On Monday it was announced George Papadopolous – I’ll call him Pops for the purpose of brevity throughout this column – pleaded guilty to charges he lied to the FBI.

(He actually was arrested in July and pleaded guilty on Oct. 3, but we only found out about it Monday.)

Pops was an adviser to then-candidate Donald Trump’s election campaign.

The FBI was asking him about his contacts with a Russian woman and a Russian professor. These Russians told Pops they had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton.

Pops told the FBI he only talked to the Russians before he was a Trump adviser.

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But the FBI determined Pops did talk to the Russians while he was an adviser. Not only that, turns out he talked to the Russians and offered to set up meetings with Trump campaign higher-ups.

The campaign higher-ups never took the meetings. They told Pops he could take a meeting if he wanted, but he never did.

Nonetheless, Pops is in hot water because he lied to the FBI. He pleaded guilty and agreed to help them with their ongoing investigation.

But here’s the weird thing.

Nobody is saying that Pops’ contact with the Russians was against the law. So when the FBI came calling, Pops could have just said, “Yeah, I talked to this Russian girl and this Russian professor. They said they had dirt on Hillary and I asked for a meeting with my bosses and they turned it down.”

Because I’m pretty sure talking to Russians isn’t against the law.

So if the stuff Pops lied to the FBI about wasn’t a crime to begin with, it begs the obvious question: Why did he lie about it?

No one but Pops knows the answer to that one.

It’s just bizarre.

The other big news was that Paul Manafort and his business partner, Rick Gates, got indicted on 12 counts each as part of Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller’s investigation. They’re accused of money laundering, tax evasion and running afoul of the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

FARA, enacted in 1938, says if you act as an agent of foreign entities in a political or quasi-political capacity, you have to disclose it.

This is a pretty complex mess of charges, but it basically has to do with Manafort’s lobbying efforts on behalf of the Ukraine from 2006 on, the money he made doing it, and how he funneled the money into the U.S.

There was plenty of reporting about the indictments, but I stumbled onto a report in Politico that was really interesting – and not widely reported.

From Politico:

Democratic power lobbyist Tony Podesta, founder of the Podesta Group, is stepping down from the lobbying shop that bears his name after coming under investigation by Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller.

You may recall that Tony Podesta is the brother of Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager John Podesta. Politico speculates that the Manafort/Gates indictment itself suggests that Podesta may be in serious trouble because the indictment lays out the intertwined nature of Manafort and the Podesta lobbying group.

See, before Manafort joined the Trump campaign, he was doing consulting and lobbying work for, among others, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. Manafort set up a nonprofit organization called the European Centre for a Modern Ukraine.

Politico:

Through that organization, Manafort hired the Podesta Group and Mercury LLC to do public relations and lobbying work aimed at shielding Yanukovych from international condemnation for actions such as jailing political rivals.

So The Podesta Group was working for Manafort to help lobby for the European Centre for a Modern Ukraine, trying to prop up Yanukovych. Problem is, the Obama administration – and Congress – was taking a stand against Yanukovych and against Ukraine’s pro-Russian government.

Basically, these guys were lobbying on the wrong side of the argument from the U.S. perspective.

FARA says you’re supposed to report if you’re a lobbying on behalf of foreign entities. Part of Manafort’s and Gates’ indictments were under the FARA statute.

Politico:

... The Podesta Group said nothing in a 2012 lobbying report to Congress about at least 32 meetings, emails and other communications it had with the State Department, at a time when Hillary, as Secretary of State, was scrutinizing Ukraine’s upcoming election, records show.

In addition to its undisclosed contacts with the State Department, the Podesta Group did not disclose some contacts it had between 2012 and 2014 with Vice President Joe Biden’s office, the National Security Council and Congressional offices, the records show.

So if the Podesta Group was lobbying for Ukrainian interests during this time, they should have registered under FARA.

Recently, it’s been widely reported that Tony Podesta, the Podesta Group and Mercury LLC are also the subjects of Mueller’s investigation.

John Podesta, Hillary’s longtime adviser and chairman of her 2016 presidential campaign, also was a senior counselor to President Barack Obama in 2014 and previously was lobbying partners with his brother.

He failed to disclose during the campaign that he acquired 75,000 shares of stock from a Russian outfit called Joule Unlimited.

When he joined the Obama White House as a counselor to the president, sources told the Wall Street Journal he hid his Joule holdings by transfering them to a shell company owned by his family.

Will he get dragged into this whole Russian mess? Is this a Foreign Agents Registration Act violation?

Throughout the history of the FARA statute, most violations were cleared up with a retroactive filing. Prosecutions are rare. (Manafort and both Podestas registered as foreign agents after the fact.)

Ken Silverstein has been covering foreign lobbying for 20 years. He wrote the following for Politico.com:

The real news in the indictment of Paul Manafort on charges of laundering and failing to register as a foreign agent is that someone has actually been prosecuted under a foreign lobbying law that has existed for decades but has almost never been enforced.

Silverstein is no fan of Manafort, by the way, writing:

In 1992, Spy magazine ranked his lobbying firm as the “sleaziest of all in the Beltway,” giving it a “blood-on-the-hands” rating of four.

... But if you're going to indict and prosecute lobbyists for failing to disclose their activities, roughly half of Washington would be under arrest.

... The Center for Public Integrity, in the early 1990s, reported that only about half of foreign lobbyists bother filing under FARA, and it's surely gotten worse since then.

It will be fascinating to see how all this plays out.