Apparently, someone on the Trump campaign had a craving for enan eliniko gliko, or maybe it was an espresso hafukh, or maybe just some nice tea and buttered toast—because George Papadopoulos turns out to be the most widely traveled coffee boy in history.
He was on hand in America …
Papadopoulos appears on panel hosted by the American Jewish Committee in Cleveland, where the GOP convention is being held, joined by Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN), Rep. Tom Marino (R-PA) and Rep. Ted Yoho (R-FL).
And in London …
He ultimately is granted a meeting with mid-level official at the Foreign Office in London, and Papadopoulos mentions to the official that he had been in contact with top Russian government officials, the Washington Post reported.
And in Greece ...
He had acquired a new status in Athens and was widely regarded as being the key to having Trump’s ear. He was bestowed with awards, wined and dined by prominent Athenians and even appointed to the judging committee of a beauty pageant on a Greek island.
Then it seems he was making news in Israel, and back in London, then back in America. And somehow, along the way, people got the impression he hadn’t been sent jetting across continents to visit the local Starbucks—because the Trump campaign sent Papadapoulos out as a representative both to the press and to government officials in a way that made it clear he was a key member of the campaign.
Even when Papadopoulos was back in the United States, he continued his role as not just a foreign policy adviser to the campaign, but one of the key contacts for the campaign.
Papadopoulos is in New York, where sometime between Sept. 22-25, he meets with Ksenia Baygarova, a reporter for the privately-owned Russian news outlet Interfax.
Everywhere he went, Papadopoulos was confident in his Trump connection, right up until the December following the election.
Papadopoulos travels to Greece, where he signals to government officials that he’ll be a key player in the new administration, even though it appears no official position had been offered to him.
Papadopoulos even talked to a Russian reporter on January 20, 2017, just one week before he had the encounter with the FBI where he went on to deny most of what he’d been up to over the previous year.
The deliberate and rapid effort by other members of Trump’s team to belittle Papadopoulos’s position within the campaign since his name hit the news might be more believable had he not been sent to official activities and appeared on panels as a representative of the Republican candidate. It’s only after Papadopoulos has his second encounter with the FBI that his international connections abruptly end and he takes a slightly different approach.
February 16, 2017
Papadopoulos interviews with the FBI again, according to court filings. The next day he deletes the Facebook account he had been using to communicate with the Russian-affiliated contacts, and a few days later he also gets a new cell phone number.
Papadopoulos wouldn’t be arrested until July, and was likely wearing a wire between then and the official unveiling of his Statement of Offense on the same day as the indictments of Paul Manafort and Rick Gates. Tracking Papadopoulos’s movements and communications after he dropped out of sight in February could provide some very interesting details.
About coffee.