# Sam Clovis **Sam Clovis** (born September 18, 1949) is a retired Air Force colonel and Iowa talk-radio host who became national co-chair of Donald Trump's 2016 campaign — and the supervisor at the root of the [[George Papadopoulos]] chain in the Russia investigation. ## Campaign role and the Papadopoulos chain Clovis endorsed Trump at a Dubuque rally on August 25, 2015 and became the campaign's national co-chair and policy adviser. In March 2016 he released the list of foreign-policy advisers that included Papadopoulos; his own lawyer confirmed Clovis brought Papadopoulos on. In Papadopoulos's plea papers he is the unnamed "campaign supervisor" who answered one of Papadopoulos's Russia-meeting overtures with "Great work." Clovis's lawyer says he opposed any Russia trip. He testified to the Mueller grand jury in October 2017. Wikipedia describes GOP operative [[Peter W. Smith]] — who sought Clinton emails from Russian hackers — as "close to Sam Clovis," without further documentation. *[Single-sourced.]* ## The USDA nomination After a January 2017 posting as senior White House adviser at the Agriculture Department, Clovis was nominated in July 2017 as Under Secretary for Research, Education and Economics — the department's chief-scientist post, which the 2008 Farm Bill reserves for "distinguished scientists." Clovis holds a political-science BA and a public-administration doctorate and had called climate science "junk science." He withdrew on November 2, 2017, the week the Papadopoulos plea became public, and left USDA on May 4, 2018. The Senate Intelligence Committee later made criminal referrals of Clovis alongside [[Steve Bannon]], [[Erik Prince]], [[Donald Trump Jr.]] and [[Jared Kushner]]; NBC did not specify what he allegedly misstated. ## RWKB angle Clovis sits at two intersections: the campaign's permissive supervision of Russia outreach, and the first Trump administration's habit of placing loyalists in expert posts they were not qualified for. ## See Also - [[George Papadopoulos]] - [[Mueller Investigation]] - [[Peter W. Smith]]