Carter Page

[stillrobertpaulsen]

Edited to remove story seemslikeadream just linked about Lyin' Sessions. What can I say?

[seemslikeadream]

Edited to remove story seemslikeadream just linked about Lyin' Sessions. What can I say?

Clovis is the one that brought Page and Papadopoulos to the trump campaign !!!

Sam is a big fat fuckin key

Looks like Sam Clovis has indeed flipped on Jeff Sessions and Donald Trump
Bill Palmer
Updated: 7:12 pm EDT Thu Nov 2, 2017
Home » Opinion

As expected, the Donald Trump administration withdrew its nomination today of Sam Clovis for a USDA position. This was nearly a given, considering that George Papadopoulos implicated Clovis in the Trump-Russia scandal this week, and Clovis testified before a Robert Mueller grand jury this week. His Senate confirmation hearing would have been entirely about the scandal. Now one new key detail sure makes it look like Clovis has flipped on Jeff Sessions and Donald Trump.



As Palmer Report spelled out earlier this week, there were two distinct possibilities when it came to the Sam Clovis grand jury testimony. The first was that he was not truly cooperating, and he had either showed up voluntarily to testify in his own defense, by subpoena in a case against a different Trump-Russia adviser. The second was Clovis had flipped, and was testifying in incriminating fashion against someone higher up the chain.



ABC News is confirming that the Trump White House didn’t know Sam Clovis had testified in the grand jury until reading about it in the news (link). Then administration then withdrew Clovis’ nomination today in response. This means that Clovis didn’t even bother to inform the Trump team that he was testifying, let alone try to coordinate strategy. Considering that Clovis had a pending nomination for a position in the Trump administration, his failure to notify the Trump team of his grand jury testimony strongly suggests that it’s because he’s flipped. There are only two people he could have flipped on.



George Papadopoulos has asserted that Sam Clovis and Jeff Sessions knew about his plot to conspire with the Russian government to alter the outcome of the election. In turn Clovis answered to Jeff Sessions, who in turn answered to Donald Trump. Robert Mueller would only cut a deal with Clovis if he was willing to flip on Session or Trump. Flipping on Sessions would force Sessions to flip on Trump. So if Clovis has flipped, he’s made the conscious decision to sell them both out.
http://www.palmerreport.com/politics/fl ... ovis/5859/

trip down memory lane

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EeUWZnTG5UM

[stillrobertpaulsen]

Bombshell Carter Page Testimony Verifies Key Parts Of Steele Dossier
By Susie Madrak
11/07/17 6:00am

More pieces of Christopher Steele's Russia dossier were verified last night by the release of the transcript of Carter Page's House intelligence committee testimony.

Page's strange, meandering narrative baffled a lot of reporters -- but not Natasha Bertrand, who works for Business Insider. Check out her story, in which she connected these important dots:

Page revealed during his testimony that he met with both members of Russia's presidential administration and with the head of investor relations at the state-owned Russian oil giant Rosneft during his trip to Moscow last July.

He also congratulated members of the Trump campaign's foreign policy team on July 14 for their "excellent work" on the "Ukraine amendment" — a reference to the Trump campaign's decision to "intervene" to water down a proposed amendment to the GOP's Ukraine platform.

The original amendment proposed that the GOP commit to sending "lethal weapons" to the Ukrainian army to fend off Russian aggression. But it was ultimately altered to say "provide appropriate assistance" before it was included in the party's official platform. The dossier alleges that the campaign "agreed to sideline" the issue of Russia's invasion of Crimea and interference in eastern Ukraine in exchange for dirt on Hillary Clinton.

Page also revealed that Trump campaign adviser Sam Clovis had asked him to sign a non-disclosure agreement upon joining the campaign — and that he discussed his July Moscow trip with Clovis both before he went and after he returned.

And yes, Page was offered the brokerage of a 19% stake in the Rosneft energy company in exchange for the lifting of sanctions -- as reported by Christopher Steele.

There is no evidence that Page played any role in the Rosneft deal. But Page returned to Moscow one day after the Rosneft deal was signed on December 8 to "meet with some of the top managers" of Rosneft, he told reporters at the time. Page denied meeting with Sechin, Rosneft's CEO, during that trip, but he said it would have been "a great honor" if he had.

From there, Page traveled to London, where he met with his "old friend" Sergey Yatsenko — a former mid-level Gazprom executive — to discuss "some opportunities in Kazakhstan."

Asked whether he had ever met the overseas professor who told Papadopoulos about the Kremlin's dossier of incriminating Clinton emails, Joseph Misfud, Page at first said "No."

But he then seemed to backtrack: "I — you know, there may have been a greeting," he said. "I have no recollection of ever interacting with him in any way, shape or form...I have no personal relationship with him."

We now know that despite Page's previous testimony, the Russians actually paid for his trip. And the Trump campaign knew about it.

Sam Clovis not only knew about the trip, he made Page sign a non-disclosure agreement. So Clovis is in trouble -- and so is Corey Lewandowski, who also knew.

And that Ukraine amendment is the RNC platform is looking more and more like a quid pro quo.

Links also contains many informative tweets.

[seemslikeadream]

Tue Jan 10, 2017

The report also alleges a bribe offered to Trump, via his adviser Page, by a “close associate” of Igor Sechin, one of Putin's closest confidants in the Kremlin and a strongman from the security and intelligence services. The alleged bribe was offered in July 2016 in exchange for the lifting of U.S. sanctions.
Today, Sechin is the president and CEO of Rosneft, Russia'a state-owned oil company partially blacklisted by the U.S. Treasury Department for its role in the invasion and occupation of Ukraine.
“SECHIN’s associate said that the Rosneft President was so keen to lift personal and corporate western sanctions imposed on the company, that he offered PAGE/TRUMP’s associates the brokerage of up to a 19 per cent (privatized) stake in Rosneft in return. PAGE had expressed interest and confirmed that were TRUMP elected US president, then sanctions on Russia would be lifted.”
Trump's attorney Michael Cohen maintained a “secret liaison” with the Russian leadership, the report alleges, especially related to trying to “cover up” the scandal of U.S. press disclosures about the closeness of Page and former campaign manager Paul Manafort to the Kremlin.
On Tuesday night, Cohen called those allegations "so ridiculous" and "silly."
The Guardian reported Tuesday night that the FBI applied for a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court last year to monitoring four individuals on Trump’s team who were suspected of irregular contacts with officials in Russia. The court initially turned down the request as overly broad, and it’s unclear if the FBI was granted the warrant.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2 ... -next.html

Sat Sep 24, 2016

Trump foreign policy advisor reportedly being probed for ties to Russia
Christine Wang | @christiiineeee
17 Hours Ago
CNBC.com

Carter Page, an adviser to U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, speaks at the graduation ceremony for the New Economic School in Moscow, Russia, Friday, July 8, 2016. Page is a former investment banker who previously worked in Russia.
Pavel Golovkin | AP
Carter Page, an adviser to U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, speaks at the graduation ceremony for the New Economic School in Moscow, Russia, Friday, July 8, 2016. Page is a former investment banker who previously worked in Russia.
One of Donald Trump's foreign policy advisors is being probed by U.S. intelligence officials to determine whether he has had private discussions with senior Russian officials, Yahoo News reported, citing sources.

In particular, members of the intelligence community are concerned that Carter Page has spoken with the Kremlin about the possibility of lifting economic sanctions on Russia, sources told Yahoo.

Page and Trump's campaign did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The report comes amid growing concerns that Moscow may be trying to influence the U.S. presidential election. On Thursday, Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Rep. Adam Schiff of California issued a joint statement expressing their concern about Russian hacking and called on President Vladimir Putin "to immediately order a halt to this activity."

"Based on briefings we have received, we have concluded that the Russian intelligence agencies are making a serious and concerted effort to influence the U.S. election," Feinstein and Schiff said. "At the least, this effort is intended to sow doubt about the security of our election and may well be intended to influence the outcomes of the election—we can see no other rationale for the behavior of the Russians."

Feinstein is vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Schiff is a ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee.
http://www.cnbc.com/2016/09/23/trump-fo ... ussia.html

Feds investigating Trump advisor’s meeting with Russian officials seeking to influence U.S. election
Harry Reid wrote the FBI, demanding action.


Carter Page, an adviser to U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, speaks at the graduation ceremony for the New Economic School in Moscow, Russia, Friday, July 8, 2016. Page is a former investment banker who previously worked in Russia. CREDIT: AP PHOTO/PAVEL GOLOVKIN
U.S. law enforcement is looking into Donald Trump foreign policy advisor Carter Page’s meetings with high-ranking Russian officials this summer, Yahoo’s Michael Isikoff reports.
Page, who Trump said was one of his five foreign policy advisors last March, is suspected of communicating with “senior Russian officials” about “the possible lifting of economic sanctions” if Trump becomes president, Yahoo reports, citing “multiple sources who have been briefed on the issue.”
One of the officials Page allegedly met with, Igor Diveykin, is “believed by U.S. officials to have responsibility for intelligence collected by Russian agencies about the U.S. election.” Russia is widely believed to be behind high-profile computer hacks that appear timed to influence the presidential election.
ThinkProgress obtained a letter from Sen. Harry Reid to the FBI, dated August 27, demanding an investigation into Page’s contacts with the Russians. Reid’s letter refers to Page as a “Trump advisor” with “investments in Russian energy conglomerate Gazprom.”

Page worked in Russia for Merrill Lynch for three years starting in 2004. Sergey Aleksashenko, who became head of the bank’s Moscow operation in 2006, told Reuters last month that he viewed Trump’s selection of Page as “a strange choice.”
Page traveled to Russia this summer and gave a speech criticizing U.S. foreign policy. From Yahoo:
Page showed up again in Moscow in early July, just two weeks before the Republican National Convention formally nominated Trump for president, and once again criticized U.S. policy. Speaking at a commencement address for the New Economic School, an institution funded in part by major Russian oligarchs close to Putin, Page asserted that “Washington and other West capitals” had impeded progress in Russia “through their often hypocritical focus on ideas such as democratization, inequality, corruption and regime change.”
Page isn’t the only Trump advisor whose connections to Russia have come under scrutiny. Last December, retied Gen. Michael Flynn, a prominent Trump military advisor, traveled to Russia and gave a speech during a tenth anniversary celebration for Russian state-owned media company RT. He’s refused to answer questions about who paid him for the appearance.
In March, Trump hired veteran Republican political operative Paul Manafort to lead his delegate-recruitment efforts. Manafort quickly rose to become Trump’s campaign manager, but left that position last month amid reports Ukrainian authorities were investigating him for allegedly receiving $12.7 million in illegal payments from Ukraine’s former pro-Russia ruling party.
During a news conference a month before Manafort stepped down, Trump brazenly encouraged Russian hackers to obtain emails deleted from Hillary Clinton’s private server. Those comments came in the wake of a massive hack of the Democratic National Committee’s emails that sparked controversy about how the party treated Bernie Sanders days ahead of the Democratic National Convention. State election databases have also reportedly been hacked.
On Thursday, the top Democrats on the intelligence committee pinned those hacks on Russian intelligence. A joint statement from Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and Rep. Adam Schiff said, “Based on briefings we have received, we have concluded that the Russian intelligence agencies are making a serious and concerted effort to influence the U.S. election.”
“At the least, this effort is intended to sow doubt about the security of our election and may well be intended to influence the outcomes of the election — we can see no other rationale for the behavior of the Russians,” the statement continues, going on to say “that orders for the Russian intelligence agencies to conduct such actions could come only from very senior levels of the Russian government.”
Trump, for his part, downplayed reports that Russia might be trying to meddle in American politics during an interview that aired earlier this month on the Russia-run RT network.
Trump has praised Putin, calling the man presiding over a country where opposition leaders have been killed under mysterious circumstances “highly respected within his own country and beyond.” During a presidential forum broadcast on NBC earlier this month, Trump said that if Putin “says great things about me, I’m going to say great things about him” and commended Putin’s high approval ratings in Russia — a country known for stifling dissident journalists.
Around the same time as the forum, Trump surrogates, including campaign vice presidential nominee Mike Pence and campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, defended Trump’s praise of Putin during TV interviews. Both echoed Trump’s statement that Putin is a stronger leader than President Obama.
In the Yahoo report, Trump spokesman Jason Miller says Page “has no role” in Trump’s campaign, adding, “we are not aware of any of his activities, past or present.” But Miller couldn’t explain why Trump would’ve cited him as an advisor in the past. And as recently as last month, Trump spokesperson Hope Hicks described Carter as an “informal foreign advisor.”
The full text of Reid’s letter is below:
https://thinkprogress.org/feds-investig ... .ka7vjlqir

[seemslikeadream]

Palmer Report fully vindicated for its earlier reporting on Hungary’s role in the Trump-Russia scandal
Bill Palmer
Updated: 8:39 pm EST Mon Nov 20, 2017
Home » Politics

Seven months ago, Hungarian political dissident Dr. András Göllner laid out a sweeping evidence-based argument that the epicenter of the Trump-Russia scandal was in Budapest, Hungary. Palmer Report sought to bring immediate attention to Dr. Göllner’s premise, but most of the mainstream media completely ignored him, and a few within the mainstream media seized the opportunity to falsely accuse Palmer Report of being “fake news” for even touching the Hungary storyline. Now the Hungary connections are being fully vindicated by the mainstream media itself.



