The former Trump campaign aide whose Russia contacts set off
the investigation over collusion in the 2016 US president election began a
two-week jail sentence Monday over lies he told to the FBI.
George Papadopoulos entered the minimum security unit of the
Oxford, Wisconsin federal prison more than one year after pleading guilty in
one of the first cases brought by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, the Bureau of
Prisons confirmed.
He was the second figure in the Mueller probe to be
sentenced to jail, after Alex Van Der Zwaan, a London lawyer who got 30 days
for lying about his work with Paul Manafort, chairman of Donald Trump’s
presidential campaign in 2016.
Manafort meanwhile faces more than a decade in jail when he
is sentenced in February on multiple charges related to money laundering and
illegal lobbying.
Papadopoulos was an obscure oil industry analyst when he
joined the Trump campaign’s foreign policy advisory team in March 2016.
Based in London, he made contacts with what he believed were
important Russian and Russia-linked officials, who through him offered the
Trump campaign a meeting between candidate Trump and Russian President Vladimir
Putin.
One, a mysterious professor Joseph Mifsud, also told
Papadopoulos that Moscow had dirt on Trump’s election rival, Democrat Hillary
Clinton.
After an allegedly drunken Papadopoulos related the
conversation to an Australian diplomat who passed the information on through
intelligence channels, the Federal Bureau of Investigation opened a probe into
contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia.
Emails and testimony by other witnesses showed that
Papadopoulos had repeatedly reported his Russia contacts and meetings to the
Trump campaign, raising suspicions of collusion.
One week after Trump took office in January 2017, the FBI
interviewed Papadopoulos. During that interview, he lied about his contacts
including with Mifsud, according to federal charges.
On October 5, 2017, he pleaded guilty and pledged to
cooperate with the probe.
At the time, Trump branded him a “young, low-level volunteer
named George, who has already proven to be a liar.”
He was sentenced on September 7 this year after expressing
his remorse that he “lied in an investigation that was important to national
security.”
But immediately after that, Papadopoulos declared he had been
entrapped by US and foreign intelligence services and alleged that Mifsud was a
CIA operative who was part of a broader campaign to damage Trump.
“I was framed in many ways,” he said in an interview last
month with Fox News, calling his Russia contacts “completely orchestrated.”
He tried to delay his prison sentence, claiming in a court
filing that the Mueller investigation was illegal, a claim Trump himself has
made.
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