Little Kremlin on the Potomac:
The Papadopoulos timeline (from the indictment) is important. I’m trying to fill in the blanks as best as I can from various sources:
- Early March 2016: Papadopoulos joins the Trump Goat Rodeo as a foreign policy adviser with a focus on Russia.
- March 14, 2016: Papadopoulos met a professor who claimed to have contacts with top Russian officials. “However, after defendant Papadopoulos informed the professor about joining the campaign, the professor appeared to take great interest” in him. The professor had “claimed to have substantial connections with Russian government officials,” which according to the filing, Papadopoulos thought would help his standing as a foreign policy adviser for the campaign.
- March 19, 2016: Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta reportedly receives a phishing email, which led to the theft of thousands of his emails going back years, including embarrassing campaign correspondence. Those emails were then posted by Wikileaks in batches beginning in early October and continuing right through the election. The US intelligence community concluded Russia’s intelligence agency, the GRU, was responsible for the hacking.
- March 21, 2016: Comrade Stupid cites Papadopoulos as a foreign policy adviser in Washington Post editorial board meeting. Carter Page is also mentioned. Comrade Stupid told the Post:
“Well, I hadn’t thought of doing it, but if you want I can give you some of the names… Walid Phares, who you probably know, PhD, adviser to the House of Representatives caucus, and counter-terrorism expert; Carter Page, PhD; George Papadopoulos, he’s an energy and oil consultant, excellent guy; the Honorable Joe Schmitz, [former] inspector general at the Department of Defense; [retired] Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg; and I have quite a few more. But that’s a group of some of the people that we are dealing with. We have many other people in different aspects of what we do, but that’s a representative group.”
- March 24, 2016: Papadopoulos meets in London with the professor, who brought with him a female Russian national introduced to him “as a relative of Russian President Vladimir Putin with connections to senior Russian government officials.” Papadopoulos then emails a “campaign supervisor” not named in court filings as well as “several members of the Campaign’s foreign policy team,” recounting his meeting with the professor, the woman whom Papadopoulos described as Putin’s niece (the filings note he later learned she was not actually related to Putin). Papadopoulos said the topic of the discussion was “to arrange a meeting between us and the Russian leadership to discuss US-Russian ties under President Trump.”
- A few days later: Papadopoulos told the campaign he had met Putin’s niece and wanted to arrange a meeting. [That email was to campaign manager Corey Lewandowski!]
- Shortly thereafter: A campaign supervisor replied to Papadopoulos, “Great work!” [Papadopoulos would have reported to Jefferson Bearegard ‘Stonewall’ Sessions who oversaw the 2016 Goat Rodeo campaign’s foreign policy advisory committee. This is more evidence that Sessions might have LIED TO CONGRESS during his confirmation hearings to be AG]
- March 28, 2016: Comrade Stupid brings on Manafort to manage delegate operations for the campaign.
- March 31: Papadopoulos attended a “national security meeting” in Washington, D.C., with Comrade Stupid and other foreign policy advisers for the campaign. When Papadopoulos introduced himself to the group, he said he had connections that could help arrange a meeting between Comrade Stupid and President Putin.
- Early April 2016: Papadopoulos e-mails the Russian woman and the campaign about setting up a meeting.
- April 18, 2016: Around this day, Papadopoulos is introduced by email to a person in Moscow who was said to have connections to the Russian Foreign Ministry. Papadopoulos and this individual have multiple conversations over Skype and email about “setting ‘the groundwork’ for a ‘potential’ meeting” between the campaign and Russian officials.
- April 25, 2016: Papadopoulos emails an unnamed senior policy adviser to the campaign, saying, “The Russian government has an open invitation by Putin for Mr. Trump to met when he is ready… The advantage of being in London is that these governments tend to speak a bit more openly in ‘neutral’ cities.”
- April 26, 2016: Papadopoulos met the professor who told him that the Russians had dirt on Hillary Clinton. [That’s about six weeks before a British intermediary approached Donald Trump Jr. with a similar offer from a Russian attorney.]
- April 27, 2016: In a major foreign policy speech at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., Comrade Stupid indicates a willingness to work with Russia and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Sergey Kislyak, then the Russian ambassador to the U.S., was sitting in the front row, according to a report by Radio Free Europe.
- April 27, 2016: Papadopoulos emails a “senior policy advisor” and a “high-ranking” campaign official, both unnamed in legal filings. He told the adviser he had “some interesting messages coming in from Moscow about a trip when the time is right.” He told the campaign official that he had been receiving “a lot of calls” about Putin wanting to host Comrade Stupid and his team.
- May 2016: The New York Times reported that Papadopoulos, then a foreign policy adviser to Donald Trump’s campaign, was drinking at an upscale London bar when he told Alexander Downer, Australia’s emissary to Great Britain (Australia’s top diplomat in Britain), that Russia had political information on Clinton. The Russians had dirt on Hillary Clinton, in the form of hacked e-mails. Through channels, Downer passed this information on to the FBI, and that is likely what launched the Bureau’s probe into Russian meddling into the 2016 election. The contact between the Trump campaign and the Russians began very early, well before Trump was the GOP nominee. It undermines that Papadopoulos was a minor player in the campaign. It suggests that by May Trump had a compelling reason to believe that the Russians really did have juicy stuff on Clinton. It puts the meeting at Trump Tower with Natalia Veselnitskaya and (the late) Peter Smith’s attempt to acquire the Clinton e-mails (in July 2016) in a much darker light.
