A woman who asked George Papadopoulos point blank if President Trump’s campaign was working with the Russians at a bar in London in September 2016 was reportedly working undercover for the FBI.
The woman who said her name was Azra Turk posed as an assistant to Stefan Halper, an American professor at Cambridge University, sources told the New York Times. Halper served as an informant to the FBI to collect information for the bureau’s Russia investigation during the 2016 election cycle.
Papadopoulos, who was a foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign, discussed this woman in his book, Deep State Target. He described her as attractive and doubted she was being forthcoming about her identity after she asked whether the Trump campaign was working for Russia.
“There is no way this is a Cambridge professor’s research assistant,” he wrote.
In reaction to the article by the Times, Papadopoulos insisted that Turk was not working for the FBI. “I agree with everything in this superb article except ‘Azra Turk’ clearly was not FBI. She was CIA and affiliated with Turkish intel. She could hardly speak English and was tasked to meet me about my work in the energy sector offshore Israel/Cyprus which Turkey was competing with,” he wrote in a tweet.
Turk attended a second of Papadopoulos and Halper’s meetings, and it was at a third Papadopoulos wrote in his book that he cut the meeting short after Halper pressed him on hacked emails.
After meeting Papadopoulos, Turk exchanged emails with him, calling their meeting the “highlight of my trip” and said “I am excited about what the future holds for us :).”
Turk returned to the United States after the FBI determined no valuable intelligence had been gathered at the meetings.
The Justice Department inspector general’s investigators are now looking into Halper, who met multiple members of Trump’s campaign, to assess whether he exceeded his mandate. His role as an FBI informant was leaked to the media in May 2018, after which Trump and his allies alleged his campaign was the target of a politically motivated “spygate” scheme. Trump tweeted the FBI embedding a spy in the 2016 campaign would be the “all time biggest political scandal” if true.
The FBI launched its original counterintelligence investigation, called Crossfire Hurricane, in July 2016. It was prompted by Australian diplomat Alexander Downer informing the FBI that Papadopoulos told him Russia had stolen emails related to Hillary Clinton, Trump’s Democratic rival in the 2016 election.
Papadopoulos pleaded guilty in October 2017 to making false statements to the FBI about his contacts with Russians and served 12 days in prison late last year. He agreed to cooperate with the Russia investigation conducted by special counsel Robert Mueller, who recently wrapped up and found no criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russians.
Attorney General William Barr says he is “reviewing the conduct” of the FBI’s initial investigation into the Trump campaign in the summer of 2016.
