— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 1, 2016
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders acknowledged that a Trump campaign foreign policy adviser reached out to a Kremlin-linked professor, after unsealed court documents revealed Monday that George Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about those conversations.
But “nothing happened beyond that,” Sanders said of the “volunteer” adviser who she said attended just one campaign meeting.
I'm guessing that was this meeting; the one Trump captioned as a "National Security Meeting." Papadopolous is seated at that table, second from Session's left.
Then again, she also said:
“Which I think that shows, one, his level of importance in the campaign and two, what little role he had within coordinating anything officially for the campaign,” she said, repeating her attempts to minimize Papadopoulos’ role in the President’s campaign, which she said was “extremely limited.”
Funny, that's not how Shep Smith remembers it:
“They are really downplaying the foreign policy advisor,” Smith told his guest, the Wall Street Journal’s John Bussey. “Unpaid and all of that.”
“It was March of 2016 that President Trump mentioned him himself, said ‘an oil guy, great guy.’ It was April of 2016 that these conversations with the professor regarding Russia began. So one happened in March, the next happened in April. It’s going to be hard for them to downplay him,” Shep said.
Bussey agreed.
“There were e-mails back and forth between him and campaign officials,” Bussey noted, “talking about what you just described, which were his meetings with this Russian who was saying, ‘look, we can get you information on Hillary Clinton, we want to understand a little bit more about where Donald Trump is growing to be on Russia, let’s organize some meetings.'”
Important enough to sit in a "National Security Meeting," important enough to be in an e-mail conversation about meeting with Russians for dirt on Clinton; but otherwise a real nobody who, after all, wasn't paid, so how important could he be? (Does anyone else remember Manafort, the campaign manager, wasn't paid either?).
But good luck with your Ron Ziegler Hallowe'en costume this year.....
But good luck with your Ron Ziegler Hallowe'en costume this year.....
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