George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy aide on the 2016 campaign team of US President Donald Trump, said a woman who met with him in 2016 to ask him about the team’s alleged ties with Russia was a CIA agent linked to Turkish intelligence, not an undercover FBI employee, as claimed by media reports, the Sputnik news agency reported.
“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,” Papadopoulos tweeted on Thursday.
Trump’s former campaign advisor noted that foreign intelligence agencies targeting him were aware that he had no links to Russia and were interested in his work for the EastMed gas pipeline.
Papadopoulos also claimed that the administration of former US President Barack Obama had colluded with Australia, Italy, Turkey, Ukraine and the United Kingdom in a bid to overthrow Trump, who became president after the November 2016 election.
The New York Times reported on Thursday, citing people familiar with the operation, that the woman, acting under the name Azra Turk, set up the meeting with Papadopoulos, asking him to discuss foreign policy issues and posing as a research assistant, while she was actually a government investigator looking into the team’s alleged links to Russia.