"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.
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.
The New York Times 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.
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.