ABC News is reporting that Donald Trump campaign adviser Carter Page held “high-level foreign policy meetings with Hungarian officials before the 2016 presidential election” and presented himself as representing the Trump campaign during these meetings (link). Further, ABC News says that Congress is investigating these meetings between Page and Hungarian officials. These meetings took place in Budapest. In other words, András Göllner was correct back in April, and Palmer Report was fully justified in trying to bring attention to it. More importantly, let’s take a look at what Göllner’s research can tell us about what else the Budapest connection means for the Trump-Russia scandal.



Göllner pointed to the six trips which Donald Trump campaign adviser J.D. Gordon took to Budapest (source, additional source), where he publicly took positions on Ukraine that were in line with the Kremlin. Gordon has already publicly admitted that he was part of the Trump campaign team who met with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak at the Republican National Convention (source), which resulted in the Republican Party platform being changed to reflect the Kremlin’s position on Ukraine.



Göllner also pointed to current Donald Trump White House adviser Sebastian Gorka, who had documented close ties to far-right extremist groups when he lived in Hungary. But the core of his premise is that the Trump-Russia collusion all had Arthur Finkelstein as the centerpiece, with Finkelstein’s client Orbán having given free reign to Putin to use Budapest as a de facto headquarters for his collusion with the Trump Campaign. Although it’s received little U.S. media attention, the government of Hungary has become essentially an arm of the Kremlin. You can read Dr. Göllener’s research here. No word on when the mainstream media will catch up with the rest of the Budapest connection.
http://www.palmerreport.com/politics/hu ... ssia/6135/

Trump campaign adviser Carter Page held high-level meetings with Hungarian officials in Budapest
By MATTHEW MOSK Nov 20, 2017, 4:05 PM ET
J. Scott Applewhite/AP

WATCHCarter Page told Trump campaign officials about Moscow trip

Travels by Trump campaign adviser Carter Page to meet with senior officials in Hungary during the 2016 presidential election are being closely examined by congressional investigators, given the increasingly close ties between Hungary and Russia and the role of the country as a hub for Russian intelligence activity. The Hungarian prime minister was the first foreign leader to endorse Donald Trump’s candidacy.

Though characterized as a low-level volunteer, Page held high-level foreign policy meetings with Hungarian officials before the 2016 presidential election, ABC News has learned.

The meetings included a 45-minute session in September 2016 with Jeno Megyesy, who is a close adviser to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and focuses on relations with the United States, at his office in Budapest, where Page presented himself as a member of then-candidate Trump’s foreign policy team.

Megyesy confirmed for ABC News in an interview Friday that he met with Page at the request of Reka Szemerkenyi, the Hungarian ambassador to the United States. Megyesy said he did most of the talking at the meeting because Page did not appear to be well versed on the issues facing the region.

“I had the impression he didn’t deal with these issues on a regular basis,” Megyesy said.

Page’s visit to Budapest drew notice from members of the House Intelligence Committee investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election. Orban, who was the first world leader to endorse then-candidate Trump, has become increasingly aligned with Russian President Vladamir Putin, and experts consider Budapest a hub for Russian intelligence activity.

When questioned by Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the ranking Democrat on the committee, during a hearing in early November, however, Page had only hazy memories of the trip. He said he remembered seeing a Hungarian official but could not recall who.

“You don’t remember the names of anyone you met with or what their positions were in the Hungarian government?” Schiff asked, according to a transcript of the closed-door session.

“Not right now,” Page replied. “I can’t recall.”

Page told the members he could only barely remember the visit, saying “the detailed specifics of that are a distant memory.”

But Schiff was incredulous. “You went all the way to Budapest, and you can’t remember who you met with and what you hoped to accomplish?” he asked.

According to Megyesy, he spoke to Page in his office in the ornate parliament building, a sprawling landmark along the Danube River that draws legions of tourists. Their conversation covered a range of topics, Megyesy said, including the recent strain in relations between the U.S. and Hungary.

“I walked him through the politics and the issues with respect to Hungary,” Megyesy said.

Page held another meeting in Budapest, this one with Szemerkenyi, who was also in the city at the time, for coffee at a hotel, according to one person familiar with the meeting. Page initially met Szemerkenyi at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. The two met a third time in October at an embassy function in Washington, she said.

“When Mr. Page went to Budapest, I was on a scheduled visit back home and met with him for courtesy meetings,” Szemerkenyi told ABC News in a written statement. “Our conversations were friendly, discussing only general foreign policy issues.”

The infamous 35-page dossier detailing unverified intelligence gathered by a former British spy hired to dig up damaging information on then-candidate Trump contains allegations that Page held secret meetings with Russian officials during a visit to Moscow in July. Page has flatly denied the dossier’s assertion and frequently derides the file as the “dodgy dossier.”

Megyesy said no outsiders attended his meeting with Page, but when Schiff asked Page directly if he met with any Russians during his visit to Hungary, his answer was a bit more vague.

“There may have been one Russian person passing through there,” Page responded. “But I have no recollection because it was totally immaterial and nothing serious was discussed.”
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-ca ... d=51284300

The Budapest Bridge: Hungary’s Role in the Collusion Between the Trump Campaign and the Russian Secret Service
April 13, 2017 1:22 pm·
Dr. András Göllner’s essay is the first installment of a three part series in HFP.

Introduction

It was during the 2016 Presidential election campaign, and for the first time in American electoral history, that a hostile foreign power, aided and abetted by one of the candidates, was able to decisively intervene and significantly influence the outcome of an American election.

American public opinion, the mass and social media, the political establishment and, the country’s secret services, are bitterly divided about the veracity of the relationship between the Russian secret services and Donald Trump’s campaign team. Most commentators claim that even if conclusive evidence of collusion were to be found, it is well nigh impossible to prove, that the relationship had any tangible impact on the outcome of the election.

This first, of a two part series, summarizes some fresh evidence about the nature of the collusion between the Russians and the Trump campaign. It will provide some empirically verifiable evidence of the electoral impact of the Russian leaks, in the context of the strategic aspirations of the Trump campaign.

We do not claim to have any insight into the evidence at the disposal of the FBI about the alleged collusion between the Trump team and the Russian secret service. What we have, is evidence, that the FBI is forbidden by law to investigate, because it lies outside the territory of the USA.

This series argues that the place where the FBI, Congress, and the American mass media should be looking for evidence, about the collusion between senior Trump staffers and the Russian secret service is not in America, but in far away Hungary, a member of NATO, the European Union, and a champion of Vladimir Putin in the West.


The Chain Bridge in a foggy Budapest. Photo source: piusz / muemlekem.hu
Our investigation has uncovered „the smoking gun” about the relationship between the Trump campaign and the Russian secret services. It shows that the connection between the Russian secret services and the Trump campaign is not a direct one. It did not run through the Russian embassy in the US or through the spies that have been expelled by Obama. It did not run through New York City or Moscow, or in conversations between campaign staff and the Russian ambassador to the US. It ran through Budapest, which is the European Headquarters of Putin’s FSB. Budapest was the „bridge” between the Trump campaign and the Russian secret service.

Some of our evidence is well known. It is known, for example, that the Russians and the Trump campaign had identical strategic interests. They both wanted to position Hillary Clinton as a „crooked and untrustworthy” candidate. What has not been known, up to now is, that the unacknowledged architect of this grand strategy was the notoriously secretive Arthur J. Finkelstein, a long time New York associate of Donald Trump, going back to the Roy Cohen days.

Finkelstein is perhaps the most bitter opponent of Hillary Clinton amongst a small circle of pro-Republican campaign gurus, and a frequent flyer to many of the capitals where Putin is seen as a hero. Finkelstein introduced Paul Manafort years ago to Putin’s pro-Russian Ukrainian oligarchs, who use their corporate hats, to advance Putin’s fortunes abroad. Finkelstein also had a big hand in Manafort’s addition to the Trump team. Finkelstein has also served as chief political strategist for the past 10 years, to Putin’s most loyal follower in the Western alliance – the Hungarian PM, Viktor Orbán. Finkie, as Orbán is fond to call him, also works for some of the most notorious autocrats of the former Soviet Republics, and always indirectly, so his pay-masters can’t be easily identified – a skill that he passed on to Trump’s ex-campaign chairman, Manafort.

As Steven Bannon confessed to the Hollywood Reporter, after the elections, polling and visceral messaging, a Finkelstein specialty, played a critical part in the Trump campaign. It is not a coincidence, that the campaign’s senior pollster was Tony Fabrizio, who learned his craft on Finkelstein’s knees. Virtually the entire top tier of the Trump campaign, including Roger Ailes and Roger Stone, have close personal ties to the man, who is known worldwide, as „The Merchant of Venom”.

While Finkelstein has been consciously kept out of the Trump campaign’s limelight, the campaign worked from his playbook, and that playbook had an important, hitherto unseen chapter on the art of dealing with Russia’s secret services. This series argues, that the Trump campaign had not only criminal intent (aiding and abetting Russian hacking of a political opponents’s confidential data base) but benefited from its criminal activities, by cornering the political market. (As our evidence about Finkelstein’s role in the campaign began to gather momentum, Finkelstein became unreachable. His friends and associates say, that he is undergoing chemotherapy for lung cancer. We hope this is not yet another Finkelstein maneuver to throw people off his scent. We wish him speedy recovery so we can ask him directly, what he was doing on „the Budapest Bridge”.)

Putin’s Trojan Horse and the Trump campaign

During the past 7 years, and much of it thanks to Finkelstein’s successful Hungarian consulting practices, Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s current PM, managed to transform this small Central European country into a pale shadow of it’s former democratic self. Orbán, by his own admission, is Putin’s most supportive champion inside the Western alliance and the first and only Western leader to publicly endorse Trump as a candidate. By conservative estimates, Budapest is home to approximately 1000 members of the Russian secret service, most of them in the possession of Hungarian passports provided for by Hungary’s pro-Russian Ministry of the Interior. (These passports can be had for a hefty fee -300,000 Euros a pop – and after waiting only 30 days, which allows no time for a thorough vetting of the applicant. If passports were to be given to foreign aliens under such circumstances in the US, Homeland Security would be purged from top to bottom. In Canada, the minister would have to resign. In Hungary, this „passport business” has been subcontracted out to some of the most corrupt people in Viktor Orbán’s immediate entourage.)

The Hungarian government’s corrupt passport system, enables Russia’s top operatives to work and travel without any restrictions within the EU, and more importantly, to travel to the USA without a visa. Hungary’s bank laws provide an impenetrable financial shelter to those who are dealing with Putin’s secret services. Orbán’s Ministry of the Interior provides a protective umbrella against internet and telephone snooping. It is no coincidence that Europe’s most notorious right-wing populists, anti-Semites and anti-Muslim radicals, such as Holland’s Gert Wilders and Britain’s Nick Griffin, have established residences in Hungary. It is no coincidence that Putin is a frequent secret visitor. It is also not a coincidence that Finkelstein has a home in Budapest, and was, until recently, in weekly contact with Vladimir Putin’s most loyal Hungarian surrogate, Viktor Orbán.

Finkelstein and Orbán’s top Hungarian strategist, Árpád Habony, have a London based joint company, close to the headquarters of Wikileaks. The Russian leakage of embarrassing information about Hillary Clinton, was coordinated through Budapest, and London, and was designed to lower Clinton’s trustworthiness at pre-planned moments during the campaign. Clinton’s trustworthiness ratings, her public opinion support plumeted, on average, 5% points after each well timed leak, and especially during the closing stages of the campaign. These leaks dominated the news cycles at critical junctions in the campaign. Carefully orchestrated, they drove the all important pro-Trump social media (Facebook, Snapchat, twitter) that left the Clinton campaign grasping for air in the critical battle ground states. Arguing that the leaks had no concrete effect on the outcome of the election in the targeted states, is equal to saying that birds can fly without wings.

