Bait and Snitch

White House scandals have a way of turning nobodies into unfortunate somebodies. So it was 45 years ago in October with Donald Segretti, whom The Washington Post exposed as a major cog in a White House dirty tricks program to destroy Maine Senator Ed Muskie, the leading Democratic candidate for president. Segretti’s reported role added startling new context to what became known as the Watergate scandal. It showed that the June 1972 break-in of the Democratic National Committee was part of a much larger campaign of surveillance and sabotage against targets on President Richard Nixon’s “enemies list”—from reporters to liberal think tanks to dissident government officials like Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers.

Now comes George Papadopoulos, another nobody whose name could soon be memorialized on a Trivial Pursuit card for political scandals. The 30-year-old was yet another enabler in the Kremlin’s multipronged campaign to destroy Hillary Clinton, according to the grand jury unsealed by special counsel Robert Mueller on October 30. Donald Trump once called Papadopoulos, his former foreign policy adviser, “an excellent guy,” but now dismisses him as “a low-level volunteer” and a “liar.”