George Papadopoulos, a former Trump campaign advisor, recounts his five-year stint at conservative think tanks and 2016 role in the campaign while facing alleged international surveillance—though not by the FBI—highlighting media bias through retracted "RussiaGate" claims. His guilty plea stemmed from protecting Trump’s team, not actual wrongdoing, as he never met Russian officials; Kevin Kleinsmith’s later guilty plea over document tampering underscores the case’s fragility. Papadopoulos predicts Facebook and Twitter will suppress Trump post-Biden, citing Parler’s deplatforming as a precedent, and criticizes Section 230’s failure to hold platforms accountable. He defends Trump’s competence despite media portrayals, names potential GOP successors like Gaetz and Cruz, and condemns election fraud violence while advocating for free speech—warning Biden’s policies could destabilize U.S.-Canada relations, including Keystone pipeline cancellations. [Automatically generated summary]
This week, I was very excited to talk to former Trump campaign staffer George Papadopoulos.
If you remember, he got swept up in the whole spying on the campaign, on the Trump campaign, and the whole RussiaGate investigation, the Mueller campaign.
Didn't work out very well for them, did it?
The FBI arrested him for lying, but it was pretty complicated to say the least.
We definitely talk about that.
You're going to hear us talk about Russia Gate, why Trump pardoned him, which he did just before he left office.
And he makes some pretty accurate predictions, George does, about social media and working with the Biden administration that have actually already come true since we've recorded this episode.
So if you're interested in the whole Russia Gate story and Trump and stuff about the corruption of the intelligence community, then you'll definitely want to go to RebelNewsPlus.com and sign up to watch the whole episode unedited and uncensored.
It's true.
I'm not making it up.
It's really interesting.
And once we're behind the paywall, we actually talk about what Trump is like really in person because he would sit in on the meetings.
There's that famous photo of George on the panel with Trump.
We talk about social media censorship and who George himself thinks we should trust in the government these days.
Again, that's RebelNewsPlus.com.
This is episode 10 of Andrew Says Guys, and we are just getting started, so you don't want to miss it.
We're just getting heated up.
And this is a great conversation I had with George.
I was applying to work for the campaign.
I didn't express any real interest in Russia whatsoever.
I came from an energy background.
All my business was actually done in the Middle East.
And the one meeting I did set up with Trump was with the Egyptian president, because that's actually where I had real contacts at.
Obviously, I couldn't set up the meeting between Trump and Putin for two reasons.
One, after a while, it seemed that the campaign did not want to actually host this meeting, which is public record now.
And two, obviously, I didn't have real connections to Russia.
The guilty plea of George Papadopoulos is providing fresh insight into Robert Mueller's wide-ranging investigation of Russia's attempt to influence the presidential campaign.
When Papadopoulos was sentenced October 5th, one of the prosecutors described it as, quote, an ongoing investigation of which this case is a small part.
The personality is very educated, articulated, and even his contribution to the campaign has been much more relevant than bringing coffee.
You didn't voluntarily tell anyone.
And number two, why all the lies?
You were convicted of lying.
Michael Flynn was convicted of lying.
Michael Cohen was convicted of lying.
There have been other lies related to it from the podium at the White House.
Why all the lies?
I made it kind of clear in the book, too, but it's very important for me to say it out loud as well of why this lie occurred during my initial meeting with the FBI.
Playing this cat and mouse game with this individual, Joseph Mipsod, in which candidate Trump, President Trump, or any of his team for that matter outside of me had anything to do with, as I'm being asked questions about this person, the last thing I wanted to do was involve anyone on the campaign or the transition team or the president himself.
So what I did was I distanced myself from this individual.
I characterized him as a nobody, but somebody that should be looked into because I wanted to basically do two things, help my country look into this guy, but also not involve the president because he had nothing to do with this person and he didn't deserve the scrutiny of what seemed to be a foolish meeting with this person.
George Klopadopoulos is a former member of the Foreign Policy Advisory Panel for Donald Trump and an author of Deep State Target, How It Got Caught in the Crosshairs of the Plot to Bring Down President Trump, which was released just last year.
