George Papadopoulos, who has pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI, "did the wrong thing, while the president's campaign did the right thing," White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Tuesday.
"All of his emails were voluntarily provided to the special counsel by the campaign," Sanders told reporters at the daily briefing. "That is what led to the process and the place that we are in right now.
"The campaign is fully cooperating and helping with that.
"What Papadopoulos did was lie — and that's on him, not on the campaign, and we can't speak for that."
Russia special counsel Robert Mueller announced Monday that Papadopoulos, 30, who served as a foreign policy adviser, pleaded guilty in early October to lying to the FBI.
The disclosure came as grand jury indictments were returned against former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and another aide, Rick Gates, who were the first to be charged in Mueller's five-month investigation into Russian meddling in last year's presidential election.
Manafort, 68, and Gates, 45, remained under house arrest after pleading not guilty to charges listed in a 12-count indictment ranging from money laundering to acting as unregistered agents of Ukraine's former pro-Russian government.
Manfort's unsecured bond was set at $10 million, while Gates' was set at $5 million.
President Donald Trump has slammed Papadopoulos as a "low level volunteer" — and Sanders said Tuesday his only interaction with the president was a meeting of a Trump advisory council that had occurred during the campaign.
"He was in large group with other people in the room," she told reporters. "To my knowledge, that's the only interaction he had.
"He was somebody that played an advisory role, that's it."
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