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Special counsel Robert Mueller is asking that George Papadopoulos, a former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser, be sentenced in September on the false-statement felony charge he pleaded guilty to last fall. [...]

Papadopoulos, an energy consultant, was part of a relatively thin bench of foreign policy advisers touted by the candidate at a time when few figures in the Republican establishment were willing to assist him, but he played a pivotal role in the launching of the FBI's Trump-Russia investigation.

In May 2016, Papadopoulos told an Australian diplomat, Alexander Downer, that the Russians had access to information on Hillary Clinton that could be damaging to her campaign. A couple of months later, another Australian diplomat relayed that information to the FBI, which opened an investigation.

Three diplomats -- Victoria Nuland, Jonathan Winer and Elizabeth Dibble -- appear to be key to the State Department's role in handling Trump-related Russia information.

Nuland, who was the Obama State Department's top Russia expert, received excerpts of Steele's dossier in mid-July 2016, about two months before the salacious document would reportedly make its way to the FBI team investigating possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian government.

Dibble, the deputy chief of mission at the U.S. embassy in London, was reportedly one of the first U.S. officials to receive information about a May 2016 conversation that Papadopoulos, the Trump adviser, had with Alexander Downer, the Australian High Commissioner to the U.K.

The meeting, held May 10, 2016, in which Downer says Papadopoulos mentioned Hillary Clinton and Russians, would later prompt the FBI to start its counterintelligence investigation, known as Crossfire Hurricane.

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