An Alleged Comey ‘Honeypot’ Sex Sting Against Trump Smells Fishy

Just eight days before the 2024 election, a lawyer claiming to represent an anonymous FBI whistleblower sent a politically explosive letter to Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee alleging former FBI Director James Comey first began investigating Donald Trump shortly after he announced his run for president in June 2015, and did so without foundation.

Is someone framing James Comey?

More shocking, the letter claimed Comey “inserted” female undercover agents into Trump’s campaign to travel with him and his staff and fish for possible evidence of criminal activity as part of a so-called “honeypot” sting operation. The letter further claims the probe was never entered in the bureau’s case management system as required by Justice Department rules. 

At first blush, these bombshell allegations of abuses of power at the highest level of the FBI sound plausible given the FISA surveillance violations and other serious misconduct that DOJ’s inspector general found the FBI committed during Comey’s so-called Russiagate probe of Trump in 2016.  

But they are based on a two-page letter — published here for the first time  — that contains substantial errors. RealClearInvestigations has found that the letter was written by a Connecticut attorney with a reputation for sensationalizing complaints against the FBI. The lawyer, Kurt Siuzdak, is himself a disgruntled former FBI agent who sued the agency when Comey was running it.

Siuzdak’s Oct. 28, 2024, letter is not so much a “whistleblower disclosure,” as described, but his own summation of allegations leveled by an “FBI employee” whom he does not name in the letter. Nevertheless, the letter has received broad attention during the last few weeks, including news stories and social media posts alleging FBI abuse and a cryptic tweet from FBI Director Kash Patel that seemed to throw cold water on its claims.

Anachronisms

There are several puzzling aspects to the allegations. For starters, the letter claims that after two undercover honeypot agents “infiltrated” the Trump campaign in 2015, “one of the individuals [they] targeted was George Papadopoulus[sic].” Only Papadopoulos didn’t join the Trump campaign until March 2016. 

In an interview with RealClearInvestigations, Papadopoulos noted the timeline problem: “I was a senior foreign policy adviser on the Ben Carson campaign in 2015.” 

There is at least a kernel of truth to the new rumors. Papadopoulos said he was approached by a flirtatious woman with “dirty blonde” hair and a “very heavy accent” who said she was an assistant to an academic who had hired him for a project in London. The woman, who said her name was “Azra Turk,” was sent to gather intel – though it’s still unclear whether she worked for the British government or the U.S. government, or was ever an FBI agent. The academic she claimed to work for, Stefan Halper, was a longtime bureau asset. But this approach took place in September 2016 and was part of an official counterintelligence inquiry, codenamed Crossfire Hurricane, looking into suspected Trump campaign links to Russia.

Siuzdak’s letter claims that former FBI official Calvin Shivers was “involved in executing the plan” with Comey in mid-2015. This seems unlikely. At the time, Shivers headed the bureau’s child pornography and sex trafficking investigations. Siuzdak further states:

The investigation was closed because the New York Times obtained a photograph of one of the undercovers and was about to publish it. The FBI Press Office told the New York Times that the photograph was a picture of an FBI informant who would be killed if the photograph was revealed. In fact, it was a photograph of the FBI UCE [undercover employee].

What is Siuzdak talking about?

A New York Times spokeswoman denied this accusation. “That quote from the whistleblower complaint is inaccurate,” said Danielle Rhoades-Ha, senior vice president for external communications for the Times. “We never had a photo.”

While the letter appears to confirm suspicions held by President Trump and his team that Comey targeted him long before the FBI formally opened its Crossfire investigation in July 2016, even his new FBI director pushed back on the revelations, which went viral after the Washington Times first reported them (without mentioning the letter or its author). 

In a Feb. 28 statement, Patel disputed the story and defended a female New York agent rumored by Siuzdak to be involved: “[S]he was NOT a honeypot.” He added that Special Counsel John Durham had already reviewed the matter as part of his probe of the FBI’s Russiagate investigation and “found no evidence of any wrongdoing.” 

Contacted by RCI, Siuzdak appeared to back off the allegations. 

Asked for the identity of the “FBI employee” he repeatedly referenced in his letter as the main source of the allegations, Siuzdak demurred, claiming, “The information was actually from multiple FBI employees.”

This article was originally published by RealClearInvestigations and made available via RealClearWire.