President issues first reaction to guilty plea linking campaign with Russia
Moscow calls allegations ‘hysteria’ but declines to go into specifics
Donald Trump wrote: ‘Few people knew the young, low level volunteer named George, who has already proven to be a liar,’ having previously called Papadopoulos an ‘excellent guy’. Photograph: Pool/Getty Images
Donald Trump has tried to distance himself from a former foreign policy aide who pleaded guilty to perjury over his contacts with Russians during last year’s US election campaign.
The president fired off a series of tweets on Tuesday in which he publicly addressed for the first time the indictment of ex-adviser George Papadopoulos, which was revealed on Monday shortly after Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort was charged with a catalogue of serious federal crimes.
poulos had admitted meeting Russians to get “dirt” on election rival Hillary Clinton and lied about it to federal agents working for special counsel Robert Mueller as part of his investigation into possible coordination between the Trump election campaign and Russia.
Papadopoulos’s plea was unsealed on the same day Manafort and a business associate, Rick Gates, were charged with money laundering, tax evasion, fraud and failing to register as agents of foreign interests. Manafort and Gates denied the charges.
Papadopoulos is the first person to face criminal charges that cite interactions between Trump campaign associates and people claiming to be Russian intermediaries during the 2016 campaign. He is described in court documents as a “proactive cooperator”.
Despite Trump’s claim that “few people knew” Papadopoulos, he himself referred to Papadopoulos as an “excellent guy” in an interview with the Washington Post in March 2016 about his new foreign policy team.
Later that month Trump posted a picture on Instagram captioned “meeting with my national security team” in which Papadopoulos can be seen four seats to his right.