Former aide to President Donald Trump, George Papadopoulos, described how he was approached by what he believes were spies with the FBI and CIA in a Thursday evening episode of “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”
Papadopoulos served jail time as part of a plea agreement he struck with special counsel Robert Mueller in 2018, and he described how he was approached by suspicious individuals he believes were sent by the Obama administration to look into how the Trump campaign did business in 2016.
“I received an unsolicited email in September of 2016 from a man who was suggesting that he wanted to pay me $3,000 to write a report on energy security questions and I was an expert on it at the time and Israel, Turkey and Cyprus,” the aide said. “I looked him up because I’d never heard of him. I saw that he had worked in four administrations and he was a professor at Cambridge so accepted his offer and he flew me to London where he paid for my five-star hotel and he said before I meet with you I want you to meet my assistant.” (RELATED: House Republican Releases George Papadopoulos Transcript)
Papadopoulos then described that he was suspicious of the assistant, because her name was of Turkish origin and he knew that his views and work wasn’t viewed favorably by the Turkish government.
“I went and I met with her and she was very suggestive as you can understand, younger, very flirtatious,” he said about the assistant he was asked to meet.
“I right away understood this wasn’t a Cambridge assistant and she barely spoke English and she was very flirty and was trying to do two things, want to extract information about my professional connections in the Middle East and two to see if I had any information that she could potentially extract from meat on a Trump Russia which is nonsense. After I met with her she then is introduced to me again the next day where she goes from this suggestive young lady who now pouring his coffee and stuff on him is very belligerent,” he continued.
“From that moment I knew there was something wrong and I was laughing about it but now of course ‘The New York Times’ reported that she was some sort of agent but I don’t think she was FBI, I think she was CIA,” he concluded.
Although Papadopoulos was sentenced to 14 days in prison, he only served 12. He was released in Oxford, Wisconsin in December. He is currently serving 12 months of supervised probation and had to pay a $9,500 fine. He pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his interactions with Russian nationals while he worked on Trump’s campaign.