Mueller recommends Papadopoulos be sentenced to up to 6 months in prison

by Jacqueline Thomsen - 08/17/18 8:46 PM ET

Special counsel Robert Mueller has recommended that former Trump campaign staffer George Papadopoulos be sentenced to zero to six months in prison and face a fine of $9,500.

Mueller stated in a court filing Friday that those penalties “are warranted and appropriate” for Papadopoulos’s conduct in lying to federal investigators.

Mueller wrote in the filing that Papadopoulos chose to lie to federal investigators during a voluntary interview and that he “was expressly warned that it is a crime to lie to federal investigators.”

“The defendant knew the questions he was asked by the FBI were important, and he knew his answers were false at the time he gave them. His lies negatively affected the FBI’s Russia investigation, and prevented the FBI from effectively identifying and confronting witnesses in a timely fashion,” the court document states.

{mosads}

The former Trump campaign employee reached a plea agreement with Mueller’s team last year and is set to be sentenced in September.

Papadopoulos’s wife, Simona Mangiante, is urging her husband to break off the plea deal and stop cooperating with Mueller.

“I trusted the institutions until they proved me wrong,” Mangiante told MSNBC on Thursday, adding that she had learned of “exculpatory evidences that fully justify him to drop off his plea agreement.”

The court filing Friday states that Mueller’s team is “aware that the defendant and his spouse have participated in several additional media interviews concerning his case.”

The filing also pushed back against certain assertions that Papadopoulos’s wife has made in media interviews, including that he voluntarily said that a professor had told him that Russia had dirt on Hillary Clinton.

The document states that FBI agents had to repeatedly press Papadopoulos on the issue, providing specific quotes from the line of questioning.

The White House has sought to downplay Papadopoulos’s role on the Trump campaign, saying that he was a “coffee boy.”

Mangiante has disputed that characterization, saying that her husband was involved in policy discussions.

Papadopoulos is one of three former Trump campaign officials who have pleaded guilty to lying to investigators, including former national security adviser Michael Flynn and businessman Richard Gates.

Former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort has also been charged in Mueller’s probe, and a jury in his financial fraud trial adjourned for the weekend without a verdict on Friday. That trial resumes on Monday.