I don’t have a lot of time, and it’s already old news by this point, but, as I didn’t have time to mention it last night, I wanted to at least note the fact that, yesterday morning, as promised, the first indictments in Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation were made public. Here, with a brief recap, is a clip from the legal blog Lawfare.

The first big takeaway from Monday morning’s flurry of charging and plea documents with respect to Paul Manafort Jr., Richard Gates III and George Papadopoulos is this: The president of the United States had as his campaign chairman a man who had allegedly served for years as an unregistered foreign agent for a puppet government of Vladimir Putin, a man who was allegedly laundering remarkable sums of money even while running the now-president’s campaign, a man who allegedly lied about all of this to the FBI and the Justice Department.

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…

And it’s this second takeaway, which involves a member of the Trump campaign team by the name of George Papadopoulos, that I’d like to talk abut right now.

When the news broke yesterday that Manafort, and his business partner, Gates, had been asked to turn themselves in, it wasn’t a surprise to anyone who has been following the case. We, after all, knew that Manafort’s residence had been raided by the FBI, and it was already pretty clear that he’d been engaged in his share of money laundering and unscrupulous behavior on the part of the Putin regime in the past. In fact, reporters were waiting outside his Virginia condo on Monday morning, expecting that he’d be one of the individuals named in Mueller’s indictments. Papadopoulos, though, was a name that people weren’t expecting. And, unlike Manafort and Gates, who were charged with 12 felony counts each, Papadopoulos, according to the the unsealed documents, had actually already plead guilty to the charge of having lied to federal investigators. And that’s not all. According to the documents, Papadopoulos had become a “proactive cooperator,” which, according to federal prosecutors interviewed today, means that he likely “wore a wire.”

Papadopoulos, if you’ve never seen him before, is the dark haired young man staring at Jeff Sessions in this official photo of Trump’s foreign policy advisory team, which was released in the run up to the election.

Trump, as you might expect, has done everything he could today to distance himself from Papadopoulos, who he referred to as a “low level volunteer” and a “liar” on Twitter this morning, perhaps unaware of the fact that we could, by way of a simple Google search, find evidence that, back in March of 2016, Trump not only officially named him as a member of his foreign policy team, but called him an “excellent guy.” [Papadopoulos, who was only 29 a the time, was an oil and energy consultant.] And, now that he’s been named in the investigation, we’re learning more about his role within the Trump campaign, where, contrary to what we’re hearing today, he didn’t just fetch coffee. Papadopoulos, as the Washington Post reported today, not only traveled on behalf of the Trump campaign, but, among other things, “sat at the elbow” of Jeff Sessions during a dinner for campaign advisers weeks before the Republican National Convention. What’s more, Trump foreign policy adviser Carter Page just came out and admitted that he could have exchanged emails with Papadopoulos about Russia during the campaign, indicating that he was, in fact, a contributing member of the team.

Here, with a little more background on what Papadopoulos did for the campaign, is a clip from Wired.

…Papadopoulos had worked with people he knew to be involved at a high level with the Russian government in an attempt to obtain “dirt” on Hillary Clinton, notably thousands of stolen emails. He had worked to “arrange a meeting between the Campaign and the Russian government officials,” and had otherwise endeavored through multiple rounds of contact with both Russian-linked individuals and with the Trump campaign to coordinate gaining access to material that would harm Trump’s Democratic opponent. At least one of his contacts was with a woman he believed—evidently incorrectly—was a niece of Russian president Vladimir Putin.

Then he lied about that effort to the FBI—a violation of 18 U.S.C., Section 1001, and one of the easiest traps for federal investigators to spring on targets who think that the FBI is less savvy than it is—and made ham-handed attempts to cover up those lies by deleting social media profiles and changing his telephone number…

And, not just that, but, according to the documents released today, Papadopoulos did all of this with the knowledge and approval of a “Senior Policy Advisor,” a “High-Ranking Campaign Official,” and a “Campaign Supervisor.” But it gets even worse. It looks as though we now have a direct line to Trump… Here’s more for Lawfare.

… 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..