Some argue, that one of the reasons why Paul Manafort, Carter Page, and Roger Stone offered to voluntarily testify before the congressional committee is, that they were not the principals in the transactions, that took place on „the Budapest bridge”. We argue, that their eagerness to testify early has an entirely different explanation. They simply wanted to get through the congressional screening process early, before the proverbial brown matter hits the fan, and before the learning curve of the congressional investigators goes up a notch.

Who were the principals on „The Budapest Bridge” the FBI and Congress should investigate particularly closely, apart from Arthur Finkelstein ? The investigations should include Jo Anne Barnhart, Finkelstein’s close personal friend, and managing director of the Hungarian government’s secretive lobby arm in the US, the „Magyar Foundation”. It should include another Finkelstein protegé, and Hungarian lobbyist, ex-congressman Connie Mack IV. The latter is the recipient of a 5 million dollar contract, through a third party, to promote Putin’s Hungarian disciple in America. The Congressional investigators should also talk to Senator Sessions’ right hand man during the campaign, J.D. Gordon, who travelled six times to Budapest, and considers Putin’s Trojan Horse as one of the finest leaders within the Western alliance. Last, but not least, the FBI and the Congressional team should investigate Sebastian Gorka, Bannon’s „terrorism expert” and a man with a 15 year connection to anti-American, pro-Russian, pro-Iranian radicals in Hungary.

In our second installment, we shall provide some empirically verifiable evidence about Gorka’s Hungarian associates, and his 15 year track record in Hungary as an enemy of democracy and the rule of law. That alone should make for his rapid exit from his strategic position in the White House. Our own findings fully support the call of three American senators – Sens. Dick Durbin of Illinois, Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, and Ben Cardin of Maryland – who, on March 17, sent a joint letter to the US Justice Department asking the agency to look into whether Gorka “falsified his naturalization application or otherwise illegally procured his citizenship.” We will argue, that Trump’s senior campaign associate, failed to disclose the full extent of his neo-fascist, anti-American, anti-Democratic political ties in Hungary prior to being given American citizenship. By marrying an American multimillionaire, a Trump campaign donor with connections in high places, Gorka managed to secure access to the White House on behalf of forces, that, are diametrically opposed to America’s national interests.
In our second installment we shall provide further evidence of „the smoking gun” in the Trump campaign, and in Mr. Gorka’s closet.

András B. Göllner split his time between Budapest and Montreal from 1990 until 2010, as a senior political-economic advisor, on governmental transparency. He organized the current Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán’s first visit to Canada, and learned, through close personal contact, about many of his corrupt practices. He conducted the first and only study (financed by USAID) that looked inside the operations of the Hungarian Ministry of the Interior, which today, works arm in arm with Russia’s secret services. He is an internationally recognized expert on Central European politics, has a PhD in Economics from the London School of Economics, published 3 books, and dozens of articles, in such well known English language media as The LA Times, The Huffington Post, The National Post, or the Montreal Gazette, to name just a few. He is a regular contributor to the Hungarian Free Press. His current status is Professor Emeritus, at Montreal’s Concordia University.
http://hungarianfreepress.com/2017/04/1 ... t-service/

[seemslikeadream]

Former Trump Aide Carter Page Was on U.S. Counterintelligence Radar Before Russia Dossier
Court documents, testimony show foreign-policy adviser was known to authorities as early as 2013

Carter Page, a foreign policy adviser to Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, spoke with reporters following a day of questions from the House Intelligence Committee in Washington, Nov. 2, 2017.
Carter Page, a foreign policy adviser to Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, spoke with reporters following a day of questions from the House Intelligence Committee in Washington, Nov. 2, 2017. PHOTO: J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE/ASSOCIATED PRESS
By Rebecca Ballhaus and Byron Tau
Updated Feb. 1, 2018 10:03 a.m. ET

Carter Page, who served as a foreign-policy adviser to Donald Trump’s campaign, was known to U.S. counterintelligence officials for years before he became a prominent figure in a dossier of unverified research about the future president’s ties to Russia.

The White House is expected to release as early as this week a memo detailing what Republicans allege were surveillance abuses during the 2016 campaign. Republicans say the memo, written by the GOP staff on the House Intelligence Committee, shows that prosecutors used information gleaned from an ex-British spy—who was paid by a research firm hired by Democratic opponents of Mr. Trump—in their application for a secret court order to monitor Mr. Page. Mr. Page hasn’t been accused of wrongdoing.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation on Wednesday urged the White House not to release the memo, citing “grave concerns about material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo’s accuracy.” Democrats have also said the document is misleading and cherry-picked.

“It’s clear that top officials used unverified information in a court document to fuel a counterintelligence investigation during an American political campaign,” said Rep. Devin Nunes (R., Calif.), an ally of Mr. Trump who serves as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and who directed the writing of the memo.

The FBI said the memo contains significant omissions about the surveillance decisions made during the time period in question.

Yet a question persists: What prompted the FBI to suspect that Mr. Page was acting as an agent of Russia?

Rep. Devin Nunes (R., Calif.) serves as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and directed the writing of the memo detailing what Republicans allege were surveillance abuses during the 2016 campaign.
Rep. Devin Nunes (R., Calif.) serves as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and directed the writing of the memo detailing what Republicans allege were surveillance abuses during the 2016 campaign. PHOTO: JOSHUA ROBERTS/REUTERS
The full extent of the evidence regarding Mr. Page that the Justice Department submitted to the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court—a secret judicial panel that approves surveillance warrants against suspected agents of foreign powers—isn’t clear. The Wall Street Journal has previously reported that the warrant included material beyond research compiled by Christopher Steele, the former British intelligence official. What is known from court documents and testimony by Mr. Page before Congress is that the former Trump aide has been known to U.S. counterintelligence officials dating back to at least 2013, nearly three years before he joined the Trump campaign.

The dispute between the White House and the FBI comes against the backdrop of a federal investigation, now led by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, into whether Trump associates colluded in the Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 election. Mr. Trump has denied collusion, and Moscow has denied election meddling. Mr. Page has called the investigation “baseless.”

Mr. Page’s dealings with Russia date back to more than a decade before Mr. Trump ran for president and his opponents began crafting the dossier.

For three years, starting in 2004, Mr. Page was living in Moscow, where he opened an office for the investment banking firm Merrill Lynch & Co. He also served as an adviser on “key transactions” involving the Russian state-owned energy company PAO Gazprom and RAO UES, the Russian state-controlled electricity monopoly, according to Mr. Page’s biography.


In January 2013, Mr. Page was in New York at an Asia Society event on China and energy development, when he met Victor Podobnyy, a junior attaché at the Russian consulate in New York City who was in the audience, Mr. Page told the House Intelligence Committee last fall.

In March 2013, Mr. Page met with Mr. Podobnyy again over coffee or a Coke, he told the House panel in his testimony. Mr. Page, asked why he had sought out Mr. Podobnyy a second time, said he wanted to practice his Russian.

That June, three years before the 2016 presidential campaign and the creation of the dossier, Mr. Page had his first known brush with a U.S. counterintelligence official. He was interviewed by FBI counterintelligence agent Gregory Monaghan and another FBI agent, who were investigating whether Mr. Podobnyy was a Russian intelligence agent, according to a criminal complaint.

In 2015, Mr. Podobnyy was charged with posing as a U.N. attaché under diplomatic cover while trying to recruit Mr. Page as a Russian intelligence source. The criminal complaint filed by U.S. federal prosecutors alleged Mr. Podobnyy was an agent for the SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence service. The complaint also detailed Mr. Podobnyy’s discussion in April 2013 with Igor Sporyshev, a second alleged SVR agent posing as a Russian trade representative, about efforts to recruit “a male working as a consultant in New York City.” Mr. Podobnyy was afforded diplomatic immunity and left the country.


In a statement last year, Mr. Page confirmed he was the unnamed consultant and said he helped U.S. federal investigators during the case. The complaint charging Mr. Podobnyy said Mr. Page had provided the Russians with documents, which Mr. Page said were “nothing more than a few samples from the more detailed lectures” he was preparing for a course he was teaching at New York University at the time.

Asked for comment Wednesday, Mr. Page forwarded a 23-page letter from May 2017 addressed to the House Intelligence Committee in which he said the Justice Department under President Barack Obama was best described by the final scene in the movie “The Big Short,” which shows that bankers went effectively unpunished for their role in the financial crisis of 2007.

“After essentially achieving very little in his six-years in office, it is understandable why [then-Attorney General Eric] Holder might want to target a token Russian banker during his final months in office,” Mr. Page wrote.

Mr. Page said at his June 2013 meeting with U.S. counterintelligence agents, he discussed “at length” his research on the international political economy, “because it seemed to me that the resources of the U.S. government might be better allocated towards addressing real national security threats.” He added that the “harsh retribution” he subsequently faced “marked a direct retaliation.”

Six months after prosecutors charged Mr. Podobnyy, Mr. Trump launched his presidential campaign. In January 2016, Mr. Page told the House committee, he had an “initial meeting” with the campaign and began serving as an informal adviser.

In March 2016, in an interview with the Washington Post, Mr. Trump officially named Mr. Page as a member of his foreign policy advisory committee. Also named to the committee: George Papadopoulos, who last year pleaded guilty to lying to FBI agents about his contacts with Russians during the campaign.

A former Trump national security adviser said the campaign wasn’t aware at the time of Mr. Page’s past dealings with U.S. counterintelligence officials.

Over the course of the campaign, Mr. Page traveled to Russia at least twice and kept top Trump campaign advisers abreast of his travels, Mr. Page told the House panel.


When it comes to the Russia investigation, the word ‘collusion’ gets thrown around a lot. But there's not a lot of clarity on what it actually means. Is it illegal? Is it grounds for impeachment? We asked a law professor to explain. Photo Illustration: Drew Evans/The Wall Street Journal.

In July 2016, Mr. Page delivered a lecture in Moscow hosted by the New Economics School to a packed auditorium on his thoughts about global economics trends. In the speech, he criticized the U.S. and European states for their behavior toward states of the former Soviet Union for their “often hypocritical focus on ideas such as democratization, inequality, corruption and regime change.”

Mr. Page told attendees that the thoughts in his speech, delivered in English, were strictly his own and didn’t represent the opinions of any current or former employer. He declined to answer questions after the speech about U.S. politics, saying that the purpose of his speech was academic, and refused to meet with reporters, leaving the auditorium through an exit backstage.


Mr. Page told the House that while in Moscow, he “briefly said hello” to Arkady Dvorkovich, deputy prime minister of Russia, and met with Andrey Baranov, head of investor relations at Russian oil giant PAO Rosneft.

Toward the end of his trip, Mr. Page emailed campaign aides Tera Dahl and J.D. Gordon and told them he would send a “readout soon regarding some incredible insights and outreach I’ve received from a few Russian legislators and senior members of the presidential administration here.”

Mr. Gordon said in an interview that he didn’t recall the email.

Related Video

U.S. investigators are looking into contacts between several current and former associates of Donald Trump and Russian individuals—some with direct ties to the Russian government or state-owned entities. WSJ's Niki Blasina provides a who's who of the Russians at the center of the investigations.
That fall, the Justice Department requested a secret court order to monitor Mr. Page’s ties to Russia, using as part of its request information from Mr. Steele, according to people familiar with the matter. It isn’t clear whether the department had previously requested a FISA warrant on Mr. Page, who left the Trump campaign in September amid reports about his ties to Russia.

At the time, Mr. Steele was working for Fusion GPS, a research firm that was being paid by the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. Before hiring Mr. Steele, the firm’s research had been paid for by a conservative news outlet that opposed Mr. Trump. Mr. Steele ultimately produced a 35-page dossier, which Mr. Trump has dismissed as false.

Mr. Page’s name surfaced repeatedly in the fall of 2016 in classified briefings given to high-level members of Congress, according to people familiar with the matter. That was around the same time the FBI and the Justice Department were applying for a surveillance warrant against Mr. Page in the FISA court.

A month after Mr. Trump won the presidential election, Mr. Page traveled to Russia again. There, he met again with Messrs. Dvorkovich and Baranov, among others, Mr. Page told the House panel.