You can find him on Twitter at GeorgePapa19, where he has a following of about 700,000 people.
George, thanks for coming on the show.
How are you today?
Thanks so much for having me.
It's real pleasure.
Now, start for the people who don't know, start by telling them how you were involved in the Trump campaign.
Because if you just do a quick search of you, I mean, your Wikipedia page, it's clearly biased.
They make sure to call you a criminal, but they don't mention that you were spied on.
I keyword searched spied spying.
I mean, it's obviously on purpose.
I think I can tell from that.
But tell people how you got to this point now.
Yeah, well, I'm glad you did mention Google and Wikipedia because, you know, the moment you Google, let's say, a prominent conservative voice on Google or Wikipedia, they're just going to basically spread as much disinformation and fake stories and news as possible, especially in my case, because it was at the center of a plot essentially to undo a presidential election.
So what my story essentially comes down to was an earnest, hardworking analyst in Washington, D.C., working at a conservative think tank, along with very establishment-type personalities who had worked directly with George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, and Reagan, people like Scooter Libby, who was the chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, Doug Feit, Under Secretary of Defense under Rumsfield.
So I worked with these personalities for five years as an analyst in D.C. until the summer of 2015, when clearly there was a presidential election season around the corner.
And I looked at the landscape.
I saw what was happening in the United States and around the world.
And I thought that America needed more of a populist kind of leader or somebody who at least espoused that type of rhetoric and actually had tangible policy prescriptions that would address the nation's political security and economic woes.
And that was Donald Trump.
And also Ben Carson, I thought, had an interesting angle to play with.
So I first joined Ben Carson's presidential campaign until he dropped out.
And after Ben Carson drops out, I had joined Donald Trump's campaign.
And that's when the world's intelligence community fell in my lap.
Yeah, and I'll get to a little bit about the story about how they got permission to do that.
But at what point did you realize or what part in time were you informed that you were being surveilled by the FBI?
Was it through somebody in the administration calling you?
Was it from the media itself?
How did you get word of this?
Well, essentially what happened was before even the Washington Post had announced that I had joined the Donald Trump campaign, I was actually based in London in between working for the Ben Carson and Donald Trump campaign.
And immediately upon me telling this mysterious organization that had hired me right after I left Ben Carson's campaign, I tell them, look, I'm leaving your organization.
I'm going to be joining the Trump campaign.
And that's when this group began to introduce me to a lot of the mysterious and shady characters that we later understood were at the epicenter of the entire spying scandal.
People like Joseph Mipson, who some of the viewers might know if they followed somewhat of the Obama beat spygate story and others.
So a lot of actually what happened to me was based abroad.
A lot of the spying was based in London, which suggests that it wasn't actually the FBI who was running the operation against me.
And that's why I think my story has yet to actually have a final chapter closed on it.
Now, for me personally, years ago when this stuff was happening, this was one of my first really big YouTube videos.
It hit hundreds of thousands of views.
If I recall correctly, I think it was the New York Times was the publication that said the Trump campaign was spied on.
And then they later retracted that when it was no longer politically convenient.
And if I have any of the timeline incorrect here, please correct me.
But from what I understand, and this is just from memory, they used the Steele dossier to feed, they fed that to certain publications.
I believe Yahoo News is the one that name that always comes up.
And they used that for the reason to do the surveillance.
And then afterwards, they did the unmasking.
Is that the correct timeline there?
Yes.
So essentially, what was going on is that a paid foreign agent, an ex-MI6 official, Christopher Steele, was essentially on the payroll of the Clinton campaign.
He wanted funds to basically dirty up the campaign and to spread propaganda and misinformation to both the FBI and to the U.S. media.
We know based on recent declassified documents that the FBI began to waver in their confidence of Christopher Steele once they learned that he was on the payroll of the Clinton campaign and that he was actually leaking information to the media, something that he should not have been doing.
