Devin Nunes, the Republican Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee made a strange claim on Fox and Friends this morning. He stated that George Papadopoulous, a former national security advisor to the Trump presidential campaign, never met with Trump when he was a candidate.
Papadopoulous is a key witness in Robert Mueller’s investigation into possible Russian collusion with the Trump campaign. He has already admitted lying to the FBI about previous contact with Russian nationals.
The Trump administration has tried to minimize Papadopoulous’s role in the campaign. But Nunes’s remarks on Fox News this morning are easily debunked by looking at images from Trump’s own social media accounts. One photo, dated March 31, 2016, shows Papadopoulos seated two seats up the table from then-senator Jeff Sessions. Further down the table is then-candidate Donald Trump, who captioned the image “Meeting with my national security team.”
The images have circulated for months, and were used in reporting dating from the end of October and early November of 2017, when Papadopoulous was indicted and plead guilty.
Nunes led the creation of a controversial GOP-authored memo, released last week, which questions the FBI’s surveillance of another indicted aide, Carter Page, in the course of its investigation into Russian election-meddling. This morning after Fox and Friends, the president tweeted praise for Nunes as “a man of tremendous courage.”