Carter Page, former volunteer adviser to the campaign of then-candidate Donald Trump, has detailed how an FBI investigation based on unfounded claims led to his ruin, both financial and personal.
It wasn’t the investigation itself, it seems, that scorned Page the most, but rather the constant leaks to the media regarding the allegations against him. Even though the allegations ultimately proved unsubstantiated, the damage has already been done. People distanced themselves from him, his business declined, even his girlfriend left him.
When he visited her in late 2016 in her London apartment, she was “freaking out with the fake news about me,” he said.
Trump was handed a piece of paper by an aide and read five names. One of them was Carter Page.
A Naval Academy and New York University grad, Page used to work as an investment broker at Merrill Lynch’s Moscow office from 2004 to 2007. He then founded his own investment firm, Global Energy Capital, and wrote articles and gave speeches as a foreign policy expert.
Based on Ioffe’s research, Page seemed to exaggerate his Russian contacts. He held a mid-level post at Merrill Lynch without any high-level access to Russian elites. His investment firm didn’t seem to get anywhere. Its fancy Manhattan address next to the Trump Tower turned out to be a co-working space. His writings were pro-Russian in tone, like those of other Westerners doing business in Russia, Ioffe noted.
During the campaign, Page said he was an investor in Gazprom, a massive Russian natural gas company. He later said the stake was actually minuscule and that he had sold it in August 2016 at a loss.
The same day as Ioffe’s, another story about Page came out by Yahoo News’ Michael Isikoff.
It seemed to take full advantage of Page’s inflated profile, portraying him as a man with “extensive business interests in Russia,” who runs a consulting firm “located around the corner from Trump Tower, that specializes in oil and gas deals in Russia and other Central Asian countries.”
The article alleged Page “opened up private communications with senior Russian officials,” by meeting with Igor Diveykin, a high-ranking Russian official, and Igor Sechin, a top executive of a major Russian oil company Rosneft, during a short Moscow trip in early July 2016.
No evidence has emerged substantiating the claims. Page denied under oath ever meeting either individual.
Using mostly Russian sources, Steele put together a dossier characterized as “salacious and unverified” by then-FBI Director James Comey. Steele provided the dossier to the FBI, which used it as a justification to spy on Page.
Between 2012 and Sept. 26, 2016, Halper was granted research and consultancy contracts for over a million dollars from a Defense Department strategy think tank directly under the Defense Secretary.
Based on the intelligence agencies’ “two-hop” rule, the warrant allowed the FBI to not only access Page’s electronic communications, but also metadata, including the phone records of all people he was in contact with and all people in contact with them reaching back 18 months. That would likely involve many, if not all, in the Trump campaign.
Two days after the Yahoo article, Page sent a letter to Comey, offering to answer any question the FBI may have. He wasn’t interviewed until March 2017, he said, and he hasn’t been charged with any crimes.
Page said the spying on him and the leaking of false information about him to the media was politically motivated—because he volunteered to help Trump.
Just as Trump did, he described the spying on the campaign as worse than the Watergate scandal.
“The crimes that have already been committed against President Trump, myself, and the entire Trump movement are much worse,” Page said.
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