Donald Trump has tried to distance himself from a former foreign policy aide who pleaded guilty to perjury over his contacts with Russians during last year’s US election campaign.
The president fired off a series of tweets on Tuesday in which he publicly addressed for the first time the indictment of ex-adviser George Papadopoulos, which was revealed on Monday shortly after Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort was charged with a catalogue of serious federal crimes.
“Few people knew the young, low level volunteer named George, who has already proven to be a liar,” Trump posted on Twitter shortly after 8am local time, adding: “Check the DEMS!”
Court documents released on Monday said that Papadopoulos had admitted meeting Russians to get “dirt” on election rival Hillary Clinton and lied about it to federal agents working for special counsel Robert Mueller as part of his investigation into possible coordination between the Trump election campaign and Russia.
Papadopoulos’s plea was unsealed on the same day Manafort and a business associate, Rick Gates, were charged with money laundering, tax evasion, fraud and failing to register as agents of foreign interests. Manafort and Gates denied the charges.
Papadopoulos is the first person to face criminal charges that cite interactions between Trump campaign associates and people claiming to be Russian intermediaries during the 2016 campaign. He is described in court documents as a “proactive cooperator”.
Despite Trump’s claim that “few people knew” Papadopoulos, he himself referred to Papadopoulos as an “excellent guy” in an interview with the Washington Post in March 2016 about his new foreign policy team.
Later that month Trump posted a picture on Instagram captioned “meeting with my national security team” in which Papadopoulos can be seen four seats to his right.
The president’s team insisted that Papadopoulos, 30, played a limited role in the campaign and had no access to Trump.
The Washington Post identified Trump’s former campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, as the “high-ranking campaign official” mentioned in the court documents who Papadopoulos had told about his Russian contacts.
Lewandowski said he could not recall any such emails.
“This would have potentially come from a low-level volunteer, so I don’t remember the exact email,” he said.
“From what I recall, George was a low-level volunteer who might have attended a meeting of the foreign advisory team, the one meeting who took place,” Lewandowski told the NBC News’ Today show. “But he was not a person who was involved with the day-to-day operations of the campaign, or a person who I recall interacting with on a regular basis at all.”
But in late 2016 and early 2017, Papadopoulos was touted by the Trump camp as one of its leading voice on the Middle East and Syria in particular.
“If you worked on Syria policy in DC during the time of the inauguration, you probably heard of this guy,” tweeted Johan Arterbury, a Syria expert who was then working at Georgetown University. “His background was Cyprus and energy, his work experience minimal. Syria wonks (me included) were left confounded on how he got such connections.”
According to another Syria expert at a Washington thinktank, who asked not to be named, Papadopoulos was shortlisted to become a senior White House adviser on the Middle East and was due to be interviewed for the job in November – but then his star seemed to fade in the Trump camp.
Arterbury, now a Middle East security analyst, said: “By February he’d dropped from the radar, Syria policy moved elsewhere, and he vanished from the scene.”
Trump tweeted on Tuesday morning: “The Fake News is working overtime. As Paul Manaforts [sic] lawyer said, there was ‘no collusion’ and events mentioned took place long before he ... came to the campaign.”
Monday’s events marked a significant acceleration of Mueller’s investigation, which continues to cast a shadow over the White House as Trump’s approval rating has dropped to just 33%, according to a recent Gallup poll.
Susan Hennessey and Benjamin Wittes wrote on the influential Lawfare blog: “Trump, in short, had on his campaign at least one person, and allegedly two people, who actively worked with adversarial foreign governments in a fashion they sought to criminally conceal from investigators.
“The release of these documents should, though it probably won’t, put to rest the suggestion that there are no serious questions of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.”
Meanwhile, Russian officials brushed off the allegations in broad terms but did not offer specific details. Senator Alexei Pushkov wrote on Twitter: “Neither Trump, nor his campaign or Russian officials are mentioned. A ‘professor with ties to the Kremlin’? Ridiculous.”
Papadopoulos’s plea deal states that he was told in April 2016 by an unnamed “professor” – identified by the Washington Post as Joseph Mifsud – that Russia had “dirt” on Clinton in the form of “thousands of emails”.
This echoes a June 2016 meeting in which Donald Trump Jr met four Russians at Trump Tower in New York after being promised “dirt” on Clinton. Manafort and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner were also present.
The Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, called the allegations of a Russian link “hysteria.”
However, Lavrov refused to answer a specific question on whether the Russian foreign ministry was aware of Papadopoulos’s approach.
An attorney for Trump’s former Iowa campaign chairman, Sam Clovis, confirmed that references to the “campaign supervisor” are to him. Trump has nominated Clovis to serve as chief scientist of the US department of agriculture.
Asked if the administration is reconsidering Clovis’ nomination, Sanders said: “I’m not aware that any change would be necessary at this time.”
She continued: “Papadopoulos is an example of actually somebody doing the wrong thing while the president’s campaign did the right thing.”
“All of his emails were voluntarily provided to the special counsel by the campaign and that is what led to the process and the place that we’re in right now was the campaign fully cooperating and we’re helping with that.
“What Papadopoulos did was lie and that’s on him not on the campaign and we can’t speak for that.”