Robert Mueller and George Papadopoulos have something cooking
Donald Trump’s former campaign foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos is the very first person known to have been arrested in the Trump-Russia scandal, way back in the summer of last year. He was a proverbial little fish who was busted in order to get him to flip on bigger fish, and sure enough, he cut a plea deal with Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Now it turns out, after all this time, Mueller and Papadopoulos still have something cooking.
George Papadopoulos agreed to plead guilty to lying to the FBI, and he agreed to serve zero to six months in prison, at the discretion of Mueller and the judge. All this time later, Papadopoulos still hasn’t been sentenced. In fact Mueller’s team just asked the judge to push things back another month in the Papadopoulos case. This only happens when it’s still not clear how much cooperating Papadopoulos has provided – which means that he’s still providing cooperation.
That’s remarkable, because we never did figure out precisely who Papadopoulos flipped on. His arrest was belatedly announced on the same day Mueller arrested Paul Manafort and Rick Gates, but Papadopoulos doesn’t appear to have played into the Manafort and Gates cases at all. Instead, when Papadopoulos was working for the campaign, he answered to the likes of Sam Clovis and Jeff Sessions. Shortly after the Papadopoulos arrest was announced, Clovis was seen testifying for a Mueller grand jury.
There has still been no word of Clovis, Sessions, or anyone else connected to George Papadopoulos having been charged with anything. Yet obviously Papadopoulos gave up someone bigger than himself, or he wouldn’t have gotten a plea deal. Now that Mueller is pushing back the Papadopoulos sentencing by at least another month, it suggests that Papadopoulos’ testimony is relevant to something that’s about to transpire.
