Washington
But interviews and documents show that Papadopoulos was in regular contact with the Trump campaign’s most senior officials and held himself out as a Trump surrogate as he traveled the world to meet with foreign officials and reporters.
Papadopoulos sat at the elbow of one of Trump’s top campaign advisers, then-Sen. Jeff Sessions, during a dinner for campaign advisers weeks before the Republican National Convention, according to an individual who attended the meeting.
He met in London in September 2016 with a mid-level representative of the British Foreign Office, where he said he had contacts at the senior level of the Russian government.
And he conferred at one point with the foreign minister of Greece at a meeting in New York.
While some top campaign aides appeared to rebuff Papadopoulos’ persistent offers to broker a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, there is no sign they told him directly to cease his activities or sought to end his affiliation with the campaign.
Emails included in court documents released on Monday show that Papadopoulos repeatedly told Trump campaign officials about his contacts with people he believed were representing the Russian government.
The court documents do not answer a key question: whether Papadopoulos also told his superiors that he had met a London-based professor who claimed to know that the Russians had “dirt” on Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, including thousands of her emails.
An FBI agent told the court in July that Papadopoulos lied in an interview with federal agents, saying he did not tell anyone on the campaign about the “dirt” because he thought the professor was a “nothing.”
At 29, Papadopoulos had scant experience that qualified him to advise a presidential candidate. He had entered the Trump campaign after a six-week stint working for the campaign of Trump’s rival for the Republican nomination, neurosurgeon Ben Carson.
Carson’s campaign manager, Barry Bennett, recalled that Papadopoulos was hired after sending him an unsolicited message via LinkedIn seeking a job.
At the time, Carson’s campaign was desperate to show it had policy experts advising his campaign, given that most leading Republican foreign policy thinkers had been snapped up by other candidates.
Bennett said his only vetting was to ask a friend at the Washington-based Hudson Institute, where Papadopoulos’ résumé indicated he had worked as a researcher, whether Papadopoulos was “an OK guy.”
“I wasn’t looking for something stellar,” Bennett said. “I wanted to make sure he was OK.”
For six weeks of work, Bennett said, Papadopoulos was paid $8,500 before he was let go from the campaign at the end of January 2016 as it shed staff.
By March 2016, Trump’s campaign, like Carson’s before it, was eagerly searching for foreign policy expertise. As Trump rose in the polls and won Republican primaries, the former reality TV host was under pressure to announce a group of advisers with whom he was consulting on foreign policy issues.
The scrutiny intensified early that month after 70 conservative national security experts signed an open letter opposing Trump’s candidacy. In mid-March, Trump was asked on the MSNBC show Morning Joe to name people with whom he spoke about foreign affairs.
“I’m speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very good brain,” Trump responded, prompting more calls for a list of formal advisers.
To come up with names, the campaign turned to Sam Clovis, a former Iowa radio host who served as national campaign co-chairman, an attorney for Clovis confirmed on Tuesday in a statement.
But the statement did not address how Papadopoulos ended up on the list. Bennett said he was not consulted and would not have recommended his former employee if he had been asked because he found him unimpressive.
On March 21, Trump included Papadopoulos among five men he announced were advising him on matters of national security in a meeting with The Washington Post editorial board. “An energy and oil consultant. Excellent guy,” Trump said.
If Trump or his team had undertaken even a cursory vetting of Papadopoulos, they would have found that much of his already-slim résumé was either exaggerated or false.
While he claimed to have served for several years as a fellow at the Hudson Institute, officials there said he had been an unpaid intern and a researcher under contract to several fellows who were writing a book.
Although he claimed to be “U.S. Representative at the 2012 Geneva International Model United Nations,” officials at that organization said they had no record of him.
Papadopoulos said he had delivered the “keynote address” at a leading American-Greek organization in 2008 — while a student at DePaul University. But records from the gathering indicate he merely participated in a youth panel with other participants. The keynote was delivered by 1988 Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis.
Though Papadopoulos’ exaggerated résumé issues quickly became public, he remained a part of the Trump advisory panel and soon began urging campaign aides to let him set up a meeting between Trump and Russian officials.
Court documents show he raised the idea at a March 31 meeting of the group attended by both Trump and Sessions, who had endorsed Trump’s campaign, telling the group that “he had connections that could help arrange a meeting between then-candidate Trump and President Putin.”
He also began appearing in the foreign press. While visiting Israel the next month, he told a group of researchers that Trump saw Putin as “a responsible actor and potential partner,” according to a column in the Jerusalem Post.