THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

But even with a lead in like Donny Dinkydick's panicked tweet to "DO SOMETHING' over the weekend, his desperate dismissal of George Papadopoulos as a "low level volunteer" has yet to stir up the sharks.

President Trump on Tuesday tried to diminish the significance of a former foreign policy adviser, who admitted to lying to the F.B.I. about how, during last year’s presidential campaign, he sought to meet with Russians offering “dirt” on Hillary Clinton based on purloined emails.

In his first comment on this aspect of the case being developed by the special counsel investigation, Mr. Trump did not deny that the foreign policy adviser, George Papadopoulos, worked to collaborate with Russia. He simply brushed off his significance and focused on the fact that Mr. Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I. to cover up the contacts with Russia.

“Few people knew the young, low level volunteer named George, who has already proven to be a liar,” Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter.

As for the indictment of his former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, the president repeated that the crimes alleged took place outside the context of the election contest.

Mr. Papadopoulos was named by Mr. Trump in March 2016 as one of five foreign policy advisers. While the president and his team now seek to minimize Mr. Papadopoulos’s importance, at the time Mr. Trump described him in flattering terms. “He’s an energy and oil consultant, excellent guy,” he told The Washington Post.

According to a statement of offense signed as part of his guilty plea, Mr. Papadopoulos admitted that he spent months last year cultivating contacts in an effort to arrange meetings between Mr. Trump’s campaign and Russian government officials.

Mr. Papadopoulos said a London-based professor with extensive Russian contacts introduced him to a woman described as “Putin’s niece” and told him the Russians had “dirt” on Mrs. Clinton based on “thousands of emails” of hers. (The woman was not actually related to President Vladimir V. Putin.)

The professor, identified on Monday by a Senate aide as Joseph Mifsud, told Mr. Papadopoulos about the emails in April 2016, three months before WikiLeaks released nearly 20,000 hacked Democratic emails. Mr. Papadopoulos kept senior campaign officials informed about his efforts and they encouraged him but made clear they wanted to keep some distance publicly. “It should be someone low level in the campaign so as not to send any signal,” a top campaign official wrote in an email at the time.

Now is not a good time to declare George a "low level volunteer" when this picture is floating around the Internet. That's George, second one up from Sessions facing the camera at a Trump level foreign security meeting. No mention if they discussed Russian e-mails at this meeting.