So this actually was utilized and weaponized, if you will, to then obtain search warrants and FISA warrants against individual members of the campaign like Carter Page, who was then later utilized to spy on the entire campaign and to wiretap everybody.
And if I'm not mistaken, they also, the people who authorize the unmasking are not unbiased individuals either.
And for what I remember, I believe BuzzFeed was the first to publish the dossier, and then CNN piggybacked on it.
And they said, oh, no, we're just telling you what BuzzFeed says.
And then you've got people like Clapper and Brennan.
They're all saying Russia gate, Russia gate, Trump's a traitor, all this sorts of stuff.
At what point did you realize that the media is not being truthful?
Was it easy to point out right from the onset?
Or did you have to sort of like figure out who was a friend and who was a foe?
If there were any friends for you at that time, well, a couple.
So I was actually at Trump's inauguration where I was meeting with the incoming White House chief of staff, Running Spribus, and discuss my potential role with the administration.
And then just two days later, after I went to visit some family in Chicago, I found the FBI knocking on my family's door.
And they made it very clear that they had been keeping tabs on me for a very long time, something that I didn't understand why.
But as somebody who loves my country, I thought that the FBI wanted to come talk to me.
They're not trying to set up an American or somebody working for a presidential campaign.
They're just looking to actually understand a potential national security issue.
So really fast upon this FBI interview, it looked like they were trying to set me up.
I leave the interview.
And that's when the media starts reaching out to me.
They start asking me, as the FBI interviewed you, as the FBI interviewed other people on the campaign, they started to detail information to me that would have been impossible to understand or know unless they were being fed information by the intelligence community.
So right away, and this is, you know, the early stages of Trump's presidency, I understood quite quickly that the media was in the lap, if you will, of the Intel community, or at least there was some sort of working relationship with them with one end objective, and that was to harm Trump's presidency.
That's what I saw.
I didn't, I never saw the media except a few conservative outlets, which were very up and coming in 2017, 2018, like the Daily Caller, which are now more established, reaching out to try and actually understand the true story.
But we really had our backs against the wall with the media completely biased against anyone associated with the Trump scheme.
And they were looking for blood, never to get the actual real story out.
Yeah.
As a person who started following all this, I feel like right when it happened, and that was probably one of the stories that I was most on top of in my short career up until now, it was pretty apparent where the allegiances lied in terms of having to tell the truth.
I mean, I remember vividly Anderson Cooper being on TV and just the blatant, it's more of an admit, omitting the truth than lying in my opinion.
And the way they pretended as if they didn't support what was going on and the way that they claimed that they weren't actually publishing the information and they didn't have any people in the FBI telling them anything.
I found it incredibly suspicious at the time.
And that's even before a lot of the stuff came out.
Now, I'm sure you faced a hell of a lot of backlash and people criticizing you.
What is your response when you're being your most level-headed self to people who say, well, why should I believe you?
You were charged by the FBI?
Look, let's look at a couple of facts.
The fact is there's a massive criminal inquiry ongoing for the last year by a special counsel now named John Durham, who's actually looking into the origins of the so-called Russia investigation.
John Durham, who's now a special counsel, and the former Attorney General, William Barr, both publicly refuted the Inspector General and the FBI regarding how this entire investigation started and whether it even had any basis.
That's the first thing.
The second point is the FBI lawyer who was in charge of my so-called case, Kevin Kleinsmith, he's pled guilty.
He was indicted and looking at six months in prison for altering documents.
He's actually been the first ex-FBI official who's been charged by the Durham investigation.
And the third point I would make is that I've never met a Russian official in my entire life.
I've never even traveled to Russia.
So the notion that I would be part of some sort of massive Russia criminal conspiracy is just baseless, nonsensical.
And you can understand how in tune the media must have been with the intelligence community to even spread this fallacy about me and a couple other people on the campaign to basically confuse Americans to rush what I think was an impeachment effort of the president.
So those are just some of the facts.
Facebook Censorship Controversy00:06:33
And also, the only lie, if you will, that the FBI charged me with or tried to muscle me into, and that's exactly what happened.
