.95 Court documents released by the Department of Justice in October 2017 confirmed that Clovis hired Papadopoulos in March 2016 and thereafter knew Papadopoulos was talking to the Russians—yet took no action to change Papadopoulos’s status with the Trump campaign.96 Speaking to Politico, administration and campaign officials justified Clovis’s actions by saying Clovis had no foreign policy connections in early 2016, was under pressure to build a national security team for Trump, and therefore did virtually no vetting of his selections. They offered no explanation for Clovis’s failure to fire Papadopoulos when it was discovered he was having clandestine communications with people connected to the Kremlin, or for his statement to Papadopoulos that Russia was going to be a top national security topic for Trump, or for his note of congratulations to Papadopoulos after the young adviser reported back to Clovis that he had advanced a clandestine negotiation with Kremlin agents.97
In November 2017, Buzzfeed News, trying to determine “how [Papadopoulos] was brought into the Trump camp’s orbit,” noted that Papadopoulos in 2016 appeared on an Israeli energy conference panel alongside Yigal Landau, the CEO of Ratio Oil Exploration, an Israeli company then in a business partnership with Kamil Ekim Alptekin, one of Michael Flynn’s clients at the now-defunct Flynn Intelligence Group.98 Alptekin was in 2016 a member of the European Council on Foreign Relations, a think tank with several hundred members—one of whom, Josef Mifsud, eventually became Papadopoulos’ primary Russian contact.99 Buzzfeed News further reported that Ratio denied any association with Alptekin, even though there were “numerous documents, emails, photographs and bank statements showing a business relationship.”100 Papadopoulos is also linked to Flynn by the involvement of both men with Ben Carson’s 2016 presidential campaign as national security advisers.
Clovis’s attorney Victoria Toensing released a statement to the press on October 30, 2017, noting that, Clovis’s inaction on Papadopoulos notwithstanding, “Clovis did not believe an improved relationship with Russia should be a foreign policy focus of the campaign. Dr. Clovis always vigorously opposed any Russian trip for Donald Trump or staff. However, if a volunteer made any suggestions on any foreign policy ma
tter, Dr. Clovis, a polite gentleman from Iowa, would have expressed courtesy and appreciation.”101 Toensing’s statement was in response to Washington Post reporting that Clovis had indeed not just failed to oppose Papadopoulos’s proposed trip to Russia as a Trump surrogate in the summer of 2016, but in fact “urged [him] to make the trip,” saying to Papadopoulos that if he determined the trip was feasible, “Make the trip.”102
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Also named to the National Security Advisory Committee on March 21, 2016, is former Department of Defense inspector general Joseph Schmitz, who in 2013 had participated in an illicit, extra-governmental scheme to sell Russian arms to Syrian rebels.
Trump’s March 2016 decision to tap Joseph Schmitz to advise him on national security “confounded top experts” in the field, according to a report that month by the New York Times.103 Along with the appointments of Page, Papadopoulos, retired U.S. Army lieutenant general Keith Kellogg, and Walid Phares (“regularly accused by Muslim civil rights groups of being Islamophobic and of fear-mongering about the spread of Sharia law [into the United States]”), Schmitz’s designation as a top Trump national security adviser “left some of the country’s leading experts in the field scratching their heads as they tried to identify [Trump’s] choices.”104 The Times used the phrase “identify his choices” advisedly; most of Trump’s picks were so far off the radar of top national security experts that the experts simply had no idea who they were. Mike Green, a foreign policy expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told the Times that everyone in his orbit had to resort to Google to “see what they [could] find” on Trump’s selections.105 As noted in a March 2016 CNN article, at a news conference the day Trump announced his picks, he called them a “very good team” and “a top-of-the-line team.”106
A year before Trump announced his run, and a little more than two years before Trump named Schmitz to his National Security Advisory Committee, Schmitz spearheaded a secret plot to use seventy thousand Russian military weapons to arm Syrian rebels; as reported by the Wall Street Journal in May 2014, the CIA had to intervene directly to put a stop to it.107 As part of Schmitz’s Russian-arms plot, he told American officials that Erik Prince—a future Trump “shadow” national security adviser, as well as Schmitz’s former boss at Blackwater, where Prince was CEO and Schmitz COO—could assist the United States in getting Russian arms to Syria.108 Schmitz’s close ties to Prince, who lives in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, offer some insight into why Trump selected Schmitz for his national security team (and may explain how Prince could be kept abreast of what was happening on that team). Jeremy Scahill of the Intercept called Schmitz an “enthusiastic fan” of Prince’s in a March 2016 interview with Democracy Now!109 Schmitz also had a tie to another member of Trump’s National Security Advisory Committee, Walid Phares; Schmitz was a senior fellow at the Center for Security Policy (CSP). CSP notes on its website that Phares has “spoken at several events organized by the CSP.”110
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But the group, including its “shadow” adjunct Michael Flynn, includes three individuals who at some point will be suspected of being foreign agents: George Papadopoulos, suspected by Mueller’s investigators of being an Israeli agent in 2016; Carter Page, suspected by the FBI of being a Russian agent in 2013; and Flynn, a confirmed unregistered Turkish agent throughout much of the presidential campaign—which the campaign knew pre-inauguration and did not reveal to anyone.
