“Interesting messages coming in from Moscow”by digby
It looks like the coffee boy had a direct line to senior campaign official and current White House adviserStephen Miller
The former Trump campaign foreign-policy adviser George Papadopoulos told Stephen Miller, a senior policy adviser, in an email last April that he had received an “interesting message” from Russia — one day after learning that the Kremlin apparently had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton, the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee.
The emails were disclosed in court documents filed by the special counsel Robert Mueller’s office and unsealed late last month. The New York Times reported on Friday that Miller was the “senior policy adviser” described, but not named, in the court filings.
Miller, now a top White House policy adviser and speechwriter for President Donald Trump, was in regular contact with Papadopoulos over several months last year, the court filings show. He has reportedly been interviewed by Mueller as part of the special counsel’s investigation into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 US election and whether the Trump campaign colluded with Moscow to influence the outcome.
The court filings say that on April 25, 2016, after “multiple conversations” with a Russian national connected to Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Papadopoulos told Miller that “the Russian government has an open invitation by Putin for Mr. Trump to meet him when he is ready,” referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“The advantage of being in London is that these governments tend to speak a bit more openly in ‘neutral’ cities,” he said.
On April 26, Papadopoulos met with Joseph Mifsud — identified in the court filings as an “overseas professor” — for breakfast at a London hotel. There, Mifsud told Papadopoulos that he had learned from high-level Kremlin officials during his recent trip to Moscow that the Russians had “dirt” on Clinton in the form of “thousands of emails,” the filings say.
Papadopoulos emailed Miller the next day.
“Have some interesting messages coming in from Moscow about a trip when the time is right,” he wrote, the court filings say.
They obviously knew about the hacking long before it was public. And they obviously knew that the Russian government was interested in helping them. The best case scenario for them is that they knew but they didn’t take it seriously and were too ignorant to understand that they needed to report such activity.
The problem is that Donald Trump keeps saying, as recently as this past week-end, that he believes the whole thing is a hoax cooked up by Democrats and hacks. He’s committed to the line that the Russians weren’t involved and he knew nothing about any of it. But there is a lot of accumulated evidence now that high ranking members of his campaign knew about Russia’s activity on his behalf. One of those high ranking members is his son and judging by his ongoing denial that Russia meddled it seems that Trump may just be willing to throw him and all the rest of them under the bus.
Speaking of Miller, I am reminded of this bit from Bill Maher on Friday on “the best people.”
The line about Miller is especially tart…
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