The man behind the salacious and unproven claim that President Donald Trump hired Russian prostitutes to perform a “golden shower” during a trip to Moscow also met with former Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos after the 2016 presidential election and offered him employment opportunities.
In a major new Washington Post report, it’s revealed that Papadopulos met with a man named Sergei Millian, who is described as the “unwitting” source for former British spy Christopher Steele’s claims about Trump and Russian prostitutes.
After the 2016 election, the two men dined at a Washington, D.C.-based restaurant called the Russia House, which is regularly frequented by Russian diplomats. The dinner was the culmination of an outreach campaign by the Belarus-born Millian in which he offered Papadopoulos “a lucrative consulting contract to work simultaneously for Trump and an unidentified Russian, which Papadopoulos said he rebuffed.”
Papadopoulos now believes that Millian was an FBI plant looking to frame Trump campaign officials for working with Russia to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. However, the FBI claims that it was not employing Millian as an intelligence source.
The Post’s report also shows how Millian regularly boasted of his connections to Trump’s businesses throughout the 2016 campaign, including one interview on a Russian state-run news program where he claimed to be an “exclusive broker” for Trump in selling condo units in Miami to Russian investors.