Traveling? In Long-Shot California Congressional Bid, George Papadopoulos Sells Himself as a Candidate for Our Age of Distrust

February 4, 2020

To a certain type of Republican, George Papadopoulos is a martyr — a young man whose ambition exceeded his experience and led to his railroading at the hands of an intelligence community that would stop at nothing to destroy President Trump’s 2016 campaign. Or at least, that’s the view of the Russia saga that Papadopoulos wants to sell voters as he runs for the California House seat recently vacated by Democrat Katie Hill.

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Papadopoulos, a 32-year-old with no political experience to speak of, is betting that he can capitalize on the current historic levels of distrust in America’s most storied institutions to reclaim a seat that was held by Republicans for two decades until their defeat at the hands of Hill, herself a 32-year-old freshman who was recently forced to resign after nude photos of her posing with a young female staffer were published online. In an age when some not-inconsequential portion of the populace believes that the intelligence community orchestrated a coup to overturn the results of a presidential election, could Papadopoulos be right?

As a political novice and newcomer to California, Papadopoulos is at a huge disadvantage relative to Republican Steve Knight, who held the seat for two terms until 2018, when he was bested by Hill and her unprecedented $6 million war chest. Papadopoulos’s conviction in connection with the Russia investigation and his reputation as a political climber with a penchant for self-sabotage and braggadocio should, by rights, hurt him when compared with Knight’s record of military service and staid political career. And even if he gets past Knight, he’ll still be a candidate with a lot of baggage running in a district where Democrats enjoy a significant voter-registration advantage. (The race is rated as leaning Democratic by the Cook Political Report.)

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And yet . . . these are not conventional times. Papadopoulos, in spite or maybe because of his many faults as a candidate on paper, has some potential to appeal to the kind of ticked-off Republican voter dying to stick a middle finger in the eye of the establishment.

Papadopoulos believes that U.S. attorney John Durham’s ongoing investigation into the origins of the Russia probe will build on the wrongdoings exposed by Department of Justice inspector general Michael Horowitz and, ultimately, vindicate him. “Horowitz was the prelude and Durham will be the main act,” he says in a lengthy phone interview. He cites Durham’s recent trip to Italy with Attorney General William Barr, saying he believes that the Connecticut prosecutor is currently working to determine exactly who dispatched Maltese academic Joseph Mifsud to meet with him and why. (It was Mifsud who provided the tip about Russian dirt on Clinton, subsequently shared with Australian diplomat Alexander Downer by Papadopoulos, which touched off the Russia probe in 2016).