Thread: Remember Carter Page? Turns out he met with Russian officials after all

Remember Carter Page? Turns out he met with Russian officials after all.

Published 3h ago on Nov. 4, 2017
by Eric Lutz

Carter Page talks to reporters after testifying before the House Intelligence Committee on Thursday. Mark Wilson/Getty Images

Carter Page — a Trump campaign foreign policy adviser — told the New York Times Friday that he met with high-ranking Kremlin officials in 2016, contradicting previous statements in which he said he’d only met with Russian citizens he’d “known for over a decade.”

What’s more, Jeff Sessions and other high-level Trump staffers were aware of his July 2016 Russia trip, Page told CNN’s Jake Tapper, raising questions about statements the attorney general has made under oath during high-profile testimonies on Capitol Hill.

Page on Thursday told the House Intelligence Committee that he’d met with “government officials, legislators and business executives during his time in Moscow” — and informed a Trump campaign official of the meetings in an email, according to the Times.

One of the Russians was Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich, he told CNN Friday.

The revelation comes days after former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his associate, Rick Gates, surrendered themselves to the FBI after being charged with conspiracy against the United States and 11 other counts by special counsel Robert Mueller.
They each pleaded not guilty.

George Papadopoulos, a former foreign policy adviser to the campaign, plead guilty to making false statements to FBI agents and has apparently been cooperating with Mueller’s investigators, according to documents unsealed the same day as Manafort and Gates’ indictments.

The White House has dismissed the charges against Manafort and Gates as being unrelated to their campaign activities and downplayed Papadopoulos role on the campaign.

Donald J. Trump

✔@realDonaldTrump

....came to the campaign. Few people knew the young, low level volunteer named George, who has already proven to be a liar. Check the DEMS!
5:16 AM - Oct 31, 2017

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“Few people knew the young, low level volunteer named George,” President Donald Trump tweeted Tuesday.

But Papadopoulos had made other, more senior Trump officials aware of his meetings with Russians, and publicly represented the campaign several times during the race — indicating that he was a more significant figure in the campaign than the administration has let on.

The revelations about Page’s Moscow meetings are some of the most direct connections between the campaign and the Kremlin yet — and paint an unflattering portrait of a campaign and administration that can’t, for some reason, get its story straight on Russia.

As the Times pointed out on Thursday, both Trump and Sessions have definitively stated that they were unaware of any campaign staffers who had been in contact with Russia.

But the special counsel’s office says that Papadopoulos discussed his Russian connections at a “national security meeting” in Washington, D.C, with Trump and Sessions in March 2016, according to court documents unsealed Monday.

Trump “listened with interest,” according to the Times, but Sessions “vehemently” railed against Papadopoulos’s offer to broker a meeting between the candidate and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Sessions was also told of Page’s trip to Moscow, though the former foreign policy adviser said that he merely mentioned the upcoming meetings in a “brief comment” to the then-Alabama senator.

“It was such a nothing event,” Page told CNN, echoing Donald Trump Jr.’s characterization of his July 2016 meeting with a Kremlin-connected attorney. “It’s totally in passing. It was nothing.”

Trump listed Page — an unknown in foreign policy circles — as one of his advisers in a March 2016 interview with the Washington Post, but downplayed his role on the campaign after it was revealed in April that he had been targeted by Russian spies.

“I don’t think I’ve ever spoken to him,” Trump said of Page. “I don’t think I’ve ever met him. And he actually said he was a very low-level member of I think a committee for a short period of time. I don’t think I ever met him. Now, it’s possible that I walked into a room and he was sitting there, but I don’t think I ever met him.”

But in May, the president seemingly changed his tune, suggesting in a tweet that Page could prove the Russia investigation is nothing more than a “Witch Hunt!”

Donald J. Trump

✔@realDonaldTrump

So now it is reported that the Democrats, who have excoriated Carter Page about Russia, don't want him to testify. He blows away their....
3:37 AM - May 31, 2017

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Donald J. Trump

✔@realDonaldTrump

...case against him & now wants to clear his name by showing "the false or misleading testimony by James Comey, John Brennan..." Witch Hunt!
3:45 AM - May 31, 2017

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Page confirmed he met with Dvorkovich, but when Tapper on Friday asked him to name the “others” he had contact with, the ex-Trump adviser demurred.

“You know, it’ll come out,” Page said. “Things keep leaking in this.”

https://mic.com/articles/185835/reme...all#.nL4VXPJN0

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Moved to Other Topics - Political, not immigration related.

• BREAKING NEWS
  
  
  
  Trey Gowdy told 'Fox News Sunday' Carter Page was more bumbling detective than secret agent after new information was released
  
  "My take is that Carter Page is more like Inspector Gadget than Jason Bourne or James Bond," Gowdy, R-S.C., said during an interview on "Fox News Sunday."
  More on this
  
• For more news, please go to FoxNews.comand watch Fox News Channel.
  

Related

FBI believed Trump campaign aide Carter Page was recruited by Russians

Carter Page Met With, Gave Documents to Russian Spy in 2013

REUTERS/SERGEI KARPUKHIN

One-time advisor of U.S. president-elect Donald Trump Carter Page addresses the audience during a presentation in Moscow, Russia, December 12, 2016. REUTERS/Sergei Karpukhin


Former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page met with an undercover Russian spy in 2013 and gave him documents, Page confirmed to BuzzFeed News. The Russian intelligence operative Victor Podobnyy was charged in the United States in January 2015 with acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign government.

In his charging documents, Podobnyy is quoted as discussing his efforts to recruit Page, who is referred to as “Male-1” throughout the document. Page confirmed to BuzzFeed that he was Male-1. “[Male-1] wrote that he is sorry, he went to Moscow and forgot to check his inbox, but he wants to meet when he gets back. I think he is an idiot and forgot who I am... He got hooked on Gazprom thinking that if they have a project, he could rise up,” Podobnyy is quoted as saying in the charging document. “I also promised him a lot... this is intelligence method to cheat, how else to work with foreigners? You promise a favor for a favor. You get the documents from him and tell him to go **** himself.”
The complaint alleges that Podobnyy met Page at an energy conference in January 2013 and that Page then met with Podobnyy and sent him documents on U.S. energy business through June of that year. Page works in the energy industry and previously denied having had any communications with Russian officials that would have broken the law. Page told BuzzFeed that none of the documents he shared with Podobnyy were sensitive.

Podobnyy was charged in absentia, but removed from the U.S. under diplomatic-immunity rules before he could stand trial. Another Russian intelligence officer charged in the same filing pleaded guilty to conspiring to act as a foreign agent and was sentenced to 30 months in prison.
The Trump administration has attempted to distance itself from Page, who left the campaign after it was revealed that federal authorities were investigating his ties to Russia. Page was also named in a dossier compiled by a former U.K. intelligence officer, which claimed to describe a compromised relationship between Trump and the Russian government.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/carter...an-spy-in-2013