"Bigger than WATERGATE": Trump salutes NYT report on FBI meeting with Papadopoulos

President Donald Trump announced Friday that the FBI had sent an undercover investigator to meet with an assistant of his 2016 "Greater Than Watergate" campaign, praising one of his main enemies of the media, the New York Times, for his reports.

"Finally, Mainstream Media involves – too" hot "to avoid," wrote Trump on Twitter. "Pulitzer Prize Someone? The New York Times, on the front page (finally), "Detailed effort to spy on the Trump campaign." @Foxandfriends C is bigger than WATERGATE, but the opposite! "

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Trump 's complaint is based on a Times report on Thursday that a woman, sent by the FBI, identified herself as an assistant to a Cambridge researcher when she met in London in 2016. Trump campaign advisor, George Papadopoulos, who later pleaded guilty. false statements in the office. The woman was sent as part of the FBI-led counterintelligence investigation into Trump's links with Russia.

The fact that the office sent a person undercover to meet Papadopoulos fueled the insistence of the president and his allies on the fact that special investigation by special advocate Robert Mueller in Russia was motivated by political reasons and that the 2016 Trump campaign was illegally monitored.

The woman, who identified herself as Azra Turk, posed for her meeting with the help of the Trump campaign as an assistant Cambridge professor and government informant, Stefan Halper. The meeting finally turned from its purported goal, foreign policy, to the woman directly asking Papadopoulos if the Trump campaign was working with Russia to interfere in the elections. At that time, investigators were studying the links of the Trump campaign with Russia for a little over a month, although the politically charged probe was still secret.

The operation "gave no fruitful information," the Times reported, and although FBI officials insisted that their investigations before the 2016 elections were legal, they were examined by the inspector. Department of Justice.

After Mueller completed his investigation earlier this year without finding a plot to reach out to the Russians, Trump and his allies called for an investigation into the origins of the investigation into Russia, the Attorney General William Barr said that he supported it.

Barr was targeted last month when he told lawmakers that it was possible that there was a "spying" of the Trump campaign to be monitored. He has since defended his use of the term "spying", claiming that he was probably more involved in the genesis of the probe than is known publicly.

Although the investigation into Russia was triggered by Papadopoulos' revelation to an Australian diplomat that he had been informed that Russia had "spoiled" Trump's opponent, the president claimed to several times and wrongly that he was relying on an unfounded file claiming that Russia had compromised information about him that was funded by his political opponents.

Late Thursday, however, Trump appeared to call for the removal of an investigation on his investigators before returning to his insistence that the investigation on Russia had been rigged.

"OK, so after two years of hard work and each party doing its best to make the other party look as bad as possible, it's time to get back to work," he said. he writes in two tweets. "The Mueller report firmly asserted that there was no collusion with Russia (of course) and that, in fact, they were pushed back every turn to try to get the company to get it. But Republicans and Democrats must now unite for the good of the American people, no more costly and tedious investigations. "