In the plea bargain, Papadopoulos is mentioned emailing at least 2 campaign officials that give him various levels of encouragement. Who are these officials? Why are they not named? Obviously Mueller's team knows their identities. You get the feeling that those officials will, at some point, be the recipients of either plea bargains or indictments.
The White House has dismissed Papadopoulos as a volunteer, which is interesting given the following from the plea bargain.
The government notes that the official forwarded defendant PAPADOPOULOS’s email to another Campaign official (without including defendant PAPADOPOULOS) and stated: “Let's discuss. We need someone to communicate that DT is not doing these trips. It should be someone low level in the campaign so as not to send any signal.”
Now I would like if a lawyer (Res Ipsa?) weighed in on this, but it seems to me that there is a lot in that little statement.
One, there seems to be an awareness that communicating with the Russians is something that should not see the light of day.
We need someone to communicate that DT is not doing this trips."
The next sentence is what makes the White House's dismissal of Papadopoulos as a low level volunteer so interesting:
It should be someone low level in the campaign so as not send any signal.
So it seems to me that they are showing a willingness to communicate with the Russians, and that is should be low level to protect 'DT' with deniability. Having two Campaign officials strategizing in an email about communicating with the Russians sounds an awful lot like conspiracy to me. (It's important to remember that the term 'collusion' is not used in indictments.) The other thing is that this did not stop with Papadopoulos, with 2 officials discussing this without including Papadopoulos in the correspondence.
Anyway, this is round one. I doubt very much that the identities of the Campaign officials will remain secret forever. But the very fact that they still are secret could very well mean that negotiations between Mueller and those 2 officials are still continuing. You don't rat down, you rat up.
