George Papadopoulos did a lot of wrong things. One of those things was when he offered to set up a special, secret meeting between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin through his own supposed “Russian contacts”. Contrary to what the media narrative would lead you to believe, Sessions rejected that half-assed proposal.
From NBC News (of all places):
Attorney General Jeff Sessions rejected a proposal by a junior campaign aide who offered to use his “Russian contacts” to try to set up a meeting between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, a source familiar with the matter told NBC News…
The meeting at which Papadopoulos floated the idea of Trump sitting down with Putin occurred March 31, and Sessions can be seen in a photo sitting at the head of the table. At the other end was Trump.
“The March 31 comments by this Papadopoulos person did not leave a lasting impression,” said the person familiar with Sessions’ views. “As far as Sessions seemed to be concerned, when he shut down this idea of Papadopoulos engaging with Russia, that was the end of it and he moved the meeting along to other issues.”
The source added, “Papadopoulos was some 29-year old that nobody had ever heard of and who struck people in the room as someone who didn’t have a lot of credibility.”
The source said Sessions was not aware that Papadopoulos had been offered “dirt” on Clinton or emails.
That March 31 meeting of Trump’s foreign policy team was one of only six times that the group met and the only meeting that Trump himself attended. Trump reportedly didn’t say yes or no to Papadopoulos’s suggestion of a photo op with Putin but Sessions, his most prominent Republican supporter, did. The entire reason Papadopoulos is relevant to the investigation is because he doggedly tried to get the Trump campaign together with Russian officials for months, yet here’s an instance of the future Attorney General squashing the idea of a Trump/Putin meeting the minute Papadopoulos proposed it.
Oops.
Of course that doesn’t mean everyone in the Trump universe was so quick to reject the idea of secret meetings and getting “dirt’ on Hillary from the Russians, as Allah notes:
But just because Sessions is likely innocent doesn’t mean the entire campaign hierarchy is. The fact remains that dopey, low-level George Papadopoulous was pushing the idea of meetings with Russians to big cheeses like Manafort and Sam Clovis frequently and not getting the same hard “no” that he got from Sessions. In fact, Papadopoulos claimed in an email to a Russian contact at one point last summer that his idea for a meeting between “my national chairman and maybe one other foreign policy adviser” with members of Putin’s office had already been “approved by our side.” Was that true? If so, who approved it?
The angle the MSM is taking on this is that Sessions is a big old liar-pants because he somehow neglected to mention his innocence at a committee hearing. Oh boo hoo.