The following spring, Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general appointed by Mr. Trump, approved a renewal of surveillance of Mr. Page.
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[seemslikeadream]

Carter Page, the star of the Nunes memo, explained

9 questions about the former Trump adviser you were too embarrassed to ask.

By Andrew Prokopandrew@vox.com Feb 2, 2018, 8:30am EST


Mark Wilson/Getty
House Republicans have claimed that the “Nunes memo” will reveal “jaw-dropping,” “shocking,” and “sickening” conduct from law enforcement officials in connection with their investigation of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia — conduct that could even be “worse than Watergate.”

So you may be surprised to hear that the memo, which isn’t yet public, is reportedly mostly, and perhaps even entirely, about ... Carter Page.

Yes, that Carter Page. The rather eccentric former Trump campaign adviser, infamous for his extremely pro-Russia views and strange media appearances, has unexpectedly turned out to be the centerpiece of the GOP’s effort to discredit the Russia investigation.

Federal government investigators grew suspicious of Page’s Russian contacts and a trip he took to Moscow during the campaign, so they reportedly wiretapped him in the fall of 2016. They continued this surveillance throughout early 2017. However, so far, Page has not been accused of or charged with anything in special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe.

Now Republicans are angry because the Justice Department’s request for permission to surveil Page partly relied on information from the infamous Steele dossier. That’s the document filled with lurid and scandalous allegations about Trump and his advisers’ ties to Russia that all involved, including Page, have heatedly denied. It’s a problem, the GOP argues, because the dossier project was ultimately funded by Hillary Clinton’s campaign lawyer — meaning that Page was being surveilled in part because of a campaign’s opposition research (which, it should be noted, hasn’t been corroborated and could be entirely false).

Yet law enforcement officials and Democrats who’ve seen the underlying intelligence emphasize that the dossier allegations were only part of the justification for the Page surveillance. The FBI, they say, had good reason to suspect Page beyond the dossier. (Indeed, Page drew investigative scrutiny for his contacts with Russian intelligence in 2013, long before the Trump campaign was a glimmer in anyone’s eye.)

All the while, the man at the center of this firestorm remains an enigma. Again, keep in mind that he hasn’t been charged with anything. For all we know, he could be an ordinary citizen who genuinely thinks the Russian government is great, has a lot of Russian friends and contacts, happened to get in way over his head, and truly was unjustly smeared in the Steele dossier. So let’s dive deeper into the mystery of Carter Page.

1) Who on earth is “Carter Page, PhD”?

Page, in a television appearance
That is the question much of the Washington foreign policy community asked in unison on March 21, 2016. (Well, some probably substituted profanity.)

On that date, presidential candidate Donald Trump sat down with the Washington Post’s editorial board and read out five names of people he said were serving on his foreign policy team. The list included George Papadopoulos, who has since pleaded guilty to making false statements to the FBI about his contacts with Russians — “excellent guy,” Trump said.

Trump also read the name “Carter Page, PhD” — and offered no further elaboration on him.

Within days, though, a few things about Page became clear from a profile by Bloomberg’s Zachary Mider. Page had a whole lot of experience doing business in Russia. He had far more positive views of Putin’s regime than most Americans. And he wasn’t a fan of the US’s sanctions on Russia.

After growing up in New York and spending a few years in the Navy in the 1990s, Page completed a few graduate degrees in international relations and business. Then for most of the 2000s, he worked at the investment banking firm Merrill Lynch, focusing on Russia and Eastern Europe.

His work led him to move to Moscow from 2004 to 2007, and it entailed advising Gazprom, the majority Russian state–owned oil firm, on deals. Soon afterward, he moved back to the US, left Merrill, and went into business for himself, advising investors on Russia-related projects.

Though all this, Page didn’t have a particularly high public profile — until, out of nowhere, Trump dropped his name. Mider quoted a former Merrill executive who’d worked with Page in Russia professing shock at his high-profile new gig. “I could not imagine Carter as an adviser on foreign policy,” the former executive, Sergey Aleksashenko, said. “It’s really surprising.”

2) So why was this rando on Donald Trump’s foreign policy team?

Trump and Sam Clovis. Scott Olson/Getty
If we think hard enough, we can remember a time before Trump was president of the United States and the undisputed commander of the Republican Party. Back then, he was a disreputable outsider whose campaign faced fierce opposition from the GOP establishment and policy elites and who was considered highly likely to lose the general election.

After Trump’s disorganized and not particularly professional campaign managed to win most of the first GOP primaries, he faced increasing pressure to demonstrate that he was a plausible major-party presidential nominee. His aides decided that part of that task entailed putting together something they could call a “foreign policy team.” The task fell to Sam Clovis, a conservative talk radio host and evangelical activist from Iowa who had distinguished himself by joining the Trump campaign relatively early.


Carter Page didn’t wait for Clovis to find him. According to his later testimony, Page reached out to New York’s Republican Party chair, Ed Cox, in late December 2015, asking to be put in touch with Trump’s team. Cox put Page in contact with then-campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, who sent him over to Clovis, who is said to have put him on Trump’s list of advisers.

The Trump team claims that the main reason they took Page on was that they were taking “anyone ... with a pulse,” as a campaign official put it to the Washington Post last year. Indeed, Clovis’s task surely was complicated by the fact that few in the “respectable” GOP foreign policy community were willing to sign on with Trump at that point.

But by one account, Clovis had something else on his mind too. Papadopoulos was added to the same team as Page, and according to a plea agreement he signed last year, Clovis told him early on “that a principal foreign policy focus of the [Trump] campaign was an improved US relationship with Russia.” With that in mind, Page would seem a perfect fit, considering his job history and policy views.

3) What did Carter Page actually do when he was a Trump adviser?
To hear some in Trump’s orbit tell it, he did nothing whatsoever. “Mr. Page is not an advisor and has made no contribution to the campaign,” campaign spokesperson Jason Miller said in September 2016. “He’s never been part of our campaign. Period.”

Indeed, Page testified that he’s never met or even spoken to Trump himself, and that he missed out on the one meeting the Trump foreign policy team had with the candidate because, he said, he had a conflict that day.

However, emails and documents made public in connection with Page’s congressional testimony do show that he was in regular contact with several campaign foreign policy advisers in the spring and summer of 2016 — though it’s not entirely clear what, exactly, he was doing.

On May 16, 2016, Page sent a curious email to two of his fellow foreign policy advisers, J.D. Gordon and Walid Phares. Page wrote (emphasis added):

As discussed, my strategy in order to keep in sync with the media relations guidelines of the campaign has been to make my key messages as low-key and apolitical as possible. But after seeing the principal’s tweet a few hours in response to the cocky “in politics and in life, ignorance is not a virtue” quote by the same speaker at Rutgers yesterday, I got another idea. If he’d like to take my place and raise the temperature a little bit, of course I’d be more than happy to yield this honor to him.
“The principal” here is Trump, and “this honor” Page wants Trump to “take my place” in, he admitted in congressional testimony, is ... a trip to Russia.


So Page has admitted that he emailed Trump advisers in guarded, roundabout language about an upcoming trip to Russia that was part of a “strategy” previously discussed with others on the campaign.

Trump didn’t end up going to Russia that year — but Page did, for a five-day trip in July 2016. This raised eyebrows even at the time, since Page gave a public speech in which he criticized US policy as too antagonistic toward the Kremlin. Yet Page and Trump’s team said, then and afterward, that Page took this trip purely as a private citizen and not at all on behalf of the campaign.


After Page returned, he started to keep tabs on preparations for the Republican convention. And when Trump’s team helped block a delegate’s proposed amendment calling for the US to arm Ukraine, Page was thrilled. “As for the Ukraine amendment, excellent work,” he wrote in an email to several campaign foreign policy officials.

But rumors soon swirled about what Page might have been up to during his Moscow trip. After a briefing in August, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid wrote a letter to the FBI saying “questions have been raised” about whether Page met with “high-ranking sanctioned individuals” during his trip.

Finally, in September, Michael Isikoff of Yahoo News reported that the government was investigating Page’s ties to the Kremlin — a revelation that led the Trump campaign to harshly disassociate themselves from Page. (In Page’s own telling, he chose to take a leave of absence. He denied doing anything wrong.)

After Trump had won the election, Page never appeared to rejoin his team. He took another trip to Russia in December 2016, during the transition, but testified that this trip was also undertaken entirely on his own.

4) So what happened during Carter Page’s July 2016 trip to Russia?
There are basically two possibilities.

The first is that, as Page says, he traveled to Russia on his own initiative, meeting with various business and personal contacts, and that nothing all that significant took place.

The second is that he’s hiding something.

Rumors of the latter soon reached the ears of Christopher Steele, the former British spy researching Trump’s Russia ties. On July 19, 2016, Steele filed a report for what become known as his “dossier” focused on Page’s Russia trip. Citing Russian sources, he wrote:

That Page had met with Igor Sechin, the CEO of Rosneft, the majority Russian government-owned oil company, and discussed lifting US sanctions
That Page had also met with Igor Diveykin, a Russian intelligence official, and discussed Russian “kompromat” on Clinton (and Trump)
In a later report, dated October 18, 2016, Steele made an even more astonishing claim:

That when Page allegedly met with Sechin, the oil executive had offered Page and Trump’s associates “the brokerage of up to a 19 per cent (privatized) stake in Rosneft in return” for lifting sanctions, and that Page “expressed interest” and confirmed that Trump would lift sanctions if he won
But in the year and a half since, no one has yet managed to confirm any of the claims in Steele’s dossier about Page’s trip. (My opinion is that they should be viewed with extreme skepticism.)

Page, meanwhile, has furiously denied the claims, saying that he’s never met either Sechin or Diveykin and disparaging what he calls the “dodgy dossier” both in media appearances and under oath.

Still, Page’s story that the trip had nothing to do with Trump’s campaign doesn’t entirely fit with the evidence either.

George Papadopoulos was also emailing campaign advisers about a potential Trump trip to Russia around the same time. And according to his plea deal, one senior official forwarded his email to another and wrote, “Let’s discuss. We need someone to communicate that DT is not doing these trips. It should be someone low level in the campaign so as not to send any signal.”
Page sent other Trump aides a memo about his trip, in which he referred to himself as “Campaign Adviser Page.” In it, he described a “private conversation” he had with Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich, who he said “expressed strong support for Mr. Trump.”
Page also wrote an email to two Trump aides saying he’d received “some incredible insights and outreach [...] from a few Russian legislators and senior members of the Presidential administration here.”
Also, Page admitted that he did meet with a different Rosneft executive — Andrey Baranov, the company’s head of investor relations, with whom he had a preexisting relationship.
When asked about some of this under oath, Page sounded evasive. He claimed his interaction with Dvorkovich lasted “well less than 10 seconds,” and that his reference to “insights and outreach” referred merely to speeches he’d attended and articles he’d read during his trip.


Now, there is a relatively innocent potential explanation here: that Page, in his real-time reporting back to the Trump campaign last year, could have been wildly exaggerating his own connections and what he had achieved in Russia to make himself appear more important and influential. But the documents certainly give reason to suspect there was more to Page’s Russia trip than we know — even if it’s unclear what it might be.

5) Why did US law enforcement officials start looking into Carter Page’s ties to Russia?
Well, it depends which time you’re referring to.

In fact, the FBI interviewed Page because of his contacts with a Russian intelligence operative all the way back in 2013.

The bureau was looking into a suspected Russian spy ring and learned that one of their suspects, Victor Podobnyy, had met with Page in hopes of finding a potential recruit. In fact, Podobnyy was caught on a wiretap discussing Page:

He writes to me in Russian [to] practice the language. He flies to Moscow more often than I do. He got hooked on Gazprom thinking that if they have a project, he could be rise up. Maybe he can. I don’t know, but it’s obvious that he wants to learn lots of money. ...

... I will feed him empty promises. ... You promise a favor for a favor. You get the documents from him and tell him to go fuck himself.
Podobnyy said one more thing about Page on the tap. “I think,” he said, “he is an idiot.”

Page did end up giving some energy business documents to Podobnyy, and the FBI interviewed him about it in June 2013. But they decided Page didn’t know Podobnyy was a spy, and didn’t charge him with anything.

6) Okay, then why did US law enforcement officials start looking into Carter Page’s ties to Russia again during the presidential campaign?
According to the New York Times, the FBI opened an investigation into Trump associates’ ties to Russia at some point in July 2016, after receiving a tip that George Papadopoulos had bragged to an Australian diplomat that he knew Russia had dirt on Hillary Clinton.

