MOSCOW, May 3: George Papadopoulos, the foreign policy aide at the campaign team of US President Donald Trump, said the 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.
Sputnik news agency reported on Thursday, citing people familiar with the operation, that the woman, acting under a 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.
“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 wrote on Twitter on Thursday.
Trump’s former adviser 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 argued 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 a president after the November 2016 election.
In April, US Special Counsel Robert Mueller finalized the report on his investigation into the alleged collusion between the Trump campaign team and Russia, which was vehemently denied by both sides.
The redacted version of the report, which was released to the public, showed that the probe found no evidence of collusion between Trump and his campaign with Russia in the 2016 US presidential election. However, Mueller described 10 episodes that may constitute obstruction of justice by the US president.
Notably, US Attorney General William Barr said after reviewing the facts he concluded that the evidence developed by Mueller failed to establish that Trump committed an obstruction-of-justice offense.
(UNI)
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