and energy production is mission-critical for the future of the kingdom.38
The next day, April 26, the Trump campaign receives, according to the Mueller Report, “indications from the Russian government that it could assist the Campaign through the anonymous release of information damaging to Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.”39 Papadopoulos is the Trump campaign representative who gathers this intelligence from Kremlin agent and Valdai Discussion Club member Joseph Mifsud.40 Besides Mifsud’s connections to an organization whose highest-profile patron is Vladimir Putin, among the Maltese professor’s “contacts” in April 2016, per the Mueller Report, is a “one-time employee of the [Internet Research Agency]” and a digital account “linked to an employee of the Russian Ministry of Defense”—an account that “had overlapping contacts with a group of Russian military-controlled Facebook accounts.” The Russian military accounts linked to Mifsud’s defense ministry contact “included accounts used to promote the DCLeaks releases in the course of the GRU’s hack-and-release operations.”41
Papadopoulos’s first contact with Mifsud, the substance of which he in short order communicates to senior officials on the Trump campaign, is met with approval, with Trump campaign national co-chair Sam Clovis telling Papadopoulos that his mid-March 2016 correspondence with a Kremlin agent on the subject of a Trump-Putin summit has been “most informative” and is “great work.”42 That Papadopoulos’s March 31 update to Trump’s national security advisory committee finds Trump “interested … and receptive to the idea of a meeting with Putin” is confirmed by J. D. Gordon, the committee’s director of day-to-day operations, even as he disagrees with Papadopoulos about Sessions’s reaction to the proposal.43
By the time of Papadopoulos’s late March report to Trump, the GOP candidate has long since learned from his attorney Michael Cohen that a face-to-face meeting with Vladimir Putin is the critical missing piece in his plan to build a Trump-branded tower in Moscow that could net him more than $1 billion—approximately a quarter of his reported total net worth at the time.44 Papadopoulos, speaking in 2017 to the special counsel’s office after his arrest for making false statements to federal law enforcement, insists to the special counsel that his outreach to the Kremlin was also pleasing to Sessions—Gordon’s demurral notwithstanding—and that Sessions was “supportive of his efforts to arrange a [Trump-Putin] meeting.”45
Papadopoulos’s conversations with Kremlin agents—including not just Mifsud but Ministry of Foreign Affairs–linked think tank director Ivan Timofeev and a woman, “Olga Polonskaya,” pretending to be Putin’s niece—appear to quickly go beyond the question of a Trump-Putin summit, however, with “Polonskaya’s” text messages to Papadopoulos referencing “initiatives between our two countries” and Papadopoulos’s own plans to “engage with the Russian Federation” over a longer period of time.46 According to the special counsel’s office, among the topics Mifsud and Papadopoulos discuss during their “extensive communications over a period of months” are “cybersecurity,” “hacking,” and “foreign policy issues”—the last of these indicating that Papadopoulos was discussing foreign policy with a known Kremlin agent even as he was helping to edit Trump’s first foreign policy address in April 2016.47 Throughout his interactions with Mifsud, the Mueller Report observes, “Papadopoulos understood Mifsud to have substantial connections to high-level Russian government officials.”48
Mifsud’s April 26 revelation that the Kremlin possessed “dirt” on Clinton in the form of “thousands of Clinton emails”—and was willing to actively “assist the Campaign through the anonymous release of information that would be damaging to Hillary Clinton”—came immediately upon Mifsud’s return to London from a meeting of the Valdai Discussion Club, a meeting that Trump campaign Russia adviser and Mifsud’s fellow Valdai Discussion Club member Dimitri Simes presumably did not attend in person, given his concurrent responsibility for helping edit as well as host Trump’s April 27 speech at the Mayflower Hotel.49
Despite Papadopoulos’s demonstrated habit of immediately reporting his contacts with Kremlin agents to his supervisors at the Trump campaign—and the fact that just ten days after receiving Mifsud’s shocking news, he shared it with a man he had just met, Australian diplomat Alexander Downer (as well as, three weeks after that, yet another man he had just met, Greek foreign minister Nikos Kotzias)—Papadopoulos will tell the special counsel that he does not think he ever gave to anyone on the Trump campaign the most valuable piece of information he would acquire in his eight months of working for the GOP presidential candidate.50
Papadopoulos was emailing with senior campaign officials during the seventy-two-hour period in which he received his top-shelf intelligence from Mifsud, including an April 25 email to Trump domestic policy adviser Stephen Miller on the Kremlin’s “open invitation by Putin