Former Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos in a new book claims that he felt forced to accept a plea deal from special counsel Robert Mueller and his team because they threatened to indict him on further charges if he declined.
In his memoir, obtained by Reuters, Papadopoulos writes that Mueller’s prosecutors threatened to charge him with failing to register as a foreign lobbyist under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) if he did not admit to lying to investigators about his contacts with a professor who promised compromising information on Hillary Clinton.
{mosads}“I was faced with a choice: accept the charges that I lied or face FARA charges,” Papadopoulos wrote in “Deep State Target: How I Got Caught in the Crosshairs of the Plot to Bring Down President Trump,” according to Reuters. “I made a deal. A deal forced on me.”
“My story is part of a larger story. The story of Trump and the story of stopping Trump, or trying to,” he reportedly continued. “The Trump presidency was the primary target of all this insanity.”
Papadopoulos has taken shots at the Mueller investigation since his release from custody in December, and has referred to the case against him specifically as a form of “entrapment.”
He suggested in an October interview on Hill.TV that he was entrapped by Western intelligence agencies and ensnared in Mueller’s investigation as a result. He said the professor had denied any ties to Russia.
“If he was really not a Russian operative, and it was known to the Russian intelligence community, as some have reported recently, and his own lawyer has stated publicly that he was actually working on behalf of Western intelligence, then perhaps this is one of the largest cases of entrapment in history,” he told Hill.TV last year.
Papadopoulos also appeared to cheer on President Trump’s efforts to attack Democrats and the news media over the Russia investigation’s findings over the weekend, tweeting “time to hit back” following the release of Attorney General William Barr’s summary of Mueller’s final report, stating, “The Special Counsel’s investigation did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election.”
Papadopoulos has also repeatedly maintained his loyalty to Trump in public social media postings since last year.
“I NEVER flipped against the president. What I did do, however, is expose the corruption of this ‘investigation’ for the world to see. The legacy is what matters now, how history remembers these days. Silence during these critical days was never an option. All must be exposed,” he tweeted in November.