A little trip down memory lane with the Trump campaign

By March 2016, Trump’s campaign [...] 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.

  WaPo

That was a good one.

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 Tuesday in a statement.

Yes, the 400-lb elephant in the room, Sam Clovis. (Hey! Maybe he's the 400-lb guy sitting on his bed Trump said might have been hacking the DNC. OK, I don't know how much Clovis weighs, but it's got to be somewhere in that area.)

Let me ask you this: why would a former Iowa radio host make a good foreign policy advisor? Take as much time as you need. He's been nominated for Secretary of Agriculture as well. Perhaps because he's from Iowa? Oh, wait. Perhaps because he was involved in the Russian collusion fiasco that is currently under investigation and he needs to be paid.

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.

What else is Bennett going to say at this point?

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.

Wait. We're ust going to jump from "the statement did not address how Papadopoulos ended up on the list" to "he's on the list"?

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.

I would be willing to be that is also the case with anyone on the Trump team. (And pretty much any resumé in circulation for any job anywhere these days.) Heck, it's true of Trump himself!

At any rate, apparently, they didn't care.

Though Papadopoulos’s 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 [Vladimir] Putin.”

As far as I've seen, nobody's addressing this question: why would he offer up something like that out of the blue? Somehow he knew - or believed - that would be something worth offering.

“I was surprised to learn what George Papadopoulos was up to during the campaign,” [J.D. Gordon, a former Pentagon spokesman and Trump national security adviser] said Tuesday in a text message. “He obviously went to great lengths to go around me and Sen. Sessions.”

JD better hope Papadopoulos doesn't have any contradictory information to give Mueller.

And yet, Papadopoulos continued to be invited to campaign events. In late June or early July, he attended a dinner at the Capitol Hill Club along with several other national security advisers for the Trump campaign.

[...]

Papadopoulos was seated to Sessions’s left.

[...]

Media appearances by Papadopoulos continued.

[...]

British sources said it was around that time that he approached British government officials to say he was traveling to London and asked to be given a meeting with senior government ministers. Instead, he was offered a session with a mid-level official at the Foreign Office in London.

During the meeting, Papadopoulos made a comment indicating he had contacts at the senior level of the Russian government, British sources said. British officials quickly concluded he was not a major or knowledgeable player in the Trump orbit and did not pursue the issue or continue contact.

Or did they quickly conclude that was not a net they wanted to get caught up in? The Greeks thought he might be a major player.

Spokesman Efthymios Aravantinos said [a] conversation [between Papadopoulus and the Greek foreign minister in New York] was conducted as part of a routine effort that the embassy makes to reach out to Greek Americans “hoping they have a sentimental attachment to Greece and that we can connect.”

Especially when they are part of a presidential campaign team.

In September, Papadopoulos emailed another Trump aide, Boris Epshteyn, and told him he planned to be in New York and hoped to set up meetings around the U.N. General Assembly meeting.

[...]

Papadopoulos wrote that he wanted to connect Epshteyn with a friend, Sergei Millian of the Russian American Chamber of Commerce, the emails said.

Millian would later be identified as a major source for the author of a dossier that included unsubstantiated salacious allegations about Trump’s activities in Russia, a claim Millian has denied.

[...]

Asked in August to describe his relationship with Papadopoulos, Millian responded by email, “I can meet and talk to any person. . . . It’s none of your business.”

God, I both pity and admire Mueller's team if they can wade through all this shit. Could Papadopoulos himself have been a Russian plant to get kompromat on Trump? There are times when I think Manafort was working with the Russians for similar reasons.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.