Christopher Steele was meanwhile doing his own investigation at the time — and was providing what he found to his own contacts in the FBI (who had worked with him before and viewed him as a reliable source of information).

So it was apparently some combination of 1) the obvious (Page’s trip to Russia and history of Russian contacts); 2) Steele’s information; and 3) other information the government obtained from other sources that led the FBI to zero in on Page.

But it was reportedly on October 19, 2016, that the Justice Department took the particularly dramatic step of asking for permission to surveil Page’s communications. (Note that this was a month after the Trump campaign disassociated itself from Page and said he had nothing to do with it, which would seem to debunk the talking point that this was an excuse for the FBI to spy on the Trump team.)


That application to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court is said to be the central preoccupation of the Nunes memo. The memo reportedly argues that the surveillance application relied on information from Steele’s dossier without proper disclosures — which Republicans find objectionable since Steele’s project was ultimately funded by the Clinton campaign and they believe it to be bogus.

Yet all sides also admit that the application didn’t entirely rely on the dossier, and that the FBI had other sources of information as well. Law enforcement officials and Democrats who’ve seen the memo argue that it gives a misleading picture of how strong the application to surveil Page was, by leaving out those other sources for political reasons.

Another angle is that FISA surveillance applications have to be renewed every 90 days. The government is said to have applied for more surveillance on Page at some point in January or February 2017, and then again in late April or May 2017 — with the latter application approved by newly sworn-in Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. (Rosenstein is special counsel Robert Mueller’s boss and ultimately oversees the investigation that Trump hopes to discredit.)

7) What is up with Carter Page’s media and legal strategy?

Rather than lawyering up and responding with caution to the Russia scandal, as most others potentially implicated in it have, Page was omnipresent discussing the topic in seemingly nonstop media appearances last year — in a way that both baffled and entertained political observers.

Throughout these appearances, Page frequently filibustered, went on tangents, and worked himself into a state of high dudgeon while maintaining that he was completely innocent of any wrongdoing and was being unjustly smeared. He also testified before the House Intelligence Committee last November for more than six hours — without a lawyer.

“The past few months has been one of the greatest pleasures of my life,” he told USA Today last fall. “You don’t fully appreciate the law and a just, functioning legal system until you’ve had your basic civil rights so severely abused based on the lies funded by rich political patrons.”

“I genuinely hope, Carter, that you’re innocent of everything, because you’re doing a lot of talking,” MSNBC’s Chris Hayes told him in October. “It’s either admirably bold or reckless, but I guess we’ll find out.”

8) How important is Carter Page to Robert Mueller’s investigation?
For all we know, he isn’t important to it at all.

The Washington Post reported that in March 2017, FBI agents interviewed Page for a total of about 10 hours over five separate meetings, and asked him about claims made in the Steele dossier.

But there’s no indication that this led anywhere, and it happened before Mueller was appointed to lead the investigation in May.

Mueller has held his cards remarkably close to the vest all along. But he’s indicted two former Trump aides already — Paul Manafort and Rick Gates. And he’s gotten two others — George Papadopoulos and Michael Flynn — to become cooperating witnesses as part of plea deals. None of the charges that have been brought appear to relate in any way to Page, or (so far as we know) to information learned from the surveillance of Page.

So it’s entirely possible that investigators eventually concluded Page did nothing wrong and moved on to focus their probe elsewhere. Or not.

9) That was long. Can I see a picture of Carter Page to close it out?
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https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics ... arter-page

[seemslikeadream]

The Unlikely Martyrdom of Carter Page

In a more rational world, the fact that Trump’s Justice Department sought to surveil the former Trump aide would undermine his claim to political persecution.


DAVID A. GRAHAM JAN 29, 2018 POLITICS

The meta-fight over releasing a memo prepared by Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee has at times obscured what exactly is in the memo, but its contents are slowly starting to come into view.

A New York Times story Monday provides one crucial element. According to that report, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein signed off on an application for a warrant to surveil Carter Page, a former Trump campaign foreign-policy adviser, that was based on information gathered by Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence officer who was paid in part by the Democratic National Committee. But when the Justice Department requested (and was granted) the warrant, the memo contends, it did not inform the judge of the source of the information underpinning the warrant.


The claim here is as complicated and convoluted as it sounds. The underlying theory seems to be this: If the warrant was obtained based on Steele’s own research and other materials he may have relayed, and if the judge was not informed, then the warrant might have been improper. Courts have ruled that even if evidence of criminal behavior is found using such a warrant, that evidence can’t be used in court—it is, as Justice Felix Frankfurter put it, “fruit of a poisonous tree.”

But there are many questions about this theory. In broad terms, the memo’s chief exponent, Representative Devin Nunes, has long since undermined any presumption of accuracy to which he may once have been entitled. Nunes has long insisted that the Obama administration was improperly surveilling Trump campaign members, and in spring of 2017 set off a strange cascade of events with a cloak-and-dagger late-night visit to the White House. Nunes, a former member of President Trump’s transition team, said he was going to deliver sensitive information to the president—a curious explanation, since he was heading the House Intelligence Committee’s ostensibly independent investigation into Russian interference in the election. It soon emerged that in fact Nunes was receiving information from the White House, which he used to make unsubstantiated claims about improper use of intelligence by Obama officials.



That means it’s hard to take any assertions in the memo at face value. Still, it’s known that Steele was passing information to the FBI, as Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS, who hired Steele, testified to Congress. Fusion GPS had been hired by the law firm Perkins Coie, on behalf of the Democratic National Committee. It’s also known that Page has been under FBI surveillance. The question is whether the Steele information was used to obtain the warrant; what other information was used; and whether use of Steele-derived information would invalidate the warrant.

First, there’s no obvious reason why the Justice Department couldn’t use information obtained in opposition research in a warrant application, assuming, of course, that it was accurate. Simpson said Steele approached the FBI with information he had obtained not at the behest of the DNC, but because he worried that there was information important to American national security, and he had a duty to inform law enforcement. This is arguably in contrast to the behavior of the Trump campaign, which after being told that an agent of a foreign government wished to offer damaging information about the Hillary Clinton campaign ahead of a June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower, chose not to inform law enforcement. Many political operatives have said they would have contacted the FBI under similar circumstances.

Second, it’s unclear what if any non-Steele information was referenced in the warrant application. Bradley Moss, a lawyer who works on national-security cases, said in an email that he expected any application would have used other sources.


“You don’t premise politically controversial and sensitive FISA warrants against a political candidate and/or his associates based exclusively upon a private opposition research document,” Moss said. “That would be professional malpractice. The fact that DOJ purportedly went forward with getting the FISA warrant(s) suggests that at least some of the information in the warrant application was independent of the dossier.”

The dossier has become a focus for Republicans seeking to discredit the investigation into Trump’s ties to Russia. Some critics have argued that the entire investigation was premised entirely on Steele’s work, which elicited a rebuttal laying out how the probe long predated the dossier.

Focusing on the Page warrant is a surprising strategy. It is not difficult to imagine that the American intelligence community had more information about Page than what was in the Steele dossier. As early as 2013, the U.S. government believed Russian intelligence was trying to recruit Page as an asset. The FBI was also surveilling him in 2016, prior to any warrant request that Rosenstein would have approved.

While illegally obtained evidence is indeed invalid, Page makes for an unlikely rallying point, both because of his history of questionable ties to Russia and because of his own statements in interviews and in congressional hearings. In jaw-dropping November 2 testimony to the House Intelligence Committee, Page offered confusing and often changing testimony about trips to Russia and Hungary and about who he had met with during those trips.


Page is a particularly unusual foil for Rosenstein, who until joining the Trump administration had a reputation as a meticulous, nonpartisan, and fair public servant but is also a lifelong Republican. But the deputy attorney general has found himself a medium for partisan warfare. After Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation, Rosenstein inherited it, and soon appointed Robert Mueller as special counsel.

Although Rosenstein is a Republican and was appointed to his post by Donald Trump, the president has suggested he is a Democrat and questioned whether he is trustworthy. The crux of Trump’s anger is the Mueller investigation: Trump is angry about Mueller’s appointment, and angry that Rosenstein has endorsed Mueller’s work so far. Trump has railed against Rosenstein in interviews, and according to a New York Times story last week considered firing him as a method of firing Mueller.

Attacking Rosenstein serves a dual purpose for Trump and his allies. If Rosenstein is forced to resign or fired, Trump would appoint a replacement who would become Mueller’s boss, and could fire the special counsel or move to limit his probe. The White House seems to recognize that firing Rosenstein merely to mess with the Mueller probe would be politically disastrous, but alleging misconduct in a warrant application could provide an excuse to push him out for other reasons. Even if Rosenstein doesn’t go, however, the current line of argument serves the purpose of undermining trust in the FBI and DOJ as they continue to investigate Trump.


Last week, it was revealed that Trump sought to fire Mueller in June, but was blocked by White House Counsel Don McGahn, who threatened to resign rather than order Mueller’s dismissal. Trump has at times threatened to fire Mueller, and a pivotal moment is approaching, as Mueller talks with Trump’s attorneys about the president testifying. Democrats and some Republicans have renewed warnings to the White House not to fire Mueller, but bills that would protect the probe have bogged down in Congress.

Page has long alleged that he was the target of politically motivated persecution by the Obama administration, which he has referred to in letters to congressional committees as the “Clinton/Obama regime” and the “Clinton-Obama-Comey” regime, after the former FBI director. In a more rational world, the fact that Trump’s Justice Department also thought the Page case required a FISA warrant would undermine Page’s claim to political persecution; instead, in the inverted logic of the present moment, it’s being used to argue that Rosenstein is some sort of partisan Democratic hack. (Page did not reply to requests for comment about the new report.)

In a rational world, the White House would also likely be defending the Justice Department and the president’s own deputy attorney general. Instead, the Justice Department and White House are on opposite sides of the debate over the Nunes memo. The Justice Department has said that releasing the memo, which contains classified information, would be “extraordinarily reckless,” but Trump—who seems to see vindication or at least political advantage from the memo’s release—has pushed for its release. This is the genius of the memo as political bludgeon: It forces the Justice Department into asymmetrical warfare, because the government would likely be unwilling to release classified information that would contextualize or even justify actions described in the memo.

Deputy White House Press Secretary Raj Shah suggested Monday morning that the White House would allow release over the Justice Department’s objections. “The Department of Justice doesn’t have a role in this process,” he said.

The House Intelligence Committee authorized the circulation of the memo among members of Congress, but not its public release. It also refused to share it with the Justice Department. Ranking Democrat Adam Schiff has blasted the memo as “a hodgepodge of false statements and misleading representations” that cherry-picks facts and omits the underlying intelligence on which it is based, which he said most members have not reviewed. Last week, committee Democrats prepared their own rebuttal memo, which is also not public. The tug-of-war over releasing the Nunes memo, and speculation about what it contains, may be over soon, though. The House Intelligence Committee is slated to vote as soon as Monday night on a public release.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/ar ... ge/551735/

[seemslikeadream]

Why Carter Page Was Worth Watching
There’s plenty of evidence that the former Trump campaign adviser, for all his quirks, was on suspiciously good terms with Russia.
By LUKE HARDING February 03, 2018


On Friday, Washington was convulsed by a contentious four-page document: the Nunes memo. The memo, according to its putative author, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Devin Nunes, revealed unprecedented abuses by the FBI and Justice Department. The counterview: That Nunes’ memo was a misleading, partisan and shoddy piece of work. In this second reading, the purpose of the memo was to offer succor to President Donald Trump and to discredit the investigation into Trump, Russia and collusion led by special counsel Robert Mueller.

Most remarkable was the unlikely hero at the center of this national row, Carter Page. The memo alleged that the bureau bugged his communications after deliberately duping the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Not only that but using supposedly flawed material supplied by Christopher Steele, the former British intelligence officer whose dossier accused Trump of consorting with Russian president and former KGB operative Vladimir Putin. But who exactly was Carter Page? And were there, in fact, genuine reasons why the FBI might have ground for suspecting him?


To answer that question meaningfully it is necessary to go back—to 2013, and to a group of jaded Putin spies working deep undercover in downtown Manhattan. One of them was Viktor Podobnyy. Moscow had dispatched Podobnyy to the United States under his own name. He worked in New York under official “cover”: attaché to Russia’s delegation to the United Nations.

In reality, Podobnyy was employed by Russia’s foreign intelligence service, the SVR. Putin was the former head of the SVR's domestic counterpart, the FSB. Podobnyy's mission was to recruit Americans and to collect economic intelligence. One of his SVR colleagues was Igor Sporyshev, who was working covertly as a “trade representative.” Neither man was aware that the FBI had a bug inside their SVR office. The Bureau was secretly listening to their conversations.