I was really muscled into a plea agreement with the FBI after running out of money because I was unable to raise money publicly.
It was basically because they said I misremembered when I met Joseph Hibson.
And that's actually in the so-called charging document.
So those are just some facts.
And I think that's exactly why when the president pardoned me, not even Democrat lawmakers or even the media on the left was in an uproar about it.
And they all were pretty uniform in their belief that there was some sort of shitty behavior done against me and that my pardon was deserved.
Well, George, I don't like, we never spoken before.
We've never met each other.
And I think it's pretty clear if somebody actually reads this stuff.
And like I mentioned, I was reading it when it was first front page of the news everywhere, especially when you look at the actual details in the Russian dossier, how flimsy it is.
Some parts of it look like it was written by a teenager from Forgehand or something, the Trump and the hotel stuff and the prostitutes and all this stuff that's so ridiculous.
And to run with that, I mean, there's so many levels here.
You've got the Yahoo level, you've got the DNC level, you've got the FBI level, where it takes, I think, some sort of, you have to pretend to take this seriously at some point.
So I had a big problem with it.
And of course, going forward, people being charged for it, I had a problem with it then.
Now, you mentioned off the top about how hard it is for certain people or certain topics to be found on Google, social media, what have you.
All the censorship we're seeing recently, and I've seen you tweet about it a little bit, especially leading up to the inauguration and around election season.
Where do you think this is going?
How far is it going?
And where do you see it coming from?
Look, the president was very adamant about repealing Section 230, which actually is a provision that allows protections for social media giants like Twitter and Facebook from not having liabilities for what they post.
And this was shot down.
It just really shows how powerful the social media lobby is against conservative voices, where the president and his efforts, when the Republicans actually held Congress, was unable to repeal this section.
Shortly after the win by Joe Biden, we saw what Twitter and Facebook did to the president.
Not only was it uncalled for, but it was, I think it sets a dangerous path forward for censorship of both politicians on the right and the left and everyday citizens, where they basically deactivated his accounts on Facebook and Twitter.
I think the president had around 85 million followers on Twitter.
Who knows how many followers he had on Facebook?
And this situation that he found himself in and prominent other conservative voices being suspended, censored, their accounts permanently taken off because they tweeted something that might have offended somebody on the left or something that Facebook or Twitter says is fake information.
Who is really the arbiter of truth?
In this country, the Constitution protects your right to free speech, and that should be the arbiter of your freedom and your ability to speak whatever you would like to say.
But unfortunately, because social media is working hand in hand with Democrat lawmakers and likely the Biden administration as a whole, their goal is to now stifle an opponent viewpoint and conservative voices.
And I think this is something that we're going to be dealing with for the long term.
I mean, they're already Amazon kicking Parlor off its servers.
Do you think it goes as far as to internet service providers or even cell phone providers?
Do you think it actually will get that far?
Look, I know Dan Bungino.
He's a good friend of mine.
And my understanding is that he was one of the big shareholders of Parlor.
So I was following very closely what was going on with Parler.
And I thought, okay, that's an interesting way to basically fight back a bit against Twitter, come out with your own platform, and then to actually see Google and Apple deplatform Parlor.
I did not expect that.
I don't think many people expected it.
And I don't know where this is leading.
If it's going to go towards the mobile companies here as well, I simply don't have that answer.
But seeing Parlor deplatformed was almost more shocking than seeing the president's account taken off Twitter.
Tell the people what is Donald Trump really like in person?
Is it what you see is what you get, which is what most people say.
Have you had direct experiences with him?
Yeah, so there was this tremendous misunderstanding about my actual role with Donald Trump's campaign, his transition team, and my interactions with him and my contributions to his campaign because this vacuum had emerged where I was unable to actually speak for a couple years.
And it allowed grifters and, you know, nobudies, essentially, who weren't even part of the campaign or knew anything about me to actually go public and to talk about me as if they knew about me.
And that's where this Michael Caputo guy came out of nowhere and he starts talking about me and others.
