Deep State Target

March 18, 2019
A prominent figure in special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia-collusion investigation decries his persecution in this revealing but paranoid memoir. Papadopoulos, a Trump campaign foreign policy adviser who pleaded guilty to charges of lying to the FBI, tells a troubling story of prosecutors railroading him for what he contends were innocuous misstatements about conversations with people who promised to arrange a meeting between then-candidate Trump and Russian president Vladimir Putin, including a man with purported ties to Russian intelligence who told him that the Russians hacked Hillary Clinton’s emails. (No meetings happened, he points out, and he insists he didn’t tell the campaign about Clinton’s emails.) Papadopoulos’s saga unfolds like a spy thriller: he encounters mysterious intelligence operatives from various countries, shady businessmen with bundles of cash, and a seductive Turkish femme fatale, all—he says—part of a plot by the FBI, CIA, and other deep state reprobates to frame him and Trump. Papadopoulos’s conspiracy theory is incoherent and implausible, but he convincingly debunks anti-Trump theorizing about the supposedly sinister contacts of campaign underlings: it wasn’t collusion, he argues, but instead the normal, promiscuous networking of on-the-make foreign relations consultants like him looking to gain status by forging connections with and between powerful people. The result is a revealing if luridly overstated insider account of a seemingly central piece of the special counsel investigation.