Originally posted by @sh76
That's Papadopoulos, not Manafort.
But Papadopoulos was sending those e-mails directly to Manafort:
Four weeks later, on May 21, Papadopoulos emailed Paul Manafort, who was then Trump’s campaign chairman (and has now been indicted on tax fraud charges), to reiterate that Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs was “eager to meet Mr. Trump.” Manafort forwarded the email to another Trump campaign official, Rick Gates (who has since been indicted alongside Manafort), with a note attached. “Let’s discuss,” said the note. “We need someone to communicate that DT is not doing these trips. It should be someone low level in the campaign so as not to send any signal.”
What signal was Manafort trying to avoid? The charitable theory is that he didn’t want to convey disrespect to Russia by having a senior campaign aide explicitly reject Russia’s outreach. That’s implausible, since assigning the brushoff to a junior aide conveyed even less respect. Nor would that theory explain why, when the email chain was leaked and published in the Washington Post two months ago, the part about avoiding a “signal” was left out. It’s more plausible that Manafort was trying not to alert nosy Americans—perhaps the same ones who, on behalf of our government, might have monitored a Trump–Putin meeting more easily in the United States than in London. That would explain why, once the Russia scandal exploded, the sentence about a “signal”—indicating an attempt to keep contacts between Russia and the campaign secret—was omitted from the material given to, or at least published by, the Post.
On June 19, 2016, Papadopoulos wrote to a high-ranking Trump official—apparently Manafort again—this time passing along word from the Russian foreign affairs ministry that if Trump couldn’t travel for a meeting, Russia would like to meet with a representative from Trump’s campaign. “I am willing to make the trip off the record,” Papadopoulos wrote, “if it’s in the interest of Mr. Trump and the campaign to meet specific people.” According to the stipulation, this offer led to weeks of communication about possible off-the-record meetings. On Aug. 15, a campaign supervisor wrote back to Papadopoulos, telling him “I would encourage you” to “make the trip.” The trip never happened. But the campaign’s authorization of an off-the-record meeting did.
The juiciest disclosure in the stipulation involves a breakfast in London on April 26, 2016, a day after Papadopoulos sent his initial query about a Trump–Putin meeting in London. At the breakfast, an “overseas professor” told Papadopoulos “that he had just returned from a trip to Moscow where he had met with high-level Russian government officials” and had “learned that the Russians had obtained ‘dirt’ on then-candidate [Hillary] Clinton.” Specifically, the Russians had “thousands of emails” from or about Clinton. But the stipulation says nothing about Papadopoulos passing this information to the Trump campaign. It says he “continued to correspond with Campaign officials” and his Russian contacts. But the correspondence spoke only of working “to arrange a meeting between the Campaign and the Russian government.”
This is quite puzzling. We know that the Trump campaign wanted dirt on Clinton. That’s clear from email correspondence leading up to the June 9, 2016, meeting between Manafort, Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, and Russian representatives. Why, then, didn’t the campaign follow up on the April 26 offer? The answer is we don’t know that it didn’t. All we know is that the campaign’s correspondence after April 26 didn’t mention dirt or Clinton’s emails. Maybe Papadopoulos didn’t pass the information along. Or maybe he did, and the vague record that follows is what happens when an incriminating conversation goes offline.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2017/10/papadopoulos_plea_blurs_the_line_between_collusion_and_cover_up.html
31 Oct '17 12:15
Manafort and aide indicted; Trump campaign official admits lying to FBI
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