One of their tasks was to liaise with another SVR officer, Evgeny Buryakov. Buryakov's position was somewhat precarious. He didn’t have diplomatic immunity, which meant if he was caught he could go to jail. His official day job was at a branch of a Russian state bank in Manhattan, VEB.

As FBI wiretaps showed, the techniques for meeting with Buryakov were distinctly old-school. Typically, Sporyshev would ring Buryakov and tell him he had to give him “something”—a ticket, a book, a hat, an umbrella. The two would meet outdoors. This sometimes happened outside Buryakov’s bank office on Third Avenue—an inconspicuous brown tower with a 1960s abstract sculpture at street level opposite the foyer. They would exchange documents.

Sporyshev’s biggest headache was finding Americans willing to become intelligence sources for Russia. This was tough. He had approached two young women working in financial consultancy who had recently graduated from a New York university. Sporyshev told Podobnyy he was skeptical anything would come of it. Or, as he put it in chauvinist terms: “In order to be close you need to either fuck them or use other levers to execute my requests.”

The Russian spies, however, had one promising lead. This was a guy—an energy consultant based in New York City. Unlike the women, he was eager to help. And, it appeared, keen to make money in Moscow. There was a drawback: The source—whom the FBI called “Male-1”—was something of a dimwit.

The FBI intercepts record:

PODOBNYY: [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. Plus he writes to me in Russian [to] practise the language. He flies to Moscow more often than I do. He got hooked on [the Russian state energy company] Gazprom, thinking that if they have a project, he could rise up. Maybe he can. I don’t know, but it’s obvious he wants to earn loads of money.

SPORYSHEV: Without a doubt.

Podobnyy explained he intended to string Male-1 along. That meant feeding him “empty promises.” Podobnyy would play up his connections to Russia’s trade delegation, to Sporyshev, and pretend his SVR colleague might “push contracts” the American’s way.

PODOBNYY: This is intelligence method to cheat! How else to work with foreigners? You promise a favour for a favour. You get the documents from him and go tell him to fuck himself. But not to upset you I will take you to a restaurant and give you an expensive gift. You just need to sign for it. That is ideal working method.

These tactics may have been crude. In this instance they worked. Podobnyy approached the consultant at an energy symposium in New York. According to FBI court documents, the two swapped contacts. They emailed for several months. Male-1 co-operated, although he says he did not know the Russian was a spy. He even handed him documents about the energy world.

This was a strange business—Kremlin officers careening around Manhattan, spycraft involving fake umbrellas, and an American intelligence source who spent more time in Moscow than his Russian handlers. Plus espionage professionals who turned out to be suffering from ennui.

The American willing to provide information to Putin’s foreign intelligence officers rented a working space at 590 Madison Avenue. The building was linked by a glass atrium to a well-known New York landmark, Trump Tower. The atrium had a pleasant courtyard, with bamboo trees, where you could sit and drink coffee. Next door was a franchise of Niketown.

From the atrium you could take the elevator up to the Trump Tower public garden on the fourth floor, with its sparrows and maple trees. The din from West 57th Street meant the garden wasn’t exactly tranquil. Or you could queue up with Japanese and German tourists at the Trump Tower basement restaurant and salad bar. Failing that, there was Starbucks on the first floor.

Male-1 had a name. At this point few had heard of him. He was Carter Page.

***

Page is a balding figure in his mid-forties, with buzz-cut hair and the super-lean physique of a cyclist or fitness fanatic. When not on his Cannondale mountain bike, he is typically dressed in a suit and tie. When he is nervous, he grins. One person who met him around this period described the encounter as “excruciating.” Page was “awkward” and “uncomfortable” and “broke into a sweat.”

Page’s résumé was curious, too. He spent five years in the navy and served as a Marine intelligence officer in the western Sahara. During his navy days, he spent lavishly and drove a black Mercedes, according to a friend from his academy class, Richard Guerin.

He was smart enough to get academic qualications: fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, master’s from Georgetown University, a degree from New York University’s business school. And a PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London.

This, it transpired, was hard won. Page’s British academic supervisors failed his doctoral thesis twice, an unusual move. In a report they described his work as “verbose” and “vague”. Page responded by angrily accusing his examiners of “anti-Russian bias”.

Page’s apparent Russian sympathies were evident from much earlier. In 1998 Page spent three months working for the Eurasia Group, a strategy consulting firm. Its founder, Ian Bremmer, later described Page as his “most wackadoodle alumnus.” Page’s vehemently pro-Kremlin views meant that “he wasn’t a good fit,” Bremmer said.

In 2004 Page moved to Moscow, where he became an energy consultant with Merrill Lynch. As Page tells it, it was while working as an investment banker that he struck up a relationship with Gazprom. He advised Gazprom on transactions, including a deal to buy a stake in an oil and gas eld near Sakhalin, the desolate island on Russia’s Pacific coast. He bought Gazprom shares.

According to Politico, few people in Moscow’s foreign business community knew of him. Those who did were underwhelmed. “He wasn’t great and he wasn’t terrible,” his former boss, Sergei Aleksashenko, said, adding that Page was “without any special talents or accomplishments,” “in no way exceptional,” and “a gray spot.”

Three years later, Page returned to New York and to his new office next to Trump Tower. From there he set up a private equity business, Global Energy Capital LLC. His partner was Russian—a wealthy former Gazprom manager called Sergei Yatsenko. Did Yatsenko know Podobnyy and Sporyshev? Or indeed other members of Russia’s underground espionage community?

In the worsening dispute between Putin and the Obama administration, Page sided with Moscow. He was against US sanctions imposed by Obama on Russia in the wake of Crimea. In a blog post for Global Policy, an online journal, he wrote that Putin wasn’t to blame for the 2014 Ukraine conflict. The White House’s superior “smack-down” approach had “started the crisis in the first place,” he wrote.

Page’s rampant pro-Moscow views were at odds with the US State Department under Clinton and with almost all American scholars of Russia. After all, it was Putin who had smuggled tanks across the border into eastern Ukraine. Not that Page’s opinions counted for much. Global Policy had a small circulation. It was edited out of Durham University in the north of England.

His relationship with the journal fizzled out when he wrote an opinion piece lavishly praising a pro-Russian candidate ahead of the U.S. presidential election—Trump.

And then something odd happened.

In March 2016 candidate Trump met with the Washington Post’s editorial board. At this point it seemed likely that Trump would clinch the Republican nomination. Foreign affairs came up. Who were the candidate’s foreign policy advisers? Trump read five names. The second was “Carter Page, PhD.” Given Trump’s obvious lack of experience of world affairs, this was a pivotal job.

One former Eurasia Group colleague said he was stunned when he discovered Page had mysteriously become one of Trump’s foreign policy advisers. “I nearly dropped my coffee,” he told me. The colleague added: “We had wanted people who could engage in critical analysis of what’s going on. This is a guy who has no critical insight into the situation. He wasn’t a smart person.”

Page’s real qualification for the role, it appeared, had little to do with his restless CV. What appeared to recommend him to Trump was his boundless enthusiasm for Putin and his corresponding loathing of Obama and Clinton. Page’s view of the world was not unlike the Kremlin’s. Boiled down: the United States’ attempts to spread democracy had brought chaos and disaster.

Podobnyy and Sporyshev approached their duties with a certain cynicism laced with boredom and a shot of homesickness, the FBI tapes revealed. Page, by contrast, was the rarest of things: an American who apparently believed that Putin was wise and virtuous and kind.

By this point, the Russian spies had been spirited out of the United States. In 2015 their ring was broken up. As accredited diplomats, they were entitled to fly home. Buryakov was less fortunate. At the time that Page joined Trump’s campaign, Buryakov pleaded guilty to acting as an unregistered foreign agent. He got two and a half years in a US jail.

In July 2016 Page went back to Russia, in a trip approved by the Trump campaign. There was keen interest. Page was someone who might give sharper definition to the candidate’s views on future US–Russian relations. Moscow sources suggest that certain people in the Russian government arranged Page’s visit. “We were told: ‘Can you bring this guy over?’” one source said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

One of Russia’s top private universities, the New Economics School, invited Page to give a public lecture. This was no ordinary event but the prestigious commencement address to its class of graduating students. The venue was Moscow’s World Trade Center

Russia’s media hailed Page as a “celebrated American economist.” This, despite the fact that Page’s lecture was distinctly strange—a content-free ramble verging on the bizarre. Page, it seemed, was criticizing U.-.S-led attempts at “regime change” in the former Soviet world. Nobody could be sure. His audience included students and local Trump fans, some of whom were visibly nodding off by the end.

Shaun Walker, the Guardian’s Russia correspondent, had attended an event given by Page the previous evening. He described Page’s PowerPoint presentation as “really weird.” “It looked as if it had been done for a Kazakhstan gas conference,” Walker said. “He was talking about the United States’ attempts to spread democracy, and how disgraceful they were.”

Page was Trump’s leading Russia expert. And yet in the question-and-answer session it emerged that Page couldn’t really understand or speak Russian. Those seeking answers on Trump’s view of sanctions were disappointed. “I’m not here at all talking about my work outside of my academic endeavor,” Page said. At the end, Walker said, Page was “spirited off.”

Clearly, Page was reluctant to give any clues about a Trump administration’s Russia policy or how Trump might succeed in strengthening ties where Obama and George W. Bush had both failed.

So what was he doing in Moscow?

***

According to the Steele dossier —vehemently disputed by Page and subsequently rubbished by Nunes, and Republicans —the real purpose of Page’s trip was clandestine. He had come to meet with the Kremlin. And in particular with Igor Sechin. Sechin was a former spy and, more importantly, someone who commanded Putin’s absolute confidence. He was in effect Russia’s second most powerful official, its de facto deputy leader.

By this point Sechin had been at Putin’s side for more than three decades. He had begun his career in the KGB and served as a military translator in Mozambique. In the 1990s he worked with Putin in the mayor’s offce in St Petersburg. Sechin functioned as Putin’s scowling gatekeeper. He carried the boss’s briefcase and lurked outside Putin’s ground-floor office in St Petersburg’s city hall.

His appearance was lugubrious. Sechin had a rubbery face, narrow-set eyes, and a boxer’s squishy nose. When Putin was elected president, Sechin became his deputy chief of staff and, from 2004, executive chairman of the Russian state oil firm Rosneft, the country’s biggest oil producer. A stint as deputy prime minister was not successful. “He’s clever, despite looking like a dummy. But he can’t speak or do public politics,” Sergei Sokolov, deputy editor of the liberal Novaya Gazeta newspaper, said of Sechin.

In private Sechin impressed. Chris Barter—the former CEO of Goldman Sachs Moscow—described him as an “extremely charming and smart guy, on top of his numbers operationally.” It was clear that Sechin had Russia’s entire security services at his disposal. He would be willing to personally reward anyone who advanced the objectives of the Russian state, Barter added.

In 2014 Page had written a sycophantic piece that lauded Sechin for his “great accomplishments.” In a blog for Global Policy, Page wrote that Sechin had done more to advance U..S.-Russian relations than anybody in decades. Sechin was a wronged Russian statesman, in Page’s view, unfairly punished and sanctioned by the Obama White House.

This was the backdrop to Page’s Moscow trip.

Eleven days after Page flew back from Russia to New York, Steele filed a memo to Fusion GPS, the business intelligence firm headed by former Wall Street Journal reporter Glenn Simpson. Simpson had initially begun investigating Trump and Russia at the behest of the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative website. Only later— once Trump had all but secured the nomination—did a law firm employed by the Democrats take over the Trump contract. The fact that Republicans opposed to Trump had begun the inquiry was nowhere to be found in Nunes’ memo.

Dated July 19, 2016, Steele’s field memorandum was titled: “Russia: Secret Kremlin meetings attended by Trump advisor Carter Page in Moscow.”

Steele’s information came from anonymous sources. In this case that was someone described as “close” to Sechin. Seemingly, there was a mole deep inside Rosneft—a person who discussed sensitive matters with other Russians. The mole may have been unaware its information was being telegraphed to Steele.

In Moscow, Page had held two secret meetings, Steele wrote. The first was with Sechin. It’s unclear where this meeting, if it happened, took place. The second was with Igor Diveykin, a senior official from Putin’s presidential administration and its internal political department.

