WASHINGTON -- President Donald Trump on Tuesday tried to diminish the significance of a former foreign-policy adviser who admitted to lying to the FBI about how, during last year's presidential campaign, he sought to meet with Russians offering "dirt" on Hillary Clinton based on purloined emails.
In his first comment on this aspect of the case being developed by the special counsel investigation, Trump did not deny that the adviser, George Papadopoulos, worked to collaborate with Russia. Instead, he brushed off his significance and focused on the fact that Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI to cover up the contacts with Russia.
"Few people knew the young, low level volunteer named George, who has already proven to be a liar," Trump wrote on Twitter.
As for the indictment of his former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, the president repeated that the crimes alleged took place outside the context of the election contest.
[DOCUMENT: Read the indictment charging Manafort and Gates]
"The Fake News is working overtime," he wrote. "As Paul Manaforts lawyer said, there was 'no collusion' and events mentioned took place long before he came to the campaign."
Manafort and his deputy, Rick Gates, were charged in a 12-count indictment with a series of money laundering, tax evasion and foreign lobbying crimes stemming from work for pro-Russia political leaders in Ukraine. While the crimes alleged began years before Trump's campaign, the indictment asserted that Manafort's scheme to defraud continued through last year until early this year.
As he has repeatedly in recent days, Trump sought to turn attention to Democrats, pointing to the resignation of Tony Podesta, the Democratic lobbyist who also faces scrutiny by special counsel Robert Mueller and whose brother, John Podesta, was Clinton's campaign chairman.
"The biggest story yesterday, the one that has the Dems in a dither, is Podesta running from his firm," Trump wrote. "What he know about Crooked Dems is earth shattering. He and his brother could Drain The Swamp, which would be yet another campaign promise fulfilled. Fake News weak!"
[PRESIDENT TRUMP: Timeline, appointments, executive orders + guide to actions in first 200 days]
Papadopoulos was named by Trump in March 2016 as one of five foreign-policy advisers. While the president and his team now seek to minimize Papadopoulos' importance, at the time Trump described him in flattering terms. "He's an energy and oil consultant, excellent guy," he told The Washington Post. Shortly afterward, Trump tweeted a photo of his advisory council meeting, with Papadopoulos among a handful of advisers at the president's table.
In his plea filing, Papadopolous admitted that he told Trump and other top campaign national security officials during that meeting that he had made contact with intermediaries for Russia who said they could set up a meeting between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
According to a statement of offense signed as part of his guilty plea, Papadopoulos admitted that he spent months last year cultivating contacts in an effort to arrange meetings between Trump's campaign and Russian government officials.
Papadopoulos said a professor in London with extensive Russian contacts introduced him to a woman described as "Putin's niece" and told him that the Russians had "dirt" on Clinton based on "thousands of emails" of hers. The woman was not actually related to Putin.
The professor, identified Monday by a Senate aide as Joseph Mifsud, told Papadopoulos about the emails in April 2016, three months before WikiLeaks released nearly 20,000 hacked Democratic emails. Papadopoulos kept senior campaign officials informed about his efforts and they encouraged him but made clear they wanted to keep some distance publicly.
"It should be someone low level in the campaign so as not to send any signal," a top campaign official wrote in an email at the time.
Papadopoulos was not charged with any crime for making those efforts but instead pleaded guilty to lying to FBI agents about the matter. He was arrested secretly in late July and has been cooperating ever since with Mueller's team.
Papadopoulos' lawyer, Thomas Breen, based in Chicago, declined to comment on the guilty plea but noted that "we will have the opportunity to comment on George's involvement when called upon by the court at a later date. We look forward to telling all of the details of George's story at that time."
It's unclear how frequently Papadopoulos was in contact with Trump campaign officials. White House spokesman Sarah Huckabee Sanders initially said the foreign-policy advisory board convened only once, but the White House later clarified she was speaking only of official meetings with Trump in attendance. An official involved with the group said the group met on a monthly basis throughout the spring and summer for a total of about six meetings.
Corey Lewandowski, who ran the campaign before Manafort, said Tuesday on NBC's Today show that Papadopoulos was "a low-level volunteer who might have attended a meeting of the foreign-policy advisory team, the one meeting that took place, but he was not a person who was involved with the day-to-day operations of the campaign."
Lewandowski said he did not recall interacting with Papadopoulos on a regular basis, and that he did not learn about the hacked Democratic emails until they became public.
"To the best of my knowledge, absolutely not," he said. "When I found out about that, I found out about it through public press reports." He added that he has not spoken with the FBI but would be "happy to do that unequivocally."
Papadopoulos' efforts are the second known effort by a member of Trump's team to obtain damaging information about Clinton from the Russians. Several weeks after the April meeting where Papadopoulos learned about the Clinton emails, Donald Trump Jr., Manafort and Jared Kushner, the future president's son-in-law, met with a Russian lawyer after being promised incriminating information about Clinton from the Russian government.
They said later that the meeting did not yield such information, but the president has defended their decision to take the meeting as routine opposition research. The original statement to The New York Times by Trump Jr. describing the meeting, crafted with the participation of the president, omitted the promise of damaging information. Mueller is now looking into that statement.
In Moscow's first response to Mueller's indictments, Russian state-run news media and government representatives on Tuesday emphasized that the accusations laid out against Manafort did not mention Russia. Instead, media reports highlighted that he was accused over his actions in Ukraine. But his work in Ukraine was for the pro-Russia party of President Viktor Yanukovych, who was driven out of office by street protests in 2014.
Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin's spokesman, called all accusations of Russia's involvement in last year's election "laughable, unqualified, groundless and unsubstantiated."
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told reporters Tuesday that he's already "losing interest" in the investigation's developments "on the topic of how Donald Trump won the presidential elections," the Interfax news service reported.
Information for this article was contributed by Peter Baker of The New York Times; by Stephen Braun, Steve Peoples, Tom LoBianc, Chad Day and Vladimir Isachenkov of The Associated Press; and by Stepan Kravchenko and Henry Meyer of Bloomberg News.
A Section on 11/01/2017