The Atlantic

A Former Trump Adviser Pleads Guilty to Lying About His Contacts With Russia

George Papadopoulos heard that Russia had "dirt" related to Hillary Clinton in the form of "thousands" of hacked emails as early as April 2016.
Source: Brendan McDermid / Reuters

Updated at 4:54 p.m. ET

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election has notched its first guilty plea—but the culprit isn’t one of the bigger names in the case. George Papadopoulos, an obscure, low-level foreign-policy aide to the Donald Trump presidential campaign, pleaded guilty on October 5 to making false statements to the FBI.

Papadopoulos doesn’t have the same profile as Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign chair whose indictment was unsealed on Monday, but the case against him offers new information about possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russia.

, all of which Papadopoulos acknowledged to be accurate as part of the plea deal, he learned in March

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