So, Mueller and his team apparently found out that Papadopoulos had been approached by a Russian operative shortly after he officially joined the Trump team, and offered hacked information about Hillary Clinton, which he then actively pursued with the blessing of his superiors. Then, after the election, on January 27, 2017, he was taken into custody by federal authorities at Dulles International Airport in DC, where he proceeded to lie about his activities. [Apparently smashing your phone and terminating your social media accounts just isn’t good enough when you’re up against the most accomplished investigative team in American history.] And, at some point, perhaps after Mueller’s people explained to him what life in federal prison was like, Papadopoulos agreed to help them in their investigation, in exchanged for a reduced sentence. [I’ve heard that he’ll likely have to serve about a year and a half, but I can’t find confirmation of that right now.] What’s more, the fact that the Papadopoulos’ plea deal was publicly announced yesterday would indicate that investigators think they’ve gotten all they can out of him.

So, just to recap, Papadopoulos could have been wearing a wire, and cooperating with Mueller’s team from late January until yesterday, when the deal was announced. And I’m sure, right now, everyone in Trump’s inner circle is trying to remember the last time they talked with Papadopoulos, and what exactly they might have told him. [Papadopoulos has definitely been cooperating with investigators since his deal with finalized on October 5, but he could have been assisting before that time as well.]

The thing that I still wonder about, though, is whether Trump and members of his team knew about Papadopoulos being taken into custody by authorities on January 27. My guess, given that January 27 was also the day Trump asked former FBI director James Comey to swear an oath of loyalty at the White House, is that they did know, but I suppose that could have just been a coincidence. [It’s also worth noting that Reince Priebus resigned the day after Papadopoulos was picked up by federal authorities.] Either way, I suspect Papadopoulos was able to provide useful information, given that he was in meetings with the likes of Jeff Sessions, Sam Clovis, Paul Manafort and Trump when the subject of Russian assistance was discussed. But, if Mueller was able to keep the July arrest quite, one can only imagine the audio that might exist.

If I were a betting man, I’d say the next domino to fall would be Clovis, who served as Trump’s liaison on the campaign’s Foreign Policy/National Security team. Not only was it Clovis who originally brought Papadopoulos into the fold, but, interestingly, Trump offered Clovis a plum assignment at the USDA just six days before Papadopoulos was arrested at Dulles, perhaps in hopes of buying his silence. [Trump nominated Clovis to be the top scientist at the USDA. Clovis is not a scientist.] At any rate, one would assume that Clovis has a story to tell, as he knows absolutely everything that Trump communicated to the members of his Foreign Policy/National Security Advisory Committee, and it looks as though Mueller has put the pieces in place to get everything he can out of him.

Trump and his people aren’t likely to give up so easily, though. Having tried and failed to write Papadopoulos off as a low-level liar, whose only job on the campaign was to serve coffee, they’re now trying something new… They’ve launched a coordinated “he was just a naive kid” defense, in hopes of explaining all of this away as just something done by an overzealous “kid” who didn’t know any better, ignoring the fact that Papadopoulos was actually an adult who was encouraged by other adults within the campaign. [Apparently you’re still not a adult at 29, in the eyes of Sean Hannity and others, at least if you’re white.]

Sean Hannity & his pro-Trump allies could only come up with one excuse for George Papadopoulos, who pled guilty to lying to the FBI, his age pic.twitter.com/mBowyYe5WU

— Media Matters (@mmfa) October 31, 2017

The big takeaway for me in all of this is that Mueller is absolutely, fucking brilliant. He didn’t just announce the charges against Manafort and Gates, which he knew that some would write off, seeing as how, for the most part, they stemmed from illegal activities that took place outside the Trump campaign, but he announced the Papadopoulos guilty plea on the same day, completely nullifying the “witch hunt” argument. Not only is this a real, legitimate investigation, where people are actually facing deadly serious federal charges, like “Conspiracy Against The United States,” but there are already admissions of guilt from campaign team members who actively sought to attain the assistance of our enemies in order to acquire illegally hacked emails, and then lied to federal investigators about it. This, in other words, isn’t just another Benghazi investigation. This isn’t a politically motivated series of show trials. This is the real deal. And people will die in prison.