Franklin, Andrews, Kramer & Edelstein

[scion]

Papadopoulos claimed Trump phone call and larger campaign role

In interviews with a Greek newspaper last year, the former Trump campaign adviser boasted of conversations with Trump and a 'blank check' promise of a future U.S. government job.

By JOSH MEYER 11/17/2017 05:05 AM EST
https://www.politico.com/story/2017/11/17/george-papadopoulos-trump-greece-russia-245668

George Papadopoulos claimed last year that Donald Trump telephoned him to discuss his new position as a foreign policy adviser to his presidential campaign and that the two had at least one personal introductory meeting that the White House has not acknowledged.

Papadopoulos also claimed that he’d been given a “blank check” to choose a senior Trump administration job and was authorized to represent the candidate in overseas meetings with foreign leaders, and at a campaign event in New York.

Papadopoulos made the claims in several interviews with two Greek journalists during and since the 2016 election, one of whom detailed them for POLITICO. They contradict assertions by Trump, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and other Trump officials that Papadopoulos was a bit player in the campaign whom they barely remember.

One person close to Papadopoulos told POLITICO that his claims about personal interactions with Trump were untrue, but declined to elaborate. The two Greek journalists were skeptical as well, saying Papadopoulos was prone to self-aggrandizement. “Everyone knows I helped him [get] elected, now I want to help him with the presidency,” Papadopoulos said in one text message published by the newspaper.

But they also reported that Papadopolous reveled in the benefits of his newfound fame — at least in Greece — as an adviser to a major party nominee for the U.S. presidency. “He had acquired a new status in Athens,” wrote the newspaper, Kathimerini, which noted that Papadopoulos had been “bestowed with awards, wined and dined by prominent Athenians and even appointed to the judging committee of a beauty pageant on a Greek island.”

Among Papadopoulos’s claims to a Kathimerini reporter and editor was that Trump called him personally in March 2016 after he had been tapped for Trump’s foreign policy advisory team. Papadopoulos said he had been recommended for the job by Trump’s former Republican primary rival, Ben Carson.

During an “informal” five-minute phone conversation, Trump made small talk and invited the young campaign aide to travel from his Chicago home to Washington to attend his March 21 campaign event at Trump’s still-unfinished Pennsylvania Avenue hotel several days later, said Marianna Kakaounaki, an investigative reporter for the well-regarded Greek language daily. It was there that Papadopoulos said he was personally introduced to the future president.

“When he left the race and supported Trump, [Carson] suggested that the young Greek-American join the team,” according to an English translation of Kakanouaki’s Dec. 11 2016 article.

Papadopoulos and Trump then had “a telephone appointment, which did not last for more than five minutes, but shortly before closing, the candidate then invited him to a speech,” the article explained.

The timing proved fortuitous for Papadopoulos, as March 21 was also the day Trump was asked to name his foreign policy advisers during a meeting with The Washington Post’s editorial board. Papadopoulos wasn’t just one of the five named by Trump, he was also the only one singled out with a personal endorsement.

“He's an energy and oil consultant,” Trump told the editorial board. “Excellent guy.”

From that day on, the two Kathimerini journalists would write in several articles, Papadopoulos exploited Trump’s personal endorsement, and his unpaid position on the National Security Advisory Committee, as much as possible.

Kakaounaki and her executive editor, Alexis Papachelas, were interested in tracking the apparent success of the young Greek-American campaign adviser and his potential influence on issues involving Greece and Greek-Americans.

Because some of their articles were for the Greek-language edition of the paper, they never reached a wider audience. And the journalists never published some key details of what he told them about his role on Trump’s campaign and presidential transition team. “My angle was always the Greek angle. This wasn’t part of my story,” Kakaounaki said in reference to Papadopoulos’ claimed interactions with Trump.

Trump officials have said that Trump only met Papadopoulos fleetingly as part of a large group of advisers who joined the president at a March 31 meeting of the advisory committee at his Washington hotel for what was mainly a photo opportunity. (In a puzzling twist, Papadopoulos insisted to Kakaounaki and Papachelas that the meeting — a photo of which Trump tweeted that day — actually occurred on the day they met: March 21, after Trump held a campaign event at the hotel.)

