A Professor on George Papadopoulos

George Papadopoulos

The Daily Beast reports:

The most remarkable thing about George Papadopoulos, the former Trump campaign aide who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russians during the course of the 2016 campaign, is that he managed to get to this point at all.

By all accounts, the 30-year-old Papadopoulos was unmemorable in virtually all chapters of his life. High school classmates don’t recall him. College professors say he was a below-average student. Peers in Washington, D.C., describe him as unremarkable, and many senior colleagues on Donald Trump’s presidential campaign thought he was a hanger-on.

And yet Papadopoulos now finds himself squarely in the middle of the most remarkable political scandal of a generation...

Those who have crossed his path are practically floored by it all.

“That was absolutely shocking,” Richard Farkas, a Russian politics professor at DePaul University, said of discovering that his former student was one of Trump’s few foreign policy advisers. “We knew his expertise was virtually nonexistent. It was thin and embellished. Lots of young people, when they aspire to get close to a campaign, exaggerate their experience. George did that in spades and it was the talk of the department here.”

  -RW