Manafort and Gates Charged

[GMDino]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-campaign-adviser-pleaded-guilty-to-lying-about-russian-contacts/2017/10/30/d525e712-bd7d-11e7-97d9-bdab5a0ab381_story.html?utm_term=.a5747824d9bd

Quote:Several weeks after Donald Trump secured the Republican presidential nomination, his national campaign co-chairman urged a foreign policy adviser to meet with Russian officials to foster ties with that country’s government.


“Make the trip, if it is feasible,” Sam Clovis wrote in an August email to George Papadopoulos.


The email, included in court papers unsealed Monday, shows how an otherwise low-profile adviser has become a focus of the federal probe into possible coordination between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin.


Papadopoulos was in contact with several senior Trump campaign aides about his efforts to broker a relationship between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, the court papers show. In addition to Clovis, who now serves as senior White House adviser to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Papadopoulos wrote to campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and campaign chairman Paul Manafort, the newly released documents show.


The campaign officials are not identified in court documents, but some of the emails cited by federal prosecutors match messages described in August to The Washington Post by people familiar with their contents.


The newly released documents show that while senior Trump officials at times rebuffed or ignored Papadopoulos, they were well aware of his efforts, which went on for months. His interactions with them could complicate the White House’s attempts to distance the president from Papadopoulos, who pleaded guilty Oct. 5 to lying to federal agents.


[Trump campaign emails show aide’s repeated efforts to set up Russia meetings]


Trump himself knew of Papadopoulos’s claims that he had a pipeline to Moscow: During a March 2016 meeting of the campaign’s national security advisers in Washington that Trump attended, Papadopoulos said he had connections that could help arrange a meeting between the then-candidate and Putin.



On Monday, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said she was “not sure that the president recalls specific details of the meeting,” calling it “brief.” She described Papadopoulos’s role with the campaign as “extremely limited.”
In a statement, Clovis’s attorney Victoria Toensing said Clovis, a radio host from Iowa who was one of Trump’s earliest supporters, “always vigorously opposed any Russian trip for Donald Trump and/or the campaign.”


She said Clovis was “being polite” when he encouraged Papadopoulos to meet with Russian officials in August, adding that the campaign had a “strict rule that no person could travel abroad as a representative of the campaign.” Clovis could not stop an American citizen from traveling abroad “in his personal capacity,” she said.

As an aside:

I'm torn on the Trump roll in this.  I think he's the kind of "leader" who really has zero idea what is going on around him.  that's the grunt work while he takes the glory, spreads the blame.

Is it worse that he doesn't know anything or if he knew and let it happen?  Not legally worse.  Just worse for him as a candidate and POTUS, I mean.