It was at that meeting that Papadopoulos pitched Trump on his ongoing efforts to set up a meeting with the candidate and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

After the Oct. 30 disclosure that Papadopoulos was cooperating with authorities, Trump tweeted that “few people knew the young, low-level volunteer named George, who has already proven to be a liar."

Papadopoulos' lawyer, Thomas Breen and Trump’s then-campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, declined to comment about his claims. White House officials didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Sessions, who chaired the foreign policy advisory committee, at first denied remembering Papadopoulos’s comments at the meeting both men attended. But in his Tuesday testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, he said that he recalled telling Papadopoulos not to pursue contacts with Russia.

In interviews with POLITICO, Kakaounaki portrayed Papadopoulos as a young man enjoying a heady moment of fame, particularly in his ancestral homeland.

“During our interview, I felt that he was probably lucky, having just met Trump in person and then Trump being interviewed and mentioning his name,” said Kakaounaki. “That mention opened a lot of Greek doors for him, and probably in other countries too.”

Papadopoulos agreed with that assessment in an interview with Kakaounaki, she said. “He acknowledged that he was lucky, because they [had] just met” when Trump gave him his personal endorsement.

Trump’s selection of the young and inexperienced Papadopoulos — along with another little-known energy consultant, Carter Page — followed months of criticism about his lack of national security expertise, but also struck foreign policy insiders as odd.

Trump’s glowing endorsement of Papadopoulos as an “excellent” guy was surprising given that Papadopoulos had just a few months of experience as a volunteer adviser for Carson, and more so after reports that he had embellished his resume — including his role at the Model United Nations and as a research fellow at the conservative Hudson Institute.

Papadopoulos shared his different version of events with Kakaounaki and Papachelas over a period of several months, as they traveled through the U.S. last year to profile prominent Greek Americans working for the various campaigns.

After Trump went from dark horse to front-runner and ultimately president-elect, seeming to make Papadopoulos an influential Greek-American, Kakaounaki and Papachelas interviewed the Trump adviser in person, by phone and via text message.

They also interviewed him in Greece, where Papadopoulos traveled at least twice to meet with senior government officials, including President Prokopis Pavlopoulos, as a Trump representative.

Papadopoulos’ international travels are of interest to congressional investigators trying to understand the Russian influence operation in the U.S. and Trump associates’ potential roles in it, according to two sources familiar with those probes.

The House intelligence committee is interested in the Greek newspaper reports, as they provide a window into Papadopoulos’ activities and relationships with the campaign in real time.

“Obviously, the committee is interested in the role that Papadopoulos played in the campaign, especially given the way that the White House has downplayed his role,” one committee source told POLITICO, noting that Papadopoulos still hadn’t provided testimony before it. “We certainly want to know about any meetings he had with senior campaign officials, including the president, about his travel abroad, and about any meetings he took part in with foreign counterparts or government officials.”

During his trips abroad during and after the campaign — including to Israel, Greece and Cyprus —Papadopoulos often dropped names of campaign officials and tried to impress people with his connections, Kakaounaki said in her stories and in interviews.

"All this time, I inform him of the Greek and Cypriot issues,” he also said, in one reported remark after Trump won the election, “but the positions or the strategy that will follow in the White House are not finalized."

Two weeks before the election, Papadopoulos informed the journalists that he had “left the campaign” because he had “done his piece.” A week later, however, he said he had come back to the campaign, but that he had to follow the campaign directive that no one was to talk about anything but the FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails.

And two days before the election, Papadopoulos attended a campaign event in Astoria hosted by a local association representing Greek Cypriot Americans.

“Mr. Trump considered it important to come and talk to you,” he told the crowd in his introduction, before sitting and nodding approvingly when the rally organizer spoke, according to the Kathimerini story.

Earlier this year, as Trump prepared for his inauguration, Papadopoulos boasted to the reporters that he had Trump's ear, was on the transition team and that Trump had written him a "blank check" for whatever position in the administration he wanted.

After serving the next eight years in the Trump administration, he said, he planned to move to Greece to work on energy issues of mutual interest to the U.S. and Greece.

Kyle Cheney contributed to this story.

https://www.politico.com/story/2017/11/17/george-papadopoulos-trump-greece-russia-245668