An FBI investigator posing as a research assistant at Cambridge University met with Trump campaign advisor George Papadopoulos in London in September 2016, it has been reported. Known to Mr Papadopoulos and those involved as Azra Turk, the investigator said she was an assistant to Stefan Halper, a longtime FBI informant, The New York Times said.

Mr Halper was previously revealed to be monitoring the Trump campaign’s activity for the FBI, which began its operation shortly before the September 2016 meeting, but the new information regarding Ms Turk’s role in the operation suggests a certain level of urgency.

In a bar in London, Ms Turk reportedly directly asked Mr Papadopoulos if the Trump campaign was working with Russia during their first meeting, arranged by Mr Halper. In his book, Deep State Target, testimony given to the FBI, and tweets in recent weeks, the Trump aide, who was sentenced to 14 days in jail in September 2018 for lying to the FBI, has recalled the meeting with suspicion.

He has repeated several times the claim that Ms Turk may have been working for Turkish intelligence. In testimony before congress, he said he believed her name was “fake” but that it suggested her ties to Turkey, saying he’d been “...reading Twitter and people saying that Azra in Turkish means pure and then Turk. So unless she has the name of pure Turk. I don't know. Maybe that's - those are common names in Turkey. I don't know.”

According to the Times, Ms Turk and Mr Papadopoulos exchanged emails.

“I am excited about what the future holds for us :)” Ms Turk wrote in one, which was provided by Mr Papadopoulos.

It appears from the report that the two did not meet again.

The revelation that Ms Turk was an FBI investigator is already being heralded online as confirmation by right-leaning pundits as confirmation of President Donald Trump’s Spygate conspiracy theory. British intelligence say they were not involved in the operation. The FBI maintains that the operation was legal.

On Twitter, Mr Papadopoulos has responded to the story by hinting that more salacious details of his experience can be found in his book.