Report: Trump aide’s drunken night kicked off Russia investigation

A former Trump aide’s drunk bragging to an Australian diplomat may have kicked off the entire Russia investigation, according to a new report in The New York Times.

On Saturday, the paper reported that George Papadopoulos, who served as a foreign policy adviser to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, told Australian diplomat Alexander Downer that Russia had political dirt on Trump’s Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, after a night of heavy drinking in May 2016.

Less than a month earlier, he had been told that Russia had emails that would embarrass the former secretary of state. That information came courtesy of Joseph Mifsud, a Maltese professor with contacts in the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, who, in April 2016, told Papadopoulos he’d learned the Russians had “dirt” on Clinton in the form of “thousands of emails.”

When leaked Democratic emails began appearing online in July, apparently timed to the Democratic national convention, Australian officials passed on the information about Papadopoulos to the United States, according to the Times, citing four current and former American and foreign officials. Australia is one of the United States’ closest intelligence allies.

Papadopoulos, 30, has become a central figure in the FBI’s ongoing Russia probe and the investigation being headed by special counsel Robert Mueller. When Mueller in October announced several charges against former Trump staffers Paul Manafort and Rick Gates, he also unsealed a weeks-old document revealing that Papadopoulos had been arrested in July. He pleaded guilty to making false statements to the FBI about his contacts with the Russians during the campaign, apparently as part of a cooperation deal.

Some of Trump’s advisers have sought to distance themselves from Papadopoulos and continue to insist his role in the campaign was insignificant. (Former Trump campaign adviser Michael Caputo in October said he was essentially a volunteer, nothing more than a “coffee boy.”) Trump in a 2016 interview with the Washington Post mentioned Papadopoulos by name while listing out his foreign policy advisers and called him an “excellent guy.”

According to the Times’s account, Papadopoulos appears to have been doing a bit more than fetching coffee. A couple of months before the election, he helped arrange a meeting between Trump and the president of Egypt. Per the Times:

It was not, as Mr. Trump and other politicians have alleged, a dossier compiled by a former British spy hired by a rival campaign. Instead, it was firsthand information from one of America’s closest intelligence allies.

Interviews and previously undisclosed documents show that Mr. Papadopoulos played a critical role in this drama and reveal a Russian operation that was more aggressive and widespread than previously known. They add to an emerging portrait, gradually filled in over the past year in revelations by federal investigators, journalists and lawmakers, of Russians with government contacts trying to establish secret channels at various levels of the Trump campaign.

Trump and many of his allies have alleged that it was the now-infamous Steele dossier, a document filled with lurid allegations about Trump’s links to Russia, that drew the FBI’s interest. The Times’ reporting convincingly disputes that account.

The Times notes that it is unclear whether Papadopoulos shared the information with anyone else in the campaign, though it seems a little unlikely he’d share it in conversation at a bar and not with anyone in the campaign for which he worked.