Just one week after being released from jail, former Trump campaign advisor George Papadopoulos says he’s running for Congress.
Papadopoulos, one of the first in President Donald Trump’s orbit to fall under special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, pleaded guilty last year for lying to the FBI. He was released from a Wisconsin prison on Dec. 7 after serving 12 days of his two-week sentence.
Fresh out of jail, Papadopoulos is probably more well-known for his prison sentence than his political platform, but the 32-year-old reportedly hopes to be on a ballot in the Orange County area—a historically red portion of California that swung blue in the 2018 midterms.
The career move was first reported by The Daily Telegraphand confirmed on Friday by Papadopoulos, who voiced confidence that he would prevail.
It is true. I will be running for Congress in 2020, and I will win. Stay tuned.
— George Papadopoulos (@GeorgePapa19) December 14, 2018
The responses were not kind. While many simply laughed, others pointed out that as a convicted felon, Papadopoulos joins the roughly 6 million other Americans who no longer have the right to vote in many states due to their criminal history.
https://twitter.com/arb/status/1073679878556274688
While this may be true, felons are not barred from running for office in all states. Some states require the person in question to have their rights restored, or have a certain amount of time to have passed since they served their sentence.
In California, a felon is disqualified from public office if they’ve been convicted under federal law of vote-buying, bribery, perjury, forgery, malfeasance in office, embezzlement of public money, falsification of public account records, or other “high crimes.”