George Demetrios Papadopoulos ( ; born August 19, 1987) is an author and former member of the foreign policy advisory panel to Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign. On October 5, 2017, Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to a felony charge of making false statements to FBI agents about the timing and the possible significance of his contacts in 2016 relating to U.S.–Russia relations and the Trump presidential campaign. In 2018, he served twelve days in federal prison, then was placed on a 12-month supervised release.
During his supervised release from prison, he participated in the filming of a docuseries. In March 2019, Papadopoulos released his book, Deep State Target: How I Got Caught in the Crosshairs of the Plot to Bring Down President Trump. He was pardoned by Trump in December 2020.
He ran in the March 2020 primary for the November general election to replace the U.S. representative Katie Hill in California's 25th congressional district, after Hill resigned, but lost, receiving 2.3% of the vote. He is pending to announce a run for Illinois's 8th congressional district in the 2026 United States House of Representatives elections.
Early life and education
George Papadopoulos was born August 19, 1987, at Swedish Hospital in Chicago, Illinois, to Greek immigrants parents originally from Thessaloniki. His father, Antonis, was heavily involved in the local politics of the Greek-American community and is the former president of the Pan-Macedonian Union of the United States. His mother, Kate (Kiki), was born in Greece, but later moved to Worcester, Massachusetts. He grew up in Lincolnwood, Illinois and attended Niles West High School in Skokie, Illinois, graduating in 2005. He then attended DePaul University, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in political science in 2009. He earned a Master of Science in Security Studies in 2010 at University College London, writing his thesis about "deleterious effects of low governance and state capacity levels in the Middle East" in November 2010. He speaks Arabic, English, French and Greek. He lived in Europe until March 2016 when he moved back to Chicago.
Career
Papadopoulos worked as an unpaid intern at the Hudson Institute from 2011 to 2015 specializing in the eastern Mediterranean and later worked as a contract research assistant to a senior fellow at the institute. Richard Weitz, a Wikistrat "expert", managed George Papadopoulos while he was at the Hudson Institute. According to CNN, Papadopoulos described himself as an "oil, gas, and policy consultant" on his LinkedIn profile.
In 2010, following the rupture in relations between Turkey and Israel due to the Mavi Marmara incident, Papadopoulos became involved in eastern Mediterranean energy development projects and policy focusing upon the relations of Israel, Cyprus and Greece, also known as the Energy Triangle. In 2014, Papadopoulos authored op-ed pieces in several Israeli publications. In one, published in the Arutz Sheva, Papadopoulos argued that the U.S. should focus on its "stalwart allies" Israel, Greece, and Cyprus to "contain the newly emergent Russian fleet"; in another, published in Haaretz, he contended that Israel should exploit its natural gas resources in partnership with Cyprus and Greece rather than Turkey. On 19 October 2015, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agreed to allow major concessions for Gazprom to develop the Leviathan gas field; Putin told Netanyahu, "We will make sure there will be no provocation against the gas fields by Hezbollah or Hamas. Nobody messes with us."
Investigative reporting conducted by Haaretz in 2017 showed that Papadopoulos co-authored an expert opinion, on behalf of the Hudson Institute that was delivered to the Israeli Energy Ministry on June 20, 2015, about a proposed plan to develop the Leviathan offshore gas fields in Israel's territorial waters. Money was donated to Hudson by the CEO of Noble Energy and other staffers of the company. Houston-based Noble Energy is heavily invested in Israeli gas with the Israeli energy group Delek Drilling. Noble Energy was initially given permission on December 17, 2015, to develop the Leviathan gas field worth up to $120 billion (~$ in ).
In September 2015, Papadopoulos left the Hudson Institute and joined Energy Stream, a London energy consultancy, as an oil and gas consultant for four months before joining Ben Carson's presidential campaign.
Beginning in December 2015 and while living in London, Papadopoulos served on the National Security and Foreign Policy Advisory Committee for Ben Carson's campaign for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. In early February 2016, he began work as a director at the London Centre of International Law Practice but left the Carson campaign in mid-February 2016 and moved from London to Chicago in March 2016.
Former Trump campaign adviser Michael Caputo described Papadopoulos's role in the Trump's 2016 election campaign as a volunteer "coffee boy".
In 2019, Papadopoulos announced he had joined the board of advisors for the medical cannabis company C3, which manufactures the marijuana pill Idrasil.
In September 2024, reports emerged that George Papadopoulos had joined the editorial board of the website intelligencer.today, alongside contributors associated with Kremlin-affiliated media. The company associated with intelligencer.today lists a Los Angeles business address, which was provided by board member Igor Lopatonok. Lopatonok’s business address is in Moscow.