- May 18, 2016: James Clapper, Obama’s director of national intelligence, warns of some indications of cyberattacks against the 2016 presidential election. In a cyber-event at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, D.C., Clapper said “as the campaigns intensify we’ll probably have more of it.”
- June 2016: Livewire: “Lewandowski referred Papadopoulos to “the campaign supervisor,” according to court filings, a person Yahoo News identified as Sam Clovis, who joined Trump’s campaign in August 2015 as a co-chair and policy adviser. [Clovis, a non-scientist and open skeptic of climate change, is Trump’s pick to be the USDA’s chief scientist.”]
- June 3, 2016: British music promoter Rob Goldstone emails Trump Jr. about setting up a meeting with a Russian government-connected lawyer, among other people, to discuss incriminating information about Clinton. Goldstone works with Emin Agalarov, the son of Russian billionaire developer Aras Agalarov. The Agalarovs already knew the future American president through connections established when Trump Sr. held the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow in 2013.
- June 7, 2016: Comrade Stupid:”I am going to give a major speech on, probably Monday of next week, and we are going to be discussing all of the things that have taken place with the Clintons,” Trump said. “I think you are going to find it very informative and very, very interesting.”Just hours before, Rob Goldstone had finalized plans for the meeting between Trump Jr., Natalia Veselnitskaya and others.
- June 9, 2016: Donald Trump Jr., Fratsputin Jared Kushner, then-2016 Goat Rodeo campaign chair Paul Manafort, meet in Trump Tower with Veselnitskaya, Russian-American lobbyist Rinat Akhmetshin and another Russian-American present to represent the interests of the Agalarovs.
How long did it take your staff of 823 people to think that up–and where are your 33,000 emails that you deleted? https://t.co/gECLNtQizQ
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 9, 2016
- June 14, 2016: News breaks of two separate Russian breaches into the Democratic National Committee’s computer network. The hacks were perpetrated by Russian groups that have become known as Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear, identified by Washington, D.C., computer security company CrowdStrike. The hackers had been monitoring the DNC’s computer network for a year.
- June 22, 2016: In a speech in New York, Comrade Stupid speculates that foreign adversaries may have hacked Clinton’s emails.”So they probably now have a blackmail file over someone who wants to be president of the United States,” he said. “This fact alone disqualifies her from the presidency.”
- July 2: Clinton told investigators her use of the private server was for convenience, not to avoid proper record-keeping.
- July 5, 2016: FBI Director James Comey recommends no charges against Clinton for her handling of classified emails while she was secretary of state. Comey did, however, raise questions about her judgment, and described Clinton and her staff as being “extremely careless.”
- July 7, 2016: Carter Page gives a Russia-friendly speech in Moscow. This leads FBI investigators to obtain a secret warrant to monitor Page’s communications.
- July 18, 2016: Comrade Stupid’s 2016 Goat Rodeo campaign worked behind the scenes to change the GOP’s platform on Ukraine: They would not call for the U.S. to give weapons to Ukraine to fight Russian and rebel forces.
- July 22, 2016: WikiLeaks publishes the first batch of almost 20,000 DNC emails, many of them discussing how to undermine Sen. Bernie Sander’s campaign. WikiLeaks officials stated that the emails come from the accounts of “seven key figures in the DNC.”
- July 23, 2016: Comrade Stupid continues pushing a “rigged” election process, in a tweet about the newly released emails.”Leaked e-mails of DNC show plans to destroy Bernie Sanders,” he says. “Mock his heritage and much more. On-line from Wikileakes, really vicious. RIGGED”
- July 24, 2016: Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz resigns in disgrace following the DNC email hacking scandal. Good Riddance!
- July 27, 2016: Comrade Stupid:
“Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”
- Aug. 15, 2016: According to legal filings on Papadopoulos, after weeks of back and forth about a possible “off the record” trip to Moscow, a campaign supervisor writes in an email, ” ‘I would encourage you” and another foreign policy adviser to the Campaign to ‘make the trip …if it is feasible.’ ” The trip did not take place.
- Aug. 19, 2016: Manafort resigns from the 2016 Goat Rodeo campaign amid reports of suspicious payments for work he did for Russian linked elements in Ukraine. This marks the second shakeup of Trump senior campaign staff.
- Aug. 21, 2016: Nixon fanboi Roger Stone tweets, “Trust me, it will soon the Podesta’s time in the barrel, #Crooked Hillary” [Stone’s Twitter accounts is suspended so I cannot embed it here.][Note: Podesta’s emails were released by WikiLeaks starting Oct. 7.]
- Sept. 8, 2016: In his Senate Office Jefferson Beauregard ‘Stonewall’ Sessions III meets with Kislyak. This would be reported by the Washington Post and is the same date of which Sen. Al Franken questioned Sessions about the meeting during Sessions’ confirmation hearing to be attorney general. Sessions maintains that he never met with Russians or intermediaries “about the Trump campaign,” even though he was a top surrogate for the campaign at the time. Sessions did ultimately recuse himself from the Russia investigation.
- Jan. 27, 2017: Papadopoulos sits for an interview with the FBI, during which he “made material false statements and material omissions,” according to court filings released Oct. 30.
- Oct. 5, 2017: Papadopoulos pleads guilty to making false statements to FBI agents.
Papadopoulos is a bit player, but his bit part might bring the whole thing, Jenga-like. I have a feeling we are going to be updating this timeline a lot.
PS – MAGA=Mueller Ain’t Going Away
