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But Putin's influence campaign backfired in other ways, Hayden told me. "If their plan was to get someone into office who would warm relations between us and Moscow, that was a disaster." The scandal not only handcuffed Trump from acting on his oft-stated desire to have closer relations with Moscow, but also prompted Congress to pass more sanctions against Russia and some of its leading officials and businessmen. Seen from that angle, Putin's triumph looks self-defeating, says Nina Khrushcheva, a professor of international relations at the New School in New York City and the great-granddaughter of former Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. "I am not sure he is a big winner, actually—maybe in a small, tactical way," she says. "It was a dream of all Soviets before him—to embarrass and undermine the U.S., so he proved his point."
To Putin and his circle, "Russia's relationship with the West is a zero-sum game," the Russian-born journalist Leonid Bershidsky observed earlier this year. If America is succeeding, then Russia must be losing. Thus, Putin has tried to stoke political disarray in the United States with a variety of ploys, ranging from compromising Trump's aides with Kremlin meetings to flooding Facebook and Twitter with fake news fanning racial divisions.
But he may come to regret it, Khrushcheva argues. "He needs U.S. power. He needs cooperation in so many areas across the globe," she says. "[Putin] can't possibly think that taking down the U.S. fully is good for him or the world." "
That's why Papadopoulos, a 2009 college graduate who listed his participation with the Model U.N. as foreign policy experience on his résumé, may pose a threat to both Russia and Trump. His cooperation with the feds—perhaps for several months—gave Mueller a pipeline into much of what Trump and his advisers were saying and doing about the Russians in private.
A hint of those conversations has already emerged, in the form of an email Papadopoulos sent to his Kremlin-linked contact in July, which Bloomberg News discovered in an FBI affidavit supporting the charges against the young man. Papadopoulos wrote that a meeting between "my national chairman and maybe one other foreign policy adviser" with the Russians "has been approved by our side." Manafort was not named in the email, but he was Trump's national campaign chairman at the time. The candidate's top foreign policy advisers then were Sessions and Flynn, the former Defense Intelligence Agency chief who had developed ties with Moscow's ambassador to the U.S. and its state-backed Russia Today TV channel.
It's unclear if Papadopoulos's account in that email was correct, but his cooperation with the feds appears to incinerate over a year's worth of assertions by the president that he had "nothing to do with the Russians."
"Indeed, when the history books are written on the Trump-Russia investigation, it's quite likely that the plea deal between special counsel Robert Mueller and…George Papadopoulos may be seen as the crucial moment," Boston Globe columnist Michael Cohen wrote. "This is the first piece of [official] evidence that there was an ongoing effort within the Trump campaign to collude with the Russian government."
That Trump's associates were so careless in meeting with agents of a hostile power astonishes Hayden, who called it national security "malpractice." Papadopoulos's engagement with Kremlin emissaries was, "at best, reckless," says a former CIA Russia analyst, who asked for anonymity in exchange for discussing such a sensitive issue. The young, inexperienced player "didn't realize how potentially dangerous this situation was, both in a counterintelligence sense and in the sense of political optics back in the United States," says the analyst, a longtime student of the espionage wars between Moscow and Washington.
Papadopoulos at first lied to FBI agents about his Russia contacts—another amateur move, which resulted in his indictment. But now that he's talking, he likely won't do much time. In that, he's very much like Segretti, the Nixon trickster who ended up serving four months of a six-month sentence after he pleaded guilty to three charges of distributing illegal campaign literature.
In the mid-1990s, Segretti, a lawyer, ran for a judgeship in Orange County, California, where his Watergate notoriety trailed him. "The reaction to his candidacy was so negative that he decided to drop out," the Los Angeles Times reported.
The only thing people "wanted to talk about," Segretti told the paper, "was Nixon and Watergate."
So it will likely go for George Papadopoulos. Only three weeks ago, the young man was looking for "a prominent publisher" on his LinkedIn page. As it turned out, however, he'd already told his story to the feds. One possible title? "Dupe."
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