Donald Trump’s bad hires have come back to bite him in Trump-Russia scandal
We still don’t know much about former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos, the specific role he played in the campaign, whether or not he was any good at his job, or what he might be like as a person. But we now know that he has a consistently bad habit of spewing secrets to strangers in bars, which alone should have disqualified him from the job. Not only did one of these incidents initially tip off the FBI to the Trump-Russia conspiracy, it’s happened with Papadopoulos again.
If you’re running something as secretive as a political campaign, and in particular if you’re running a political campaign that’s secretly and illegally conspiring with a foreign enemy to alter the outcome of the election, you can’t hire people who lack the judgment or self control to keep a secret. This week Papadopoulos was at a bar when he decided to tell a stranger all about the role that Jeff Sessions played in encouraging him to try to get dirt about Hillary Clinton from the Russians.
Back when the Trump campaign was making its initial hiring decision about George Papadopoulos, surely there had to have been something about his interview or his references or his past that would have tipped off that he was the guy who was going to keep trying to show off for strangers by telling them the campaign’s darkest secrets. Even if not, Papadopoulos is merely one name on a seemingly limitless laundry list of bad hires by the Trump campaign that have come back to bite them as the Trump-Russia scandal has unfolded.
Michael Flynn was fired from the Defense Intelligence Agency because he had gone completely off the rails before the Trump campaign hired him. Paul Manafort was reportedly suffering from severe psychological problems and staying in some kind of “clinic” at the time Trump hired him. These are not the kind of unreliable people you can hire and expect things to turn out well, particularly when you’re trying to pull off the biggest criminal election theft of all time.