In the summer of 2016, Special Counsel Mueller threatened to charge George Papadopoulos with being an Israeli agent, according to Papadopoulos’s wife, Simona Mangiante.111 The allegation that Papadopoulos was working as an unregistered Israeli agent stemmed from events that occurred before Clovis selected him for the Trump campaign, Mangiante claimed.112 After his hire by the campaign and his revelation to the National Security Advisory Committee on March 31, 2016, that he was acting as a Kremlin intermediary, the campaign immediately sent him to Israel to discuss Trump’s Russia policy and other matters.113 Papadopoulos had long been in communication with Eli Groner, then a top aide to current Israeli president Benjamin Netanyahu. But Mueller’s investigators have made no statement on the Papadopoulos case besides their public filings and they do not implicate Papadopoulos as an Israeli agent, so Mangiante’s claims can’t be further substantiated.114 The Washington Post noted that Papadopoulos “attended a series of energy conferences in Israel, including one held in April 2016, just days after he was named to Trump’s campaign.”115
According to coverage of Papadopoulos’s April 2016 visit to Israel in the Jerusalem Post, Papadopoulos told the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies (BESA) that
Donald Trump would “overtly seek” serious engagement with Russia on a range of common concerns. Trump, says Papadopoulos, sees Russian President Vladimir Putin as a responsible actor and potential partner. . . . In particular, the US and Russia share a strong interest in combating the export of radical and violent Islam from the Middle East; to stop its spread into the Muslim republics on the borders of Russia, into Europe, and into the Baltics. Papadopoulos believes that Trump can ally with Putin this regard.116
Given that Papadopoulos had joined the Trump campaign the month before as a nominal expert in Middle Eastern energy issues, and given that Trump’s National Security Advisory Committee had held only one meeting as of Papadopoulos’s trip to Israel, it’s unclear where his understanding of the Trump platform on Russia had come from by the first week of April.117 J. D. Gordon would later tell CNN’s Jim Acosta that Trump had laid out his vision for (at a minimum) the Russia-Ukraine crisis at the March 31, 2016, meeting of his National Security Advisory Committee, which Trump later called a “very unimportant” meeting.118
Papadopoulos’s first April 2016 meeting with Israeli nationals was held at BESA.119 There is at least some overlap between BESA and Joel Zamel’s Wikistrat—Zamel being the Israeli national who offered Donald Trump Jr. clandestine assistance, in the form of a domestic disinformation campaign, at an August 2016 meeting in Trump Tower attended by adviser to the UAE crown prince George Nader and Erik Prince and set up by Prince.120 For instance, a BESA publication on the ties between Israel and former Soviet republic Azerbaijan, by Alexander Murinson, notes that Murinson is both a senior researcher at BESA and a senior analyst for Wikistrat.121 The Daily Beast now says that Wikistrat is “in Mueller’s sights,” in part because of Zamel’s attempts to recruit Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn in 2014 or 2015 for a position on his firm’s advisory board and in part for other reasons: for instance, because Wikistrat’s clients are governments and the firm is involved in “intelligence collection,” Wikistrat uses “in country” “informants” for its work. The Daily Beast says it has “incredible access to top U.S. military and intelligence officials,” and the environment within Wikistrat has been described by a former employee, James Kadtke, as “more . . . than meets the eye,” “mysterious,” and “clear . . . these guys had intelligence backgrounds [and were] intelligence professionals, not academics or analysts. . . . They were using their experts for tacit information going on [sic] in various parts of the world.”122
