The FBI spied on President Trump's campaign aides in 2016.

George Papadapoulos. New York Times.

The FBI spied on President Trump's campaign aide George Papadapoulos while overseas. New York Times. A woman, identified only as Azra Turk, set up a meeting with Papadapoulos in a London bar. She grilled Trump's aide and asked him if the Trump campaign had any contact with the Russian government. Papadapoulos immediately identified Turk as a spy and ended the meeting, which provided no information whatsoever. The revelation about the spying operation helps President Trump's claim that his campaign was spied on. Azra Turk is said to have worked with Stefan Halper, a Cambridge University professor and intelligence asset with links to the British Government. 

My Comment:

This seems like damage control from the New York Times. They know that the spygate scandal is about to explode and this is their attempt to get in front of it. They are trying to make it sound like the FBI was investigating Russia-Trump connections instead of making them up out of whole cloth. 

My guess is that this was yet another attempt to entrap the president and his campaign. Much like the Trump Tower meeting, this was likely an attempt to get George Papadapoulos to try and do something illegal. Had he said that the Trump campaign was looking for dirt, he would have been offered some from Russian sources and he would have been arrested, flipped and used to try and prosecute Donald Trump and derail his presidential campaign. 

Papadapoulos, to his credit, outed Turk as a spy immediately. He agrees with most of the New York Times report but says that Turk was NOT FBI. He claims that she was CIA and worked with Turkish intelligence and could barely speak English. He knew that the question about Russia were a trap and ended the meeting. 

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 https://t.co/wbyBnvb6io

— George Papadopoulos (@GeorgePapa19) May 2, 2019

This spying is a huge deal. Investigating a presidential campaign isn't something that should ever happen and there is no evidence to believe that the FBI or other government agencies actually believed that Trump and Russia colluded. The Mueller Report, which took 2 years and was headed by people that had every motivation to find anything and everything that could hurt President Trump. And they found nothing.

It seems very clear that more is coming on this issue. President Trump has said that Spygate is going to be one of the biggest scandals of the 21st century and I tend to agree with them. When declassification happens I am betting that there will be proof that the concerns about candidate and President Elect Trump were not criminal, but political. I am guessing that it will be proven for sure that this attempt to stop Trump was in fact criminal and politically motivated...