So that's probably some of those viral clips.
Is that the Fox host?
No, this was a guy who said, oh, he's the coffee guy, the coffee.
Okay.
So this person, Michael Caputo, just to be clear to all your viewers, was fired from the campaign in the summer of 2015.
And I joined the campaign in the spring of 2016.
So of course we had zero overlap with one another.
And he was basically the voice about who George was, what his contributions were.
And so we were really in this, I was in this very bizarre moment where I saw myself discredited and destroyed publicly by people who I never even spoke to.
Courts Grapple With Trump's Legacy00:09:22
But Donald Trump is a person who listens more than he talks.
He knows what he knows and he knows what he doesn't.
And he wants competing views in the room.
That's why he always has people that he knows he could choose that will have an imponent type of viewpoint and then he'll decide at the end what the best choice is, not only for his campaign, but for the country first and foremost.
President Trump was a person who was not the bombastic person that you would see on television.
He was very measured and reserved in private.
That's something that the people never saw because the media wanted to paint him as this unhinged person who was, you know, somewhat of a danger to society.
In reality, I always tell people, look at his policies.
His policies impacted the United States and the world far better than any president, in my opinion, in modern history.
And an unhinged president would not have had those type of successes on the policy front.
Could he have spoken differently?
Absolutely.
We could all speak differently.
And but hindsight's 2020.
Besides that, the president is a success on and off the field, as they say.
And I think he did a tremendous job for the American people and for stability around the world.
Yeah, what I've been saying lately is the only person, the only president to enact more policy quicker than Donald Trump is Joe Biden.
It just so happens that his policies are terrible with all the executive orders he's doing.
Now, you mentioned earlier about how Trump was trying to repeal Section 230, and even when they control the Senate and the House, they're not able to push it through.
Now, I don't know about you, but at least where I am in Canada, there's not really any politicians that I'm able to trust.
When I look at the United States, there are a few that I'm, I mean, I don't personally trust them.
I don't know them, but that I can, I think that I can rely on to try to do what's right.
I mean, I won't start naming names.
That's kind of pointless, but is there?
No, I'm going to ask you.
So I'll name some names.
I think I trust Ted Cruz.
I think I trust Hockley.
I think sometimes you can trust Rubio, but you know, there's some people that I can say that I'm looking forward to what they might do against Biden.
Who do you think that people should trust in the government right now to try to carry on the sort of pathway that Trump was carving, something that's good for America and aren't just gonna fold right away when, let's say, social media comes after them or cancel culture comes after them.
So who do you like and who do you think the people should trust?
Well, first point, you mentioned Canadian politicians and Biden.
Well, Biden has successfully actually unnerved Canada's prime minister, which I never thought would be possible.
I thought they were going to have this bromance right outside the gate, but it looks like after he canceled the Keystone pipeline, there's going to be some sort of tension between the U.S. and Canada, which no one really saw coming.
And, you know, regarding the, who I think essentially you're asking is who can take on the mantle of leadership of the America First movement.
I think that there are many Republican officials who really think that Donald Trump was an aberration, that he did not represent the Republican Party, and that he's a threat to their own power.
And that's anathema to actually what a congressman or a senator should be looking after.
What a member of Congress should be focused on is listening to his or her constituency.
Americans voted with 75 million people for Donald Trump and his America First agenda and his economic nationalism, if you will.
This was the second most on record behind Joe Biden's vote tally, which has been contested and I think is going to continue to be contested through the midterms in this country.
You did also see people like Ted Cruz, Josh Howley, as you mentioned, who did stand up and say that we did see some irregularities in this vote, in this election.
We're not conspiracy theorists.
We just simply want to present the case in front of courts.
Courts actually never listened to the cases.
And I think that really unnerved a lot of people to say, why are you so afraid of just listening to the evidence?
This is the U.S. presidential election.
We shouldn't have question marks at the end of it.
And unfortunately, based on how the courts responded and how the media tried to portray Josh Howley, Ted Cruz, Ruby Giuliani, even the president as conspiracy theorists, it really, I think, created more division than unity.
