Newly revealed emails of a low-level adviser to the Trump campaign show the aide was eager to make connections between Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. But experts on Russia say the emails also demonstrate that Russian officials were seeking multiple access points to team Trump. The Washington Post writes:
Three days after Donald Trump named his campaign foreign policy team in March 2016, the youngest of the new advisers sent an email to seven campaign officials with the subject line: “Meeting with Russian Leadership - Including Putin.”
The adviser, George Papadopoulos, offered to set up “a meeting between us and the Russian leadership to discuss US-Russia ties under President Trump,” telling them his Russian contacts welcomed the opportunity, according to internal campaign emails read to The Washington Post.
Top Trump aides reportedly weren't as eager to make that connection as one might think given how many Russian contacts ultimately were made by key Trump advisers, including Jared Kushner, Jeff Sessions, Paul Manafort, Don Jr., and Michael Flynn. Yet despite the campaign's initial reception, Papadopoulos persisted, sending at least six email requests for meetings between Trump or his aides and Russian officials.
On March 24, [Sam] Clovis, the campaign co-chairman who also served on the foreign policy team, reacted to one proposed Russia meeting by writing, “We thought we probably should not go forward with any meeting with the Russians until we have had occasion to sit with our NATO allies.” [...]
“Putin wants to host the Trump team when the time is right,” [Papadopoulos] wrote on April 27.
On May 4, Papadopoulos forwarded [then campaign-manager Corey] Lewandowski and others a note he received from the program head for the government-funded Russian International Affairs Council. In it, Ivan Timofeev, a senior official in the organization, reached out to report that Russian foreign ministry officials were open to a Trump visit to Moscow and requested that the campaign and Russians write a formal letter outlining the meeting.
Hey, how about a rain check for next year in the Oval Office? Anyway, whatever team Trump may have done with those entreaties, they show Russia was aggressively on the hunt for a way into the campaign.
To experts in Russian intelligence gathering, the Papadopoulos chain offers further evidence that Russians were looking for entry points and playing upon connections with lower-level aides to penetrate the 2016 campaign. [...]
Steven L. Hall, who retired from the CIA in 2015 after 30 years of managing the agency’s Russia operations, said when told by The Post about the emails: “The bottom line is that there’s no doubt in my mind that the Russian government was casting a wide net when they were looking at the American election. I think they were doing very basic intelligence work: Who’s out there? Who’s willing to play ball? And how can we use them?”
The Papadopoulos emails were among more than 20,000 pages of documents the Trump campaign released to investigators on congressional committees after White House lawyers and Trump attorneys had reviewed them.
What's clear is that the Russians were interested enough in team Trump to basically throw themselves at it—even through the likes of a low-level aide who had graduated college less than a decade earlier.
Eventually, Russian officials would find an entry point with a higher-level Trump aide, Don Jr., in an email titled, "Russia - Clinton - private and confidential." But the Papadopoulos emails suggest the meeting between the Kremlin-linked lawyer, Don Jr., Kushner, and Manafort might only be the beginning of the access the Russians secured to team Trump given how many angles they appeared to be working.