The Mueller indictments and criminal information have set the mediasphere on fire! So much so that oxygen-deprived commentators are, well, losing track of some key plot points. We get to Lawfare later but let's start with Joe Uchill of The Hill, who gets this splashy headline:
Timeline: Campaign knew Russia had Clinton emails months before Trump 'joke'
Hmm. "Campaign"? One out-of-the-loop nobody in London got a mention from The Professor, a guy with some Russian contacts. Nothing in the affidavit or stipulation indicate George P passed this along. So who is "the campaign"? [Do let me add: my primary criticism of the Uchill piece applies equally to the Scott Shane effort at the failing NY Times.]
As to "knew" - well, George P claims he thought the Professor was BSing. Hillary's secret server and email travails had been in the news for over a year at that point and the possibility of classified info being hacked had been prominent in March and April of 2016. Maybe The Professor read the papers? Maybe he really was BSing and George P nailed it? Again, nothing in the stipulation indicates that George P followed up on 'the dirt', or that "the dirt" was even an agenda item rather than just a surprise suggestion from The Professor.
But Joe Uchill really loses the plot in his main story:
Months before candidate Donald Trump asked Russia to “find” Hillary Clinton's missing private server emails — a statement the campaign later called a joke — a Russian operative told a campaign aide "the Russians had emails of Clinton," according to a plea agreement released Monday.
...
In the context of the timeline of events, Papadopoulos was told of Russian hacking before the rest of the country, and weeks before the Trump campaign made its first denial of Russian involvement in the election.
We are then presented with a timeline of the DNC and Podesta hacks, and so what? If The Professor was referencing Hillary's server, We the People still don't know if the Russians hacked that. What we do know is that no one needed to be a Russian insider to speculate that the Russians had hacked Hillary's server - that was a public worry. If The Professor had mentioned the DNC or Podesta, OK, that would have been deeply troubling. But he didn't.
If The Professor was just BSing about Hillary's emails based on what he read in the news (or passing along a Russian contact's BS) and got lucky when the DNC emails were released, well, good guess. He should spend more time buying Lotto tickets.
Or if The Professor had early word of the Podesta and DNC hacks and simplified everything as dirt on Hillary, well, again, so what? Maybe George P took this seriously and followed up but nothing released confirms that.
Should George P have gone to the FBI with this hot tip? Please - sort of like Team Hillary went to the FBI as the Steele dossier came together. George P may have simply not believed it. I have one Russian friend (OK, small sample size) and there is no conspiracy theory so outlandish he won't nibble on it. You think there are Americans who don't trust the government and don't trust the media? Go to Russia. The Professor undoubtedly heard all sorts of outlandish stuff from his Russian buddies and may have passed some along. Turned out to be true-ish, but who knew?
Meanwhile, over at the invaluable Lawfare, Susan Hennessey and Benjamin Wittes provide a quick take on Monday's action. My quibble points revolve around these passages:
The second big takeaway is even starker: A member of President Trump’s campaign team admits that he was working with people he knew to be tied to the Russian government to “arrange a meeting between the Campaign and the Russian government officials” and to obtain “dirt” on Hillary Clinton in the form of thousands of hacked emails—and that he lied about these activities to the FBI. He briefed President Trump on at least some of them.
"Working to... obtain dirt"? No evidence that the offer of dirt was incidental and a surprise or that there was follow-up.
His [George P] guilty plea is for lying to FBI investigators in a Jan. 27, 2017, interview regarding his conduct and contacts. As we’ve discussed in the past, it isn’t uncommon for false statements to the FBI to be prosecuted under 18 U.S.C. § 1001 offenses in these sorts of cases. Proving that someone is lying is often easier than proving that the underlying offense violates the law. Here, for example, Papadopoulos’s underlying activity—working with Russian government officials to obtain “dirt” on Clinton and set up a Putin-Trump meeting—may have been legal, if wholly disreputable. Lying about it, however, is a crime.
Same objection. Bonus objection - the dirt is only mentioned in a conversation with The Professor, who is neither a Russian nor an official.
That said, the Papadopoulos stipulation offers a stunningly frank, if probably incomplete, account of what occurred during the spring of 2016 in the Trump campaign. To wit, during that period, Trump campaign officials were actively working to set up a meeting with Russian officials or representatives. And from a very early point in the campaign, those meetings were explicitly about obtaining hacked, incriminating emails.
Similar objection. Based on the released info, only George P knew about the email offer and no meeting was "explicitly" about that (Teh George P follow-up emails after the fateful breakfast meeting were still about a Trump meeting with Putin). Maybe Mueller is playing it close to the vest or maybe he is delivering drama-provoking over-charges. Time will tell! From the stipulation:

Next:
It isn’t clear which emails the various parties might have been discussing here. There are, after all, the hacked emails of the Democratic National Committee, which first became public on June 14, 2016, though the breach had occurred more than a year earlier. There are the hacked emails of Clinton campaign Chairman John Podesta, abreach that occurred on March 19, 2016, but that did not become public until Oct. 9, 2016. There are also the purported 30,000 emails from Hillary Clinton’s time at the State Department, a matter dating to 2015, which may not have ever been hacked but which Trump campaign folks clearly believed had been. There is also possibly some other category of alleged emails that wasn’t a matter of public discussion. But it’s clear that Trump campaign officials were after emails and, well, let’s just say they didn’t go to the FBI when they found themselves in conversations with Russian officials about them.
Good point about the range of emails on the menu. Again, it is not at all clear anyone was after any emails.
The stipulation also contains some rather damaging information about President Trump himself. Papadopoulos says he attended a “national security” meeting on March 31, 2016, at which Trump himself was present, along with his other foreign policy advisers. In that meeting, Papadopoulos told the group that he had connections to arrange a meeting between Trump and Russian President Putin. This means that Trump either knew or should have known about his campaign’s effort to interface with Russia, even as news of various criminal hacking and attempts to interfere with the U.S. election were becoming public.
For heaven's sake! Trump has been to Russia a million times and has more connection there than this nobody from nowhere. Meanwhile, as to "news of various criminal hacking and attempts to interfere with the U.S. election were becoming public", which is it? If the email hacking was public (seems early to me for the DNC/Podesta stuff) then why are we sure The Professor was not just following the news? Or if it was still secret, why would Trump know about it?
But that’s about the only good news in the indictment for the president. Because Manafort is alleged to have lied about his foreign-agent status and made false statements into this year. In other words, at the same time Papadopoulos admits he was working Russian government officials for Clinton emails and for a Trump-Putin meeting, Manafort was allegedly still laundering the money he had obtained by illegally representing one of Putin’s allied strongmen.
I'm a broken record, but... The Professor was not a Russian official and George P doesn't admit to "working" with anyone to obtain emails.
Since you ask, The Professor is described in the affidavit (but not the stipulation) as a 'citizen of a country in the Mediterranean'. Page 4:

My betting pool - he is Cypriot. Cyprus, Russian oligarchs, money laundering - c'mon. [OK, maybe Malta? The Professor is IDed as Joseph Misfud.]
Well. Lawfare normally does fabulous work but this time they seem to be making assumptions not supported by the facts in evidence.
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