The letter, dated Aug. 25, 2013, was sent by Page to an academic press during a dispute over edits to an unpublished manuscript he had submitted for publication, according to an editor who worked with Page.
“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, where energy issues will be a prominent point on the agenda,” the letter reads.
What (if Anything) Does Carter Page Know?
He has been wiretapped by the F.B.I. and grilled by congressional investigators over his suspected Russia connections. But the Trump campaign foreign-policy adviser can’t seem to stop talking.
Before I visited him in November, Page told me I was the first reporter he had allowed into the office. “I’m sure if you Google ‘Carter Page shadowy,’ hundreds of articles come up,” he boasted. “I like being a shadowy figure.” But when I entered the inner sanctum, I discovered that Global Energy Capital’s headquarters were actually a corporate co-working space. Page, the firm’s only employee, rents a windowless room — outfitted with a small circular table, a whiteboard on wheels and a painting of an orchid — by the hour. Other tenants include the National Shingles Foundation and a wedding-band company called Star Talent Inc. Still, when he mentioned Trump, Page cocked his head toward Fifth Avenue and referred to him as “the gentleman next door here.”
The office is one of many things about Page that are less than initially meets the eye. When Trump announced Page as one of his foreign-policy advisers during a meeting with The Washington Post editorial board in March 2016, he was eager to tout Page’s credentials, identifying him as “Carter Page, Ph.D.” Page’s doctoral adviser for his degree, received in 2011 from the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, was Shirin Akiner, a controversial scholar who has been derided by fellow academics and human rights groups for trying to whitewash human rights abuses in Uzbekistan. But in an email, Akiner told me, “I am afraid I have no information about Carter Page — some 10 years ago, he was one of my many students.”
Page tried unsuccessfully to publish his doctoral dissertation, on energy in Central Asia and Russia, as a book — a failure for which he has blamed the “anti-former Soviet Union, anti-Russia sentiment of various academic publishers.” But one political scientist who reviewed Page’s manuscript told me: “It was very analytically confused, just throwing a lot of stuff out there without any real kind of argument. I gave it a thumbs down — and that’s kind of rare in this business for a review of a full book manuscript.”
Before founding Global Energy Capital in 2008, Page spent seven years working for Merrill Lynch in London, Moscow and New York and, according to his corporate biography, was “involved in over $25 billion of transactions in the energy-and-power sector.” But his involvement appears to have been peripheral at best. In Moscow, he was nicknamed Stranichkin, from the Russian word stranichka, meaning “little page.” “He wasn’t great, and he wasn’t terrible,” Sergei Aleksashenko, who ran Merrill Lynch’s Moscow office while Page worked there, told the journalist Julia Ioffe. “What can you say about a person who in no way [is] exceptional?”
As a midshipman at the Naval Academy, Page read and was profoundly affected by “The Wise Men,” Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas’s book about Dean Acheson, Averell Harriman and the other mandarins who shaped Cold War-era foreign policy. He set out to play a similarly influential, “discreetly backstage” role in world affairs. People who encountered Page in his pre-Trump days recall him as someone who was forever struggling in that effort. Stephen Sestanovich, a professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, remembers running into Page — who is a prodigious conference-goer — on the sidelines of various Council on Foreign Relations forums and round tables related to Russia. “His view of how the world worked seemed to have an edgy Putinist resentment to it,” Sestanovich says. “I think Carter genuinely felt an affinity for Putin’s critique of the U.S. foreign-policy establishment and its unfairness to Russia, because he wasn’t doing any better with that establishment than Putin was.” In 2013, a Russian intelligence operative who was posing as a United Nations diplomat met Page at an Asia Society conference; according to the F.B.I., the Russian spy tried to recruit Page but encountered difficulties because, as he was heard telling a colleague in an F.B.I. wiretap, Page was “an idiot.”
It was the Trump campaign that finally provided Page what he had been seeking for years: a seat at the table. Ed Cox, the chairman of the New York State Republican Committee and an acquaintance, secured Page a meeting in early 2016 with Trump’s campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, who in turn passed off Page to Sam Clovis, a talk-show host and conservative activist in Iowa who was building out Trump’s foreign-policy team. Even among Trump advisers, that team was an object of derision. “To call them D-listers would be an insult to D-listers,” one former Trump adviser says. But Page didn’t see it that way at all. “These were some of the best discussions I ever had, with some of the most impressive people,” he recalls. “It was like an oasis.”
Page’s time at the oasis would be brief. That July, he traveled to Moscow for five days to give a speech at the New Economic School. Not long after he returned, he received a text message from a Wall Street Journal reporter asking whether he met in Moscow with Igor Sechin, a Putin ally who is now chief executive of the Russian oil conglomerate Rosneft, and Igor Diveykin, a top Russian intelligence official. Similar questions from other reporters soon followed. Page told them — and still maintains — that he didn’t meet either man. But in late September, Yahoo News ran an article reporting that American intelligence officials suspected that Page had met with both of them in Moscow — a claim, Page later discovered, that appeared in the dossier on Trump’s suspected Russia entanglements complied by the former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele. Three days after the Yahoo report, Page announced he was taking a “leave of absence” as a campaign adviser. ... more https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/18/magazine/what-if-anything-does-carter-page-know.html
Washington (CNN)Former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser Carter Page struggled to explain Tuesday how he could be an informal adviser to the Kremlin and also advise an American presidential campaign.