Based on his own Moscow experience, Barter said that meetings with Sechin came about at short notice. Typically, Sechin’s chief of staff would call up and order a meeting forty minutes later. “It was always off the cuff, last minute. It was, boom: ‘Can you come now?’” Barter said. He personally met with Sechin six times, he added.

Sometimes these meetings took place in the White House, the Russian seat of government. On other occasions they were in Rosneft’s tower HQ, overlooking the Moskva River. Of the Steele dossier, Barter told me: “Everything is believable.”

According to Steele, Sechin raised with Page the Kremlin’s desire for the United States to lift sanctions on Russia. This was Moscow’s strategic priority. Sechin offered the outlines of a deal. If a future Trump administration dropped “Ukraine-related sanctions,” there could be an “associated move” in the area of “bilateral energy co-operation.” In other words, lucrative contracts for U.S. energy firms. Page’s reaction to this offer was positive, Steele wrote, adding that Page was “generally non-committal in response.”

Steele obtained further information from his high-placed source, which said that the Sechin meeting had taken place on either July 7 or 8—the same day as or the day after Page’s graduate lecture.

According to an “associate,” Sechin was so keen to lift personal and corporate Western sanctions that he offered Page an unusual bribe. This was “the brokerage of up to a 19 per cent (privatized) stake in Rosneft in return.” In other words, a chunk of Rosneft was being sold off.

No sums were mentioned. But a privatization on this scale would be the biggest in Russia for years. Any brokerage fee would be substantial, in the region of tens and possibly hundreds of millions of dollars. Page “expressed interest” and confirmed that were Trump to become US president, “then sanctions on Russia would be lifted,” Steele wrote.

Sechin’s offer was the carrot.

There was also a stick.

The stick was flourished during Page’s alleged second meeting, with Diveykin. The official reportedly told Page that the Kremlin had assembled a dossier of compromising materal on Clinton. And might possibly give it to Trump’s campaign. However, according to Steele, Diveykin also delivered an ominous warning. He hinted—or even “indicated more strongly”—that the Russian leadership had damaging material on Trump, too. Trump “should bear this in mind” in his dealings with Moscow, Diveykin said.

This was blackmail, clear and simple.

Page was the go-between meant to relay this blunt message to Trump. He was part of a chain of cultivation and conspiracy that stretched from Moscow to Fifth Avenue. Allegedly, that is. Over the coming months, Page would vehemently deny any wrongdoing. He would assert that he was a victim. He said he didn’t meet Sechin.

However, in testimony to Nunes’ House Intelligence committee last November Page admitted meeting Andrey Baranov, Rosneft’s head of investor relations. Did sanctions come up? “Not directly,” Page replied. Did Baranov talk about privatization? He “may briefly have mentioned it,” Page admitted. Was Baranov relaying Sechin's wishes? Almost certainly.

Page’s problem, then, was that he had an unfortunate habit of seeking out Russian spies—ones in their twenties like Podobnyy and older ones like Sechin, either directly or via underlings. And Russian ambassadors like Sergei Kislyak, whom Page met in summer 2016 at the Republican national convention.

***

Page’s multiple interactions with senior Russians were a matter of growing concern to US intelligence. In the coming months, the FBI seemed to grow suspicious that Page might be a Russian agent. That summer the bureau decided it was going to bug Page’s phone calls. This was no easy matter. To do this lawfully, federal agents had to obtain a warrant. Any application of this kind was voluminous—as then FBI Director James Comey put it, these were often thicker than his wrists.

The application included Page’s earlier testimony to the FBI. In June 2013 counter-intelligence agent Gregory Monaghan interviewed Page in connection with the Podobnyy–SVR spy ring. Page said he’d done nothing wrong. Since then, Page had held further meetings with Russian operatives that had not been publicly disclosed, the application said.

The FBI presented its evidence before a secret tribunal— the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance, or FISA, court, which handles sensitive national security cases. The bureau argued that there were strong grounds to believe that Page was acting as a Russian agent. The judge agreed. From this point on, the FBI was able to access Page’s electronic communications. An initial ninety-day warrant was later renewed.

As the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, Steele’s research formed only part of the application. Four separate federal judges approved these renewals. All were appointed by Republican presidents.

Meanwhile, Page’s career as a Trump adviser was entering its terminal phase. His speech in Moscow had provoked comment, much of it adverse. The campaign’s ties with Russia were becoming a source of controversy. According to the Washington Post, quoting a campaign manager, Page wrote policy memos and attended three dinners in Washington for Trump’s foreign advisory team. He sat in on meetings with Trump. Apparently, his attempts to meet Trump personally failed.

In the classified briefing to congressional leaders in late August 2016 Page’s name figured prominently. The CIA and FBI were sifting through a mound of intercept material featuring Page, much of it “Russians talking to Russians,” according to one former National Security Council member. When Senate minority leader Harry Reid wrote to Comey in early autumn, he cited “disturbing” contacts between a Trump adviser and “high-ranking sanctioned individuals.” That was Page. And Sechin.

These embarrassing details surfaced in a report by Yahoo! News. Within hours, the Trump campaign had disavowed Page—casting him out as a nobody who had exaggerated his links to Trump. All of which made his subsequent rehabilitation by Nunes more bizarre. Page exited the campaign in late September. It was an inglorious end, and his troubles were just beginning. Steele’s Rosneft source was right. In early December—less than a month after Trump won the White House—Rosneft announced it was selling 19.5 percent of its stock. This was one of the biggest privatizations since the 1990s and, on the face of it, a vote of confidence in the Russian economy.

Steele’s mole had known about the plan months before Rosneft’s management board was informed. The board only discovered the deal on December 7, hours after Sechin had already recorded his TV meeting with Putin revealing it. Even the Russian cabinet had been kept in the dark. “Sechin did it all on his own—the government did not take part in this,” one source told Reuters.

In the weeks to come, US and other Western intelligence agencies would examine this deal closely. Where did the money go? Russian journalists were sceptical that it had ended up with Trump; it was more probable, they reasoned, that it would have travelled to Putin and Sechin. There was no proof of this, and neither the Kremlin nor other parties would offer comment.

A day after the Rosneft deal was unveiled, Page flew back to Moscow. During his previous July visit he’d been feted. Since then, however, Page had become a liability to the Trump campaign—and therefore to Russia, too. This time Page was an unperson, a toxic figure, at least officially. Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s press spokesman, said government leaders had no plans to meet with him.

Page’s own explanation for his visit was vague. He had come to see “business leaders and thought leaders,” he told RIA Novosti, the Russian state news agency. He would be in Moscow for six days, he said.

In the months to come, Page would vehemently deny the allegations against him. He portrayed himself as a “peace-seeker.” He even expressed sympathy for Podobnyy, the spy— whom he described as a “junior Russian diplomat.” In an email to the Guardian, Page complained that Obama had persecuted Podobnyy, Sporyshev, and him “in accordance with Cold War traditions.”

He wrote: “The time has come to break out of this Cold War mentality and start focusing on real threats, rather than obsolete and imagined bogeymen in Russia.”

Page’s loyalty to the SVR was breathtaking. Podobnyy wasn’t an “imagined bogeyman” but a career operative working against the interests of the United States. And, moreover, one who had bad-mouthed Page behind his back, calling him “a bit of an idiot”.

Whatever Page’s motives were for helping Russian intelligence—greed, naivety, stupidity—his actions surely justified the FBI’s interest in him. There was a simple way of avoiding U.S. surveillance and a FISA court warrant. It could be summed up like this: Don’t hang out with Russian spies.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story ... emo-216934

[seemslikeadream]

Carter Page boasted of Kremlin ties in 2013

Carter Page, a former Trump campaign adviser, said he had close ties to the Kremlin in a 2013 letter "to an academic press during a dispute over edits to an unpublished manuscript," reports TIME. Page is at the center of the Nunes memo controversy after the document alleged the FBI used the disputed Trump-Russia dossier to obtain a FISA surveillance wiretap against him. The key line:

Over the past half year, I have had the privilege to serve as an informal advisor to the staff of the Kremlin in preparation for their Presidency of the G-20 Summit next month.
Between the lines: Page has been suspected of overstating his influence during the course of the Russia probe. "The more Page talks, the less clear his story has become — and people have begun to wonder about not just his competence but also his sanity," NYT's Jason Zengerle wrote last month.
https://www.axios.com/carter-page-boast ... 06d3a.html

Carter Page's dad runs an energy company that does work in Russia.

[seemslikeadream]

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE JANUARY 12 REAUTHORIZATION OF CARTER PAGE’S FISA ORDER

February 25, 2018/2 Comments/in 2016 Presidential Election, FISA, Mueller Probe /by emptywheel
I’d like to riff on a small but significant detail revealed in the Schiff memo. This paragraph adds detail to the same general timeframe for the orders obtained against Page laid out in the Nunes memo: the first application approved on October 21, with reauthorizations in early January, early April, and late June.



REPUBLICAN JUDGES APPROVED THE CARTER PAGE FISA ORDERS

The passage also narrows down the judges who approved the orders, necessarily including FISC’s sole Reagan appointee Raymond Dearie and FISC’s sole Poppy appointee Anne Conway, plus two of the following W appointees:



Rosemary Collyer (worst FISC judge ever)
Claire Eagan (OK, she may be worse than Collyer)
Robert Kugler
Michael Mosman (a good one)
Dennis Saylor (also good)
I won’t dwell on this here, but it means the conspiracy theory that Obama appointee Rudolph Contreras approved the order, and because of that recused in the Flynn case, is false.

THE FIRST REAPPLICATION CAME DAYS AFTER THE DOSSIER AND A SECOND ISIKOFF ARTICLE CAME OUT
Back to the timing. The footnotes provide the dates for two of the other applications: June 29 (in footnotes 12, 14, 15, 16) and January 12 (footnote 31), meaning the third must date between April 1 and 12 (the latter date being 90 days after the second application).


As I laid out here, the timing of that second application is critical to the dispute about whether FBI handled Michael Isikoff’s September 23 article appropriately, because it places the reapplication either before or after two key events: the publication of the Steele dossier on January 10 and Isikoff’s publication of this story on January 11. Isikoff’s January article included a link back to his earlier piece, making it fairly clear that Steele had been his source for the earlier article. The publication of that second Isikoff piece should have tipped off the FBI that the earlier article had been based on Steele (not least because the second Isikoff piece IDs Steele as an “FBI asset,” which surely got the Bureau’s attention).

FBI DIDN’T RESPOND TO ISIKOFF IN TIME FOR THE SECOND APPLICATION
Now, you could say that FBI should have immediately reacted to the Isikoff piece by alerting the FISC, but that’s suggesting bureaucracies work far faster than they do. Moreover, the application would not have been drafted on January 12. Except in emergency, the FISC requires a week notice on applications. That says the original application would have been submitted on or before January 5, before the dossier and second Isikoff piece.

FBI appears to have dealt with the Isikoff article interestingly. The body of the Schiff memo explains that Isikoff’s article, along with another that might be either Josh Rogin’s or Julia Ioffe’s articles from the time period, both of which cite Isikoff (Rogin’s is the only one of the three that gets denials from Page directly), were mentioned to show that Page was denying his Moscow meetings were significant.



That redacted sentence must refer to the January 12 application, because that footnote is the only footnote citing that application and nothing else in the paragraph discusses it.

An earlier passage describes the first notice to FISC, in that same January 12 application, “that Steele told the FBI that he made his unauthorized media disclosure because of his frustration at Director Comey’s public announcement shortly before the election that the FBI reopened its investigation into candidate Clinton’s email use.”

It’s possible that redacted sentence distinguishes what Grassley and Graham did in their referral of Steele. The first application stated that, “The FBI does not believe that [Steele] directly provided this information to the press.” Whereas the January reapplication stated in a footnote that the FBI, “did not believe that Steele gave information to Yahoo News that ‘published the September 23 News Article.” Within a day or so, the FBI should have realized that was not the case.

So it’s true FBI was denying that the September Isikoff article was based off Steele reporting after the time they should have known it was, but that can probably best be explained by the application timelines and the lassitude of bureaucracy.

THE SUBMISSION OF THE PRELIMINARY SECOND APPLICATION LIKELY COINCIDES WITH THE OBAMA BRIEFING ON THE RUSSIAN THREAT
As noted above, the second application would have been submitted a full week earlier than it otherwise would have had to have been given the 90-day term on FISA orders targeting Americans. That means the preliminary application was probably submitted by January 5. Not only would that have been too early to incorporate the response to the dossier, most notably the second Isikoff piece, but it even preceded Trump’s briefing on the Russian tampering, which took place January 6.