And it allowed this space for conspiracy theories that really should have never existed.
Should there have been a simple hearing in front of the Supreme Court or other courts to listen to the evidence?
And if the courts decided that the evidence did not amount to anything, they could have threw them out.
Now, that's what happened.
I think that there are only a few Republican members of Congress today who do have the nationwide appeal that could actually probably galvanize the base the way that Donald Trump did.
That's somebody like possibly Matt Gates.
He's a young congressman out of Florida.
I know him, very articulate.
Ted Cruz as well has taken on more of a tough guy approach since the 2016 presidential election, which I think really benefited him.
And Judge Howley is another young senator out of Missouri, articulate, Yale Law School, who's trying to take on this tough guy approach, which I really think if you want to live in Donald Trump's Republican Party, you need to be a tough guy.
You need to present a tough guy approach.
And that's what's going to really probably help them moving forward.
So I think those are the three to look out for moving forward.
Yeah, I was going to just mention Gates.
I was thinking of them while you were talking there.
And now Sarah Sanders is running for governor.
So hopefully she can bring some of that enthusiasm with her.
Last question, George, before I let you go.
So when we talk about the QAnon followers, obviously a lot of them have been booted off of line.
Do you think that these people are going anywhere?
Do you think it's they're being they're just gonna be shunned until they take on another name?
What are your thoughts on all this moving forward?
And obviously, I've never seen you advocate for them or anything, but just what do you think this type of thinking, conspiratorial, you know, or the real hope that something is something huge is happening, you guys, and it just didn't come.
Where do you think these ideas and these people are going to be pushed to?
Yeah, so first and foremost, I don't subscribe to the Q phenomenon.
I know nothing about it, and I don't advocate for the Q followers.
But the only thing that I know is that the president and some in his administration and others on social media, you know, were talking about wait for something to come.
We have a big news coming or this is happening.
And I don't, they're not responsible for giving false hope.
That's not what I'm saying at all.
But I think just based on some rhetoric from people in the administration, you did see some, you know, conspiracy personalities around America and the world taking that and interpreting it the wrong way.
The president never advocated for violence.
No one in his administration advocated for violence or upending the Constitution or overturning the election results with violence.
But some people in this movement decided to take it upon themselves to then storm the Capitol and to try and undo the election, which is something that was unheard of and was just not a good movement.
It was unpatriotic.
On the other hand, as I mentioned earlier, because the cases were never allowed to be presented in front of courts that would allow the evidence presented that would basically deflate any of these conspiracy theories about that the election was illegal or stolen.
It allowed this vacuum to emerge where the conspiracy type personalities around America and the world were fed and emboldened and said, you know what?
Look, they're not listening to it.
It was stolen.
And the only way to take our country back is through violence.
It's, of course, something that I don't approve of and I never did.
So that's the only thing that I see that happened with this movement.
Obviously, Twitter has decided that they are the arbiter of free speech and anybody who espouses or supports this movement has been censored and taken off Twitter.
My opinion is simply this.
Everybody has the right to free speech as long as it doesn't cross the threshold of violence.
And I don't think that this movement is a violent movement.
That's my understanding of it.
And as long as it stays nonviolent, then I don't think anybody should be censoring anybody's opinion.
No, I definitely 100% agree with you on free speech.
And like I mentioned before, I followed your story for, I guess, years now.
It's hard to believe that it's been like, what, almost six years, five years.
Thank You, George00:00:45
It's crazy.
And I'm glad I got to speak to you.
It was sort of a long time hope for me.
So George Papa, 19 on Twitter, Deep State Target book is available everywhere you buy books.
Last words to you, George.
Thank you so much for having me.
This is my first interview with Canada and speaking, I guess, directly.
I know you have a global audience, but it's a great opportunity to talk directly to the Canadian people.
And let's stay tuned to see what Biden brings for a U.S.-Canada relationship.
I think it's going to be more fireworks than stability.