While in Israel, Papadopoulos was also on a panel with Ratio CEO Yigal Landau, whose close business associate, Kamil Alptekin, is a member of the European Council on Foreign Relations (an organization with a membership in the dozens or low hundreds, depending on which level of engagement one considers: “expert,” “associated researcher,” “research group member,” or general member). Papadopoulos had met another ECFR member, Joseph Mifsud, just three weeks earlier in Italy.123
Simona Mangiante claimed in 2018 that while she was with Papadopoulos in Greece during one of their trips there in 2016 or 2017, “an Israeli person who came—flew to Mykonos just to discuss business—much money was offered to George in many directions . . . and everything was highly suspicious.”124 Following the Israeli’s offer of money to Papadopoulos, said Mangiante, he “invited [Papadopoulos] to Cyprus and Isr
ael to discuss business.”125 Papadopoulos had been attending conferences in Cyprus annually and writing editorials about cooperation among Israel, Greece, and Cyprus on exploitation of the Leviathan gas field in the Mediterranean Sea a few dozen miles off Israel’s coast. Landau’s Ratio Oil Exploration is, according to Buzzfeed News, “one of several Israeli and US firms that are part of the consortium exploiting Leviathan.126 Mangiante claimed Papadopoulos didn’t take any money from the Israeli; however, in its recommendation for Papadopoulos’s September 7, 2018, federal sentencing, the Office of the Special Counsel revealed that Papadopoulos had received $10,000 from someone he believed was a foreign (non-Russian) intelligence agent and had kept it.127
In a video of Papadopoulos published by the Times of Israel in June 2018, taken at a celebration the week of Trump’s inauguration, Papadopoulos is seen meeting and discussing policy with a well-known right-wing activist in Israel, Yossi Dagan, and apparently doing so as a representative of the Trump campaign. Haaretz later confirmed that Papadopoulos was indeed speaking on Israel policy, post-inauguration, as a Trump representative.128 “We are looking forward to ushering in a new relationship between the United States and all of Israel, including the historic Judea and Samaria,” Papadopoulos says in the video.129
Since Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to making false statements in October 2017, his wife, acting as his spokeswoman, has said Papadopoulos has “reassessed his role” in aiding the Trump-Russia investigation. This development came after revelations that his drunken comment about Russia being in possession of stolen Clinton emails, made to Australian diplomat Alexander Downer in a London pub, initiated the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign (“Operation Crossfire Hurricane”) and after allegations that a Cambridge University professor named Stefan Halper, who reached out to Papadopoulos in the summer of 2016, was connected to the Bureau.130 In June 2018, Mangiante publicly asked Trump to pardon Papadopoulos; in August 2018, she claimed that Papadopoulos planned to retract his guilty plea.131 On September 8, 2018, Papadopoulos was sentenced to 14 days in prison by Judge Randy Moss, who found Papadopoulos to be contrite.132 Prior to the sentence’s being handed down, Papadopoulos’ attorney, Thomas Breen, opined to Moss that “The President of the United States hindered this investigation more than George Papadopoulos ever did.”133 In the sentencing memo Papadopoulos submitted prior to his sentencing hearing, he accused Trump of “nodd[ing] in approval” when Papadopoulos informed him that Putin wanted to set up a private meeting with him using Papadopoulos as an intermediary; according to the memo, Jeff Sessions also “appeared to like the idea and stated that the campaign should look into it.” In a September 2018 interview with CNN, Papadopoulos said Sessions was “enthusiastic” about the possibility of a Trump-Putin meeting during the 2016 campaign, saying to Papadopoulos and Trump on March 31, 2016—as well as to the assembled National Security Advisory Committee—“this is a good idea.”134
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