The most difficult task facing Team Trump this week is: Just how to diminish the skill, effectiveness, importance, and closeness of the people who helped them win the White House? For some of those now falling into indictment, Trump has been practicing for months. Paul Manafort moved from campaign chair who saw Trump through the final primaries, planned the convention, and fought back efforts to organize an anyone-but-Trump alternative … to that guy who was there for “a very short time” more than a month ago. And Sarah Sanders was still hammering that theme on Monday, saying of Manafort …
"The President hired Paul Manafort to handle the delegate process, which he did and he was dismissed not too long after that," Sanders said when pushed on the significance of his indictment.
Which, if by “handle the delegates” she means running primaries and the convention, and “dismissed not long after that” she means in August, when suspicions over Manafort’s actions in Ukraine started to draw too much attention—then she’s being perfectly accurate.
But if the Manafort effort has been aimed at diminishing his role in the campaign, the focus on George Papadopoulos has been diminishing … George Papadopoulos.
Former Trump camp adviser Michael Caputo repeatedly calls Papadopolous a "coffee boy." "Never heard of him until his name came up in the media."
Sanders, too, is insistent that Papadopoulos was just a “volunteer” who never did anything official on the campaign. All of which would be easier to believe … if Papadopoulos weren’t constantly in communication with the very top of Trump’s campaign.
Papadopoulos was in contact with several senior Trump campaign aides about his efforts to broker a relationship between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, the court papers show. In addition to Clovis, who now serves as senior White House adviser to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Papadopoulos wrote to campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and campaign chairman Paul Manafort, the newly released documents show.
Earlier speculation over just who was the “supervisor” on the receiving end of all those Papadopoulos emails focused on Jefferson Sessions—which would have been fitting, especially considering Sessions’ lengthy private meeting with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
But Sam Clovis, who was the co-chair of Trump’s campaign, now seems the agreed-on target of Papadopoulos’s enthusiastic efforts to connect Trump and Russia. The terms of Papadopoulos’s statement of the offense, show that he not only told Clovis about his meetings with a Russia-connected professor and a Russian woman he thought was well connected at the Kremlin, Clovis replied with a “great job” along with a suggestion that Papadopoulus, along with some other member of Trump’s team, take Russia up on the offer of a visit.
While Sarah Sanders and others emphasized that the campaign didn’t act on Papadopoulos’s offer of a meeting with Russia, she failed to mention that it was because they didn’t have to—while Papadopoulos was getting offers of “dirt” on Hillary Clinton in the form of “thousands of emails,” Wikileaks released those letters to the world—which Donald Trump “loved.” And while Papadopoulos was trying to get Trump to Russia to meet with them over that offer of dirt, Russia came to Trump—in the form of a Trump Tower meeting scheduled entirely on the premise that Russia had the same “dirt” they’d been pushing to Papadopoulos.
But there was an effect of Papadopoulos’s work for the campaign. He made them aware that Russia had hacked Democratic emails even before the FBI made that knowledge available.
Court documents revealed that Russian officials alerted the campaign, through an intermediary in April 2016, that they possessed thousands of Democratic emails and other “dirt” on Hillary Clinton.
That was two months before the Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee was publicly revealed and the stolen emails began to appear online. The new court filings provided the first clear evidence that Trump campaign aides had early knowledge that Russia had stolen confidential documents on Mrs. Clinton and the committee, a tempting trove in a close presidential contest.
So, when Rob Goldstone came to Donald Trump Jr. at the start of June with an offer of Clinton “dirt,” Junior had good reason to make that meeting—they already knew that the Russians were behind the hack at the DNC and of John Podesta, even though the public did not.