Involvement in Donald Trump's presidential campaign
While living in London, Papadopoulos first reached out to Donald Trump's campaign on August 4, 2015, expressing interest in “an advisory role to Mr. Trump on matters of energy security and U.S. policy in the Eastern Mediterranean."Report of the Senate Intelligence Committee, United States Senate, on the Russian Active Measures Campaigns and Interference in the U.S. 2016 Election. Volume 5: Counterintelligence Threats and Vulnerabilities, Released: August 18, 2020, p. 471 and footnote 3056. Further unsuccessful emails in an effort to obtain a position in the Trump campaign followed, but in December 2015, with the Ben Carson campaign on the verge of suspending, Papadopoulos believed that parts of the Carson campaign would be assumed by the Trump campaign, and decided to pursue this route.Papadopoulos, George. "Deep State Target: How I Got Caught in the Crosshairs of the Plot to Bring Down President Trump." Diversion Books, 2019, p. 31.
Papadopoulos sent his résumé to the Ben Carson presidential campaign, which hired him as a foreign policy adviser for two-and-a-half months, December 2015 through mid-February 2016. Sam Clovis, who at the time was national co-chairman of Trump's campaign team, approved him as an unpaid adviser. In his campaign job interview via Skype from London on March 6, Clovis allegedly told Papadopoulos that one of the campaign's foreign policy priorities was to improve U.S.–Russia relations, though Clovis later denied saying that.
Employed at that time with the London Centre of International Law Practice (LCILP), on March 12, 2016, Papadopoulos was part of an LCILP visiting delegation to the Link Campus University in Rome, a university associated with Italian intelligence agencies. There he met Joseph Mifsud, a Maltese academic with alleged ties to Russian intelligence who was at the time a teacher at the University of Stirling in Scotland.
Joins Trump team
On March 21, 2016, in an interview with the editorial board of The Washington Post, Trump announced Papadopoulos as one of his campaign's foreign policy advisers. Trump, reading from a list, said: "He's an oil and energy consultant, excellent guy."
On March 24, Papadopoulos met with Mifsud in London. Papadopoulos said that Mifsud was accompanied by a Russian woman, Olga Polonskaya, whom Mifsud falsely identified as the niece of the Russian President. On the same day, Papadopoulos performed nine internet searches of various combinations attempting to find Olga Polonskaya as a niece of President Putin or former President Medvedev.Report of the Senate Intelligence Committee, United States Senate, on the Russian Active Measures Campaigns and Interference in the U.S. 2016 Election. Volume 5: Counterintelligence Threats and Vulnerabilities, Released: August 18, 2020, p. 475 and footnote 3090. Mifsud, in a later interview, denied he said this.
On March 31, 2016, Papadopoulos joined candidate Trump as well as Senator Jeff Sessions and other campaign officials for a National Security Meeting at the Trump Hotel in Washington, D.C. Papadopoulos averred that he could facilitate a foreign policy meeting between candidate Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
From March to August 2016, Papadopoulos "was identified as having contacts with senior members of the Trump campaign on at least a dozen occasions." Papadopoulos's wife, then his fiancée, said in 2017 that his job in the campaign was to set up meetings with foreign leaders and that he had been in regular contact with high-ranking campaign officials. Papadopoulos sent emails concerning meeting with Putin to at least seven campaign officials.
At a breakfast meeting at the Andaz London Liverpool Street hotel on April 26, 2016, Mifsud told Papadopoulos that he had information that the Russians have "dirt" on Hillary Clinton, namely, "the Russians had emails of Clinton, they have thousands of emails."
On May 10, 2016, at London's Kensington Wine Rooms, Papadopoulos allegedly told the Australian High Commissioner to the United Kingdom, Alexander Downer, who was accompanied by Australian diplomat Erika Thompson, that "one of the reasons [Trump would win] was that ... the Trump team had received some kind of suggestion from Russia that it could assist this process with the anonymous release of information during the campaign that would be damaging to Mrs Clinton (and President Obama)."
Greece
On May 21, campaign chairman Paul Manafort forwarded an email from Papadopoulos to his deputy Rick Gates requesting to arrange trips to Greece and to Russia for Trump, saying: "We need someone to communicate that [Donald Trump] is not doing these trips. It should be someone low-level in the campaign so as not to send any signal." Gates delegated the task to the campaign's correspondence coordinator, referring to him as "the person responding to all mail of non-importance."House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Report on Russian Active Measures, HRPT-115-1, March 22, 2018, pp. 78-79.
Papadopoulos later said that he had told the Greek Foreign Minister, Nikos Kotzias, during a meeting on May 26, 2016, that the Russians had Clinton-related emails. He said his "biggest regret" was not immediately reporting Mifsud's comment to U.S. intelligence, and the "stupidest thing I did was actually gossiping about it with foreign diplomats".
Russia
Between March and September 2016, Papadopoulos made at least six requests for Trump or representatives of his campaign to meet in Russia with Russian politicians. Senator Richard Burr, the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which investigated Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections, said in October 2017 that the panel was interested in Papadopoulos because he had sent e-mails attempting to set up meetings between Trump and Putin. The recipients of emails about outreach to the Russian government reportedly were Clovis, Corey Lewandowski, Manafort, Gates, representative of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs Ivan Timofeev, and others.