][4] Priestap joined the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1998, and he was appointed as assistant director of the FBI Counterintelligence Division in 2015.

[4][5] In this role, he notably decided to open the Crossfire Hurricane investigation into the Trump campaign's potential collusion with Russian interference in the 2016 elections.

After arriving September 15, 2016, in London, Papadopoulos met in a private London club with a United States citizen and FBI informer Stefan Halper, who was a Cambridge professor, and a female posing as Halper's female research assistant who had invited Papadopoulos for drinks.

[8][9][10] The research assistant was an FBI investigator with the pseudonym Azra Turk but Papadopoulos stated that he believed that she "was CIA" with ties to "Turkish intel" and was tasked to learn about his work in the Energy Triangle which involves Cyprus-Greece-Israel, and competes with the interests of Northern Cyprus and Turkey.

[14][15] This biography of a person who has held a non-elected position in the federal government of the United States is a stub.