Trump's 2 reasons not to pay campaign staff: avarice and deniability [View all]

[muriel_volestrangler]

Trump infamously tries to stiff anyone who does any work for him. It's Business As Usual for him - never pay a bill you can get away with, or find someone else (like your personal "charity foundation&quot to pay your bills. Various campaign workers walked away after it became clear the word-of-mouth promises to pay them were worth squat.

But now we see the extra advantage, during a dirty campaign - he gets to say "this guy? We hardly knew him. He was just a volunteer. If we'd paid attention to him, he'd be on the payroll, wouldn't he?"

White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders said the role of Mr Papadopoulos in the Trump campaign had been "extremely limited".

He had been in a "volunteer position", she said, and "no activity was done in an official capacity".


http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-41808227

Yeah, sure. From August:

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.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-campaign-emails-show-aides-repeated-efforts-to-set-up-russia-meetings/2017/08/14/54d08da6-7dc2-11e7-83c7-5bd5460f0d7e_story.html?utm_term=.8b22426c5537

When he was part of the Trump campaign, Papadopoulos received attention for his youth. At the time, the Post’s Jia Lynn Yang pointed out his listing Model United Nations as a credential on LinkedIn. (Newsweek attempted to reach out to Papadopoulos through this account, but he was not immediately available for comment). According to the LinkedIn account that appears to belong to Papadopoulos, he graduated from DePaul University in 2009 with a bachelor’s degree in political science and government. He then received master’s degrees from University College London and the London Schol of Economics. After graduating, he worked from 2011 to 2015 as a research associate at the Hudson Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.

When the 2016 presidential election season was gearing up, he first worked as an adviser to the campaign of Dr. Ben Carson before switching in May 2016 to the Trump team, according to the LinkedIn account.
...
The initial Russia offer by Papadopoulos apparently went nowhere, as other members of the foreign policy team rejected the suggestion, according to the Post. Papadopoulos persisted, emailing then-campaign manager Corey Lewandowski in April 2016, “Putin wants to host the Trump team when the time is right.” He also forwarded campaign members an email from Ivan Timofeev, a senior official in the government-funded Russian International Affairs Council, about coordinating a Trump visit to Moscow. Again, campaign members, including Paul Manafort, whose Virginia home the FBI raided in July, rejected the suggestion.

But months later, in June 2016, Manafort, Jared Kushner and Donald Trump Jr. met with a Russian lawyer with ties to the Kremlin who had promised disparaging information about Trump's opponent, Hillary Clinton. Trump Jr. has said he did nothing wrong by attending the meeting. But William Browder, a financier and longtime critic of the Russian government, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in July that the lawyer was probably trying to initiate an agreement on behalf of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

http://www.newsweek.com/who-george-papadopoulos-trump-adviser-russia-650716

More importantly, from March 2016:

FREDERICK RYAN JR., WASHINGTON POST PUBLISHER: We’ve heard you’re going to be announcing your foreign policy team shortly… Any you can share with us?

TRUMP: Well, I hadn’t thought of doing it, but if you want I can give you some of the names… Walid Phares, who you probably know, PhD, adviser to the House of Representatives caucus, and counter-terrorism expert; Carter Page, PhD; George Papadopoulos, he’s an energy and oil consultant, excellent guy; the Honorable Joe Schmitz, [former] inspector general at the Department of Defense; [retired] Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg; and I have quite a few more. But that’s a group of some of the people that we are dealing with. We have many other people in different aspects of what we do, but that’s a representative group.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2016/03/21/a-transcript-of-donald-trumps-meeting-with-the-washington-post-editorial-board/?tid=a_inl&utm_term=.ab9e6802bb74

Nothing official my arse. Trump knew his name and wanted to drop it in the same breath as a retired general and the infamous Carter Page.