It’s also interesting timing for another reason: it means FBI may have submitted its reapplication targeting Page on the same day that Jim Comey and Sally Yates briefed Obama, Susan Rice, and Joe Biden, in part, on the fact that Putin’s mild response to the election hack sanctions rolled out in late December arose in response to requests from Mike Flynn to Sergey Kislyak. As I addressed here, that briefing has become a subject of controversy again, as Chuck Grassley and Lindsey Graham tried to suggest that the Steele dossier may have contributed to the investigation of Flynn.

But contrary to what the Republican Senators claimed in their letter to Rice on the subject, Rice claims the Steele dossier and the counterintelligence investigation never came up.

The memorandum to file drafted by Ambassador Rice memorialized an important national security discussion between President Obama and the FBI Director and the Deputy Attorney General. President Obama and his national security team were justifiably concerned about potential risks to the Nation’s security from sharing highly classified information about Russia with certain members of the Trump transition team, particularly Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn. In light of concerning communications between members of the Trump team and Russian officials, before and after the election, President Obama, on behalf of his national security team, appropriately sought the FBI and the Department of Justice’s guidance on this subject. In the conversation Ambassador Rice documented, there was no discussion of Christopher Steele or the Steele dossier, contrary to the suggestion in your letter.

Given the importance and sensitivity of the subject matter, and upon the advice of the White House Counsel’s Office, Ambassador Rice created a permanent record of the discussion. Ambassador Rice memorialized the discussion on January 20, because that was the first opportunity she had to do so, given the particularly intense responsibilities of the National Security Advisor during the remaining days of the Administration and transition. Ambassador Rice memorialized the discussion in an email sent to herself during the morning of January 20, 2017. The time stamp reflected on the email is not accurate, as Ambassador Rice departed the White House shortly before noon on January 20. While serving as National Security Advisor, Ambassador Rice was not briefed on the existence of any FBI investigation into allegations of collusion between Mr. Trump’s associates and Russia, and she later learned of the fact of this investigation from Director Comey’s subsequent public testimony. Ambassador Rice was not informed of any FISA applications sought by the FBI in its investigation, and she only learned of them from press reports after leaving office.

Grassley and Graham appear to have confused the IC investigation with the counterintelligence investigation, only the latter of which incorporated the Steele dossier.

In any case, one reason the apparent coincidence between the January 5 briefing and the reapplication process is important is it suggests it was also pushed through a week early to provide room for error with the inauguration. If a FISA order on January 19 goes awry, it might not get approved under President Trump. But if anything happened to that application submitted around January 5, it’d be approved with plenty of time before the new Administration took over.

INTELLIGENCE FROM PAGE’S FISA COLLECTION HELPED SUPPORT THE GOVERNMENT’S HIGH CONFIDENCE THAT RUSSIA ATTEMPTED TO INFLUENCE THE ELECTION
Here’s one of the most interesting details in the Schiff memo, however. This passage describes that the wiretap on Page obtained important intelligence, though it won’t tell us what it is.



That redacted footnote, number 14, describes that the redacted intelligence is part of what gave the Intelligence Community “high confidence”



Admittedly, this footnote, with its citation to the October and June applications, is uncertain on this point. But for the wiretap on Page to have supported the December ICA assessment of the Russian tampering, then it would have had to have involved collection from that first period.

If that’s right, then it suggests the reason the Obama Administration may have applied for the order renewal early, the same day Comey and Yates briefed Obama on the ICA and Flynn, is because something from that order (possibly targeting Page’s December trip to Moscow) added to the IC’s certainty that the Russians had pulled off an election operation.
https://www.emptywheel.net/2018/02/25/t ... isa-order/

[seemslikeadream]

HIGH-STAKES GAME
Carter Page’s Multimillion-Dollar Dream

The very strange story of how the Chinese came to own 15 percent of Russia’s state oil company, and what Donald Trump’s former campaign adviser had to do with it.

TODD GITLIN
STEVEN E. HALLIWELL
03.28.18 4:35 AM ET
Carter Page is a Rosencrantzian go-between who makes few but intriguing appearances in the ongoing drama of Mad King Donald. Trump might well say of him, as Hamlet said of Rosencrantz and his doppelgänger Guildenstern, that he is “not near my conscience.”

But a news report from Moscow recently about a Chinese government investment casts new light on how the Russian government sought to engage with candidate Trump. The Russian business newspaper Vedomosti wrote that two state-controlled Chinese companies have become major shareholders in CEFC, a nominally private Chinese oil company that is acquiring a large stake in Russia’s huge state-owned oil company, Rosneft. Through this maneuver, the Chinese state now owns about 15 percent of Rosneft.

Vedomosti did not note that Page features as a character in what has been a long-running Rosneft drama. It’s a story of a privatization deal gone bad, and a feckless American intermediary whose only credential seems to be his peculiar presence in the court of the Mad King.

Over the past two years, that big chunk of Rosneft has had a tortuous journey. In July 2016, the British ex-spy Christopher Steele, in his so-called dossier, reported to his client, Fusion GPS, that Page had met earlier that month in Moscow with Rosneft’s CEO Igor Sechin. Sechin, according to Steele’s source, offered Page a commission if he could place the Rosneft shares with a foreign buyer. For many months, Page, already on the FBI’s radar for having met with Russian faux diplomats trying to recruit him, denied meeting with Sechin or any other Russian officials. Finally, before the House intelligence committee, he did admit to meeting with Sechin’s number two, head of investor relations Andrey Baranov.

On the face of it, the offer seemed preposterous. Sechin, a close ally of Putin, a former spy, and one of Russia’s powerhouse leaders, was offering a €10 billion ($11 billion) deal to an obscure, undistinguished, self-styled oil and gas expert. But Page had something else going for him. In 2016, he had become one of Trump’s top five foreign policy advisers. For financial reasons, if no other, Sechin had been tasked by Putin himself to get the Rosneft transaction done. The Russian federal budget had been decimated by low oil prices. Putin needed cash. He also wanted to show Barack Obama and European leaders that Russia was attractive to foreign investors despite the sanctions imposed after the March 2014 seizure of Crimea by Russia’s “little green men.”

Russia could sell up to 19.5 percent of its enormous state oil company and still keep control. For Page, who had traveled to Moscow to make a speech, Russian largesse had the potential to put him in the big leagues. If he could find a buyer, even a small finder’s fee would be worth tens of millions of dollars. This would not have been the only act of Kremlin kindness seen that summer. A month earlier, as is now well-known, a Russian lawyer had offered dirt on Hillary Clinton to candidate Trump’s top advisers at a Trump Tower meeting.


The sale happened, or so it seemed, five months later, on Dec. 7, 2016—a month after Trump’s upset victory. Igor Sechin announced that 19.5 percent of Rosneft had been sold to two big investors: a Qatar sovereign wealth fund and Glencore, the Anglo-Swiss commodities trading firm.

We do not know if Page played any role in contacting Glencore or the Qatar government, but within 24 hours of Sechin’s announcement, Page—no longer on Trump’s team—was on a flight back to Moscow. Even if he had played no role, the sale opened a window on what Steele’s source had said was the main topic of the Page-Sechin meeting: Sechin’s offer of “future bilateral energy cooperation and prospects for an associated move to lift Ukraine-related western sanctions against Russia” in a Trump administration. If a major European commodities firm and a Mideast oil producer now owned a big piece of Rosneft, closer Russo-American cooperation on oil issues became feasible. Five days after the sale to Glencore and the Qataris was announced, President Trump appointed an oilman, Rex Tillerson, as secretary of state.

The Rosneft deal, described as a 50-50 acquisition, soon went off the rails. Glencore said it had offered only token cash for the transaction. The Qataris, who had reportedly put €2.5 billion into the transaction, said nothing. An Italian bank, Intesa, appeared to be guaranteeing $5 billion on behalf of a Cayman Islands company whose ownership no one would divulge. A Reuters analysis found reason to think that a state-controlled Russian bank had channeled the entire sale through a Singapore shell company.

In other words, Putin got the appearance of a private deal for Rosneft, to show he could withstand sanctions, but the deal as presented was at best murky. Fortune wondered aloud whether Russian state-controlled institutions were the real purchasers—in a back-door arrangement that would, if exposed, cause the ruble to collapse.

To show his appreciation for their contribution to “strengthening cooperation with Russia,” in 2017 April Putin bestowed state medals upon the Qatari leader, Glencore’s CEO, and the head of Intesa Bank. But five months later, the deal came undone. The three named financial participants abandoned the pretense that they wanted to invest in Rosneft.

Then, in September, Sechin announced that Glencore and the Qataris were selling the bulk of their shares—$9 billion-worth—to a Chinese firm, the China Energy Corporation (CEFC). CEFC is one of the largest “private” companies in China, and one of the most closely held. Given the back-alley character of the transaction, it is unclear whether the sellers realized any gain.

Meanwhile, oil income was down, Russian expenditures—especially pensions—were up, and Russia was still starved of Western financing. Multilateral organizations, including the International Monetary Fund, were pressing Putin to privatize state companies. The new Chinese owners might have passed the privatization test—until two weeks ago, when the takeover of CEFC by two state-controlled Chinese companies was reported. One report suggests that CEFC’s head was looting the company and did not have the cash to buy the Rosneft shares. The Chinese government stepped in.

China’s Ministry of Finance, in combination with a state-controlled insurance company, will become owners of more than one-third of CEFC’s shares, giving the Chinese government effective control over the Rosneft shares, and with that, a major voice in Rosneft decision-making. Rosneft shares traded in the London market moved down sharply in late February, perhaps on rumors of the impending deal.

Now back to Carter Page. Why was this man, described by his Russian handlers as “an idiot,” offered any role whatsoever in this transaction, let alone a fee likely to run into the tens of millions of dollars? In retrospect, it seems clear that Sechin was desperate to find a partner to buy Rosneft shares. Putin needed the appearance of a privatization deal to prove he was invulnerable to sanctions. No Western investment bank would buy Rosneft shares, no matter how lucrative the package. Sechin had run out of options. As unimpressive as Page was, he was apparently worth a try.

Moreover, no matter how minimal his qualifications, Page simultaneously fit another bill: He was a conduit to Trump, helping to support Russia’s efforts to undermine Hillary Clinton and to install in Washington an American government friendly to Russia. The Russians were probing for multiple access points to Trump. They had seated the testy, mercurial Gen. Michael Flynn at Putin’s side during December 2015 festivities in Moscow. Page’s appointment to the Trump foreign policy team gave Russia another point of entry into Trump’s entourage. Sechin would seem to have had no other reason to deal with Page in the first place—unless Sechin thought that discreet coordination with the United States on oil and gas production, along the lines of OPEC production quotas that Putin had negotiated, was possible, and that Page could start that discussion.

For Russia, the stakes were very high, and however unlikely a player Page appeared to be, he might be useful. Ukraine’s break with the Kremlin threatened control over gas transit lines through Ukraine to Europe and forced Russia to make massive pipeline investments. If Russia were to lose its dominance in supplying Europe with gas, it might find itself courting domestic political crisis. Shoring up Rosneft’s oil revenues and with it the state budget was a high priority; taking a chance on a Page connection would be low-risk.

Russia’s oil-and-gas strategy continues to stumble along. Rosneft’s privatization, likely a Potemkin facade, has ended with China likely controlling a major chunk of Russian oil. Carter Page’s dream of a transcendent payday was a bubble that burst. As Guildenstern might have said, “the very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream.”
https://www.thedailybeast.com/carter-pa ... llar-dream

[stillrobertpaulsen]

HIGH-STAKES GAME
Carter Page’s Multimillion-Dollar Dream

The very strange story of how the Chinese came to own 15 percent of Russia’s state oil company, and what Donald Trump’s former campaign adviser had to do with it.



Now back to Carter Page. Why was this man, described by his Russian handlers as “an idiot,” offered any role whatsoever in this transaction, let alone a fee likely to run into the tens of millions of dollars? In retrospect, it seems clear that Sechin was desperate to find a partner to buy Rosneft shares. Putin needed the appearance of a privatization deal to prove he was invulnerable to sanctions. No Western investment bank would buy Rosneft shares, no matter how lucrative the package. Sechin had run out of options. As unimpressive as Page was, he was apparently worth a try.

Who was it that coined the phrase, "useful idiot"?

Must have been a friend of Page.

[Jerky]

The term actually has a long, confusing, and interesting history.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot