George Papadopoulos was ambitious and underqualified, the kind of wannabe who fills the lower rungs of many a political campaign. This foreign policy adviser to the Donald Trump campaign would not have been even a footnote in the history of the 2016 election before he pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his attempt to connect campaign officials with Russian officials. Now, as with so many others, a marginal supporting actor in Trump’s ongoing drama takes center stage.
Early in the 2016 cycle, Papadopoulos, then 29, briefly advised Ben Carson’s presidential campaign. Interested in national security and politics but without much in the way of credentials or experience, Papadopoulos cast himself as an international energy consultant based in London. He had previously worked as an unpaid intern and contract researcher for the conservative Hudson Institute. It was a middling résumé for an aspiring policy aide, and he joined Team Trump in what most campaigns would consider an entry-level advisory role.
Take it from the president himself, who, shortly after the guilty plea was released on October 30, dismissed Papadopoulos as a “low-level volunteer.” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Papadopoulos was merely a “member of a volunteer advisory council that met one time over the course of a year.” According to Michael Caputo, who served as senior communications adviser for the Trump campaign, Papadopoulos was a “coffee boy.”
Yet this coffee boy and low-level volunteer seemed to have the ear of some important people in the campaign. Throughout the spring of 2016, he emailed with key Trump aides—most frequently with his immediate supervisor, Sam Clovis, but also with campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, campaign chairman Paul Manafort, and a still-unknown “senior policy advisor.” His attempts to broker a meeting between the campaign and the Russians never bore fruit, despite Papadopoulos’s persistence and the willingness of these more senior aides to entertain the idea.
For a brief moment, Papadopoulos’s exposure even went all the way to the top. According to his plea statement, on March 31, just a few weeks after coming on board the campaign, he attended a “national security meeting” in Washington. In attendance were Trump, then-Alabama senator Jeff Sessions, and 10 other members of what the candidate called his “national security team.” Ten days earlier, in a meeting with the editorial board of the Washington Post, Trump read off a list of his national security advisers and included Papadopoulos. “He’s an energy and oil consultant,” Trump said. “Excellent guy.”
Hangers-on, self-promoters, and fortune-seekers surround every political campaign, from dog catcher to president. They are like bacteria—inevitable, inescapable, sometimes harmless, often dangerous. A typical campaign has an immune system to protect itself and the candidate from these invaders, well-meaning and parasitic alike.
“In every presidential campaign, you have people with thin résumés,” says Karl Rove, the chief political strategist for George W. Bush. “In a serious policy shop you’d have a process that sort of weeds those people out.”
Donald Trump’s campaign, needless to say, was atypical. For one, Trump consciously and credibly adopted the outsider mantle, a signal to established political professionals to stay away. His deviations from GOP orthodoxy on policy were a similar red flag. There was also the enduring belief among the so-called experts that Trump had no chance of winning the nomination. Who wants to hitch their wagon to a campaign going nowhere?
Steve Bannon would call the C-team politicos who made up the Trump campaign the “island of misfit toys.” Rove calls them “walking disasters.”
Papadopoulos wasn’t the only such disaster to strike the campaign. His supervisor, Sam Clovis, was an Iowa talk-radio host whose political experience reached its peak in 2014, when he first failed to win the GOP nomination for U.S. Senate and then was defeated in the race for state treasurer. Clovis advised Rick Perry’s presidential campaign before jumping to Trump in August 2015. He showed little pull even within his home state—it was Ted Cruz, not Donald Trump, who won Iowa—but Clovis nevertheless became a national co-chairman of the campaign and a top cable-news surrogate for the candidate. His most consequential role may end up being his frequent conversations with Papadopoulos, in which, as outlined in the guilty plea, they discussed the possibility of an “off the record” meeting between the campaign and Russian officials. Clovis emailed Papadopoulos in mid-August 2016: “I would encourage you . . . to make the trip [to Russia] if it is feasible.” According to recent news reports, Clovis has testified before Robert Mueller’s grand jury.
“Every campaign attracts its fair share of strange characters,” notes Alex Conant, who was Marco Rubio’s communications director during the Florida senator’s bid for the GOP nomination. “Campaigns are about addition, so you generally try to find something to do for everyone who wants to help. But obviously most people who walk in off the street don’t end up as senior advisers to the candidate.”
Trump World’s “strange characters” didn’t always come off the street. It’s worth remembering that Paul Manafort was brought into the Trump campaign in May 2016 to “professionalize” the operation. Manafort had been a Republican consultant for decades, but by 2016 he had mostly abandoned domestic politics for the lucrative foreign market. As his recent indictment outlines, there was plenty of evidence of shady dealings and questionable associations that would have warned off most candidates.
There were also the personal connections—figures such as Boris Epshteyn, a friend of Eric Trump’s from their days at Georgetown University who began popping up on TV and at campaign events as an imperious surrogate. Epshteyn served a short stint in the White House communications shop before leaving in March, amid reports he had been combative with networks.
Then there was Michael G. Flynn, the son of Trump campaign adviser and former defense intelligence chief Michael T. Flynn. Flynn fils was a part of the Trump transition in late 2016, and even applied for a security clearance, before he was kicked out for spreading conspiracy theories on his Twitter account.
Trump’s tolerance for these types has extended well past the campaign and into his presidency. The elder Michael Flynn served for a short time as the White House national security adviser before being forced out for misrepresenting his conversations with the Russian ambassador. Flynn is one of the central figures in the Mueller probe. Sebastian Gorka, the British-born counterterrorism analyst, was brought into the White House as an aide primarily on the basis of his position as the national security editor at Breitbart. He spent most of his time gabbing on cable news before exiting the administration a week after Steve Bannon did. And who can forget the whirlwind 11 days when Anthony Scaramucci served as the White House communications director? Scaramucci’s chief qualification seemed to be his willingness to defend Trump in the most bombastic way imaginable. His over-the-top, vulgar interview with the New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza during his first week on the job sealed his fate.
So is it any wonder that George Papadopoulos, who listed among the credentials on his LinkedIn page his participation in the 2012 International Model United Nations, would have been in a position to regularly communicate with top Trump campaign staffers?
“It’s a sign of the thinness of the campaign,” Rove says. “Where’s the adult?”
Michael Warren is a senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD .