George Papadopoulos is ordered to report to prison on November 26, 2018. (Credit: Alex Wong/Getty Images)
“A newly declassified transcript from the FBI’s 2016 Russia probe reviewed by CBS News shows a recorded conversation between former Trump advisor George Papadopoulos and the bureau’s confidential human source turned up no evidence of coordination between the campaign and Russia.
The 90-page, lightly redacted transcript between Papadopoulos — who is identified by the code name “Crossfire Typhoon,” or CT — and the bureau’s confidential human source, or CHS, captures the October 23, 2016 conversation.
Papadopoulos does boast about setting up “a meeting with… (t) President of Egypt and Trump,” according to the transcript, and says that he had made “a lot of cool [connections] and I’m going to see what’s going to happen after the election.”
The recorded conversation was documented in the December Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report on the FBI’s surveillance of former Trump campaign aide Carter Page.
Of the October 23, 2016 transcript, Horowitz wrote, “Papadopoulos did not say much about Russia during the first conversation with Source 3, other than to mention a “friend Sergey…[who] lives in…Brooklyn,” and invite Source 3 to travel with Papadopoulos to Russia in the summertime.”
The date on the transcript reflects that the FBI was using a confidential source to gather intelligence about the former campaign aide less than three weeks before the presidential election. Within days of the Papadopoulos recorded conversation, the FBI Russia team, known as “Crossfire Hurricane” had also secured a surveillance warrant for Page to investigate alleged coordination between the Trump team and Moscow.
(…) Earlier this month, CBS News was first to report that transcripts of a separate conversation, on October 31, 2016, showed that Papadopoulos denied to an FBI confidential source that the campaign was involved in the circumstances surrounding the hack of the Democratic National Committee’s email system, calling the idea “illegal.”
However, Horowitz also noted in his report that “Case Agent 1” had said of a similar recorded conversation with Papadopoulos in September 2016, “the Crossfire Hurricane team’s assessment was that the Papadopoulos denial was a rehearsed response and that he did not view the information as particularly germane to the investigation of Carter Page.” (Read more: CBS News, 4/25/2020) (Archive)