President Donald Trump on Friday hailed The New York Times for reporting that the FBI sent an investigator posed as a research assistant to a meeting with a Trump campaign aide in 2016.
“Finally, Mainstream Media is getting involved - too ‘hot’ to avoid. Pulitzer Prize anyone? The New York Times, on front page (finally), ‘Details effort to spy on Trump Campaign,’” Trump tweeted Friday morning.
He added: “This is bigger than WATERGATE, but the reverse!”
The Times reported on Thursday that the FBI sent a government investigator to meet with then-adviser to the Trump campaign George Papadopoulos, “as part of the counterintelligence inquiry opened that summer to better understand the Trump campaign’s links to Russia.”
The investigator posed as a research assistant to University of Cambridge professor Stefan A. Halper, a longtime informant according to the Times, and told Papadopoulos that her name was Azra Turk. She offered to meet Papadopoulos at a London bar in September 2016, where she asked him if the Trump campaign was working with Russia. The next day, Papadopoulos met with Halper and Turk at a private club in London, and later with just Halper at the Sofitel hotel. There, Halper began asking about the Trump campaign and Russia, at which point Papadopoulos ended the meeting.
The newspaper adds that “The London operation yielded no fruitful information, but FBI officials have called the bureau’s activities in the months before the election both legal and carefully considered under extraordinary circumstances.”
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