George Papadopoulos: Trump campaign agreed to meeting with Russians

Implicated in the latest twist are former adviser George Papadopoulos and USDA chief scientist nominee Sam Clovis

By Matthew Rozsa

Staff Writer

Published November 1, 2017 8:07AM (EDT)

 (Getty/Brendan Smialowski)
(Getty/Brendan Smialowski)

Yet another small step has been taken toward demonstrating either real or attempted collusion between Russian government officials and President Donald Trump and his 2016 campaign.

George Papadopoulos — a former Trump adviser who was described as important to their campaign prior to the announcement of his guilty plea earlier this week — wrote an email one week before the Republican National Convention in which he said that his side had "approved" trying to set up a pre-election meeting with Russian officials and "my national chairman and maybe one other foreign policy adviser," according to Bloomberg. The email was discovered during the three months in which Papadopoulos cooperated with investigators in building their case against specific members of Trump's campaign and/or administration.

It is notable that the email was not part of the admission of Papadopoulos' wrongdoing released by prosecutors, which could indicate that they believe its assertions were not true.

Papadopoulos' supervisor was Sam Clovis, the Trump campaign's national co-chairman and Trump's current nominee to be chief scientist at the United States Department of Agriculture. Although the Papadopoulos documents claim that he was told by Clovis that it was a top campaign to improve America's relations with Russia, Clovis' lawyer claims that he set up a national security committee in the campaign and Papadopoulos "attended one meeting and was never otherwise approached by the campaign for consultation."

The statement added, "Dr. Clovis has not communicated with Mr. Papadopoulos since prior to the 2016 election."

Not surprisingly, Trump took to Twitter on Tuesday to spin his own version of the latest revelations about Papadopoulos and Clovis.


By Matthew Rozsa

Matthew Rozsa is a staff writer at Salon. He received a Master's Degree in History from Rutgers-Newark in 2012 and was awarded a science journalism fellowship from the Metcalf Institute in 2022.

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Related Topics ------------------------------------------

Donald Trump George Papadopoulos Sam Clovis Vladimir Putin