George Papadopoulos in jail
WASHINGTON — George Papadopoulos, a former Trump campaign adviser, was sentenced on Friday to 14 days in prison for lying to the F.B.I. about his contacts with Russian intermediaries during the 2016 presidential race, becoming the first Trump adviser to be sentenced in the special counsel investigation, affording to sources.
Though most first-time offenders convicted of lying to federal authorities escape with probation, Judge Randolph D. Moss said that Mr. Papadopoulos deserved a stiffer sentence because he had impeded an investigation of “grave national importance.”
Prosecutors argued that Mr. Papadopoulos’s repeated lies during a January 2017 interview with investigators hampered the Russia investigation at a critical moment. In part because Mr. Papadopoulos misled the authorities, prosecutors said in court papers, they failed to arrest a London-based professor — suspected of being a Russian operative — before he left the United States in February 2017, never to return.
During an interview with The New York Times this week, Mr. Papadopoulos, 31, for the first time gave his own account of why he deceived F.B.I. agents after they arrived at his house in Chicago last year asking about any connections between the Trump campaign and Russian intermediaries.
“I wanted to distance myself as much as possible — and Trump himself and the campaign — from what was probably an illegal action or dangerous information,” he said. He told the judge that he was blinded by personal ambition and the thrill of being part of Mr. Trump’s electoral victory. Just before his F.B.I. interview, he had attended an inauguration event; just after, he promoted his campaign work as a reason he should be hired by the Energy Department.
“I was surrounded by important people,” he told the judge. “I was young and ambitious and excited.”
At the time of the F.B.I. interview, he told The Times, he was concerned about where the escalating investigation might lead. He made no suggestion that anyone on the campaign or in the administration had directed him to lie.
The sentencing hearing, which lasted more than 90 minutes in a packed courtroom, veered in unexpected directions. Mr. Papadopoulos’s defense lawyer, Thomas M. Breen, tried to shift some of the blame for his client’s lies to President Trump. He suggested that Mr. Papadopoulos took his cues from Mr. Trump, who has tried to discredit the inquiry by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, into Russia’s interference in the election and whether any Trump associates conspired.
“The president of the United States hindered this investigation more than George Papadopoulos ever could,” Mr. Breen said. “The message for all of us is to check our loyalty, to tell the truth, to help the good guys.”
Everyone Who’s Been Charged as a Result of the Mueller Investigation Thirty-four people have faced criminal charges that stem from the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
While Judge Moss cut short that argument, he stressed the importance of the investigation to the integrity of American democracy. Because determining whether a foreign government interfered in the electoral process was “a matter of enormous importance,” he said, Mr. Papadopoulos’s crime was “significantly more serious than the typical violation.”
He “elevated his self-interest over the national interest,” he said. The judge also fined Mr. Papadopoulos $9,500 and ordered him to complete 200 hours of community service and one year of probation after he is released from custody.
Andrew D. Goldstein, a prosecutor on Mr. Mueller’s team, told the judge that because Mr. Papadopoulos lied, investigators were forced into a painstaking monthslong examination of 100,000 emails and other communications to establish how Russian intermediaries tried to use him as a channel to the Trump campaign. Even after he pleaded guilty, Mr. Goldstein said, Mr. Papadopoulos made only “begrudging efforts to cooperate.”