Last week, Time magazine reported that Page bragged about being an informal adviser to the Kremlin in a 2013 letter to an editor reviewing his manuscript submitted for publication.
ABC's "Good Morning America" anchor George Stephanopoulos pressed Page on the two roles as part of why law enforcement may have targeted him for surveillance under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. A controversial Republican intelligence memo released last week highlighted that Page had been targeted.
"You can understand how that would raise questions and could lead to probable cause," Stephanopoulos said. "On the one hand, at one point you say you're an adviser to the Kremlin. Then you're an adviser to Donald Trump."
"Look, the probable cause, based on all the evidence that keeps dripping out and now has been substantiated with the Friday, you know, first memo, is that it was based on dodgy dossier which was, you know, a political stunt," Page responded.
The GOP-crafted memo Page referenced alleges that the FBI and the Justice Department cited, in part, a dossier funded by a law firm on behalf of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign to obtain a warrant to surveil Page. Republicans had previously funded the opposition research effort that later led to the dossier.
"If you're talking about obstruction, that's real obstruction of justice -- false evidence," Page said Tuesday.
In 2013, the FBI interviewed Page about his ties to Russia, warning him that Russian intelligence services tried to recruit him as an agent. Page admits talking to the undercover Russian spy but said he did not realize that the man was an intelligence agent at the time and that he did not share anything sensitive.
Page has said that he's never spoken to President Donald Trump despite his status as a foreign policy adviser. During the presidential transition, Trump's team distanced itself from him and denied any collusion between the campaign and Russia.
Last fall, Page admitted that the topic of Russia "may have come up" in emails with campaign foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos, who pleaded guilty to charges of making a false statement to the FBI about his contact with Russian government officials.
Page, who told the Senate intelligence committee in May he had "brief interactions" with low-level Russian officials in 2013, traveled to Moscow in July 2016, shortly after Papadopoulos forwarded a request from Russian officials to meet with Trump or someone in the Trump campaign. Page denied that the Russia trip was in his capacity as a campaign adviser.
And in November 2017, Page told the House Intelligence Committee he was invited to speak in Russia after joining the campaign, and that senior campaign officials knew about the engagement.
EXCLUSIVE Former Senior FBI Official Is Leading BuzzFeed’s Effort to Verify Trump Dossier
Anthony Ferrante coordinated the U.S. government’s response to Russian election interference. Now he’s helping a news site defend itself from a Russian billionaire’s lawsuit.
For the last six months, a team led by a former top FBI and White House cybersecurity official has been traveling the globe on a secret mission to verify parts of the Trump dossier, according to four sources familiar with different aspects of the ongoing probe.
Their client: BuzzFeed, the news organization that first published the dossier on U.S. President Donald Trump’s alleged ties to Russia, which is now being sued over its explosive allegations.
The investigation, being conducted by FTI Consulting, is running in parallel to special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia in Kremlin-directed efforts to interfere with the 2016 presidential election. With the special counsel probe under wraps, the BuzzFeed court case could represent the first public airing of an investigation into the veracity of some of the dossier’s claims.
FTI is a Washington-based business advisory firm that specializes in areas ranging from corporate litigation to forensic accounting, and it is a frequent post-government landing pad for FBI officials.
The ramifications of FTI’s dossier investigation could be game-changing for Mueller’s probe, because it “would establish outside veracity of dossier allegations,” a source familiar with the work told Foreign Policy. Yet news of FTI’s involvement, including the critical role of a former top FBI official, would also be controversial because the dossier itself is “a political football,” the source said.
The dossier, which was funded by those connected with the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party, has been the subject of ongoing controversy; while some of its claims have allegedly been verified, many others remain unproven. Trump and his allies have repeatedly attacked those involved in the dossier, as well as top FBI officials, as being involved in a partisan witch hunt.
Ferrante, a former top FBI official who previously served as director for cyber incident response at the U.S. National Security Council during the Barack Obama administration, is now at FTI Consulting, where he is leading the effort.
Ferrante joined the FBI as a special agent in 2005, and he was assigned to the bureau’s New York field office, where he worked on cyber threats to national security. In 2006, he was selected as a member of the FBI’s Cyber Action Team, a group of experts who deploy globally to respond to critical cyber incidents.
As a top FBI cybersecurity official tasked to the White House, Ferrante was in charge of coordinating the U.S. government response to Russian attempts to meddle in the 2016 presidential election, among other responsibilities. Prior to joining the NSC in 2015, Ferrante was chief of staff for the FBI’s cyber division at headquarters under then-Director James Comey. Ferrante, still working for the FBI but at the White House, stayed in his position as director for cyber incident response at the NSC through the Trump administration, until April 2017, when he left to join FTI.
At FTI, Ferrante launched what’s now been a months-long stealth effort chasing down documents and conducting interviews on the ground in various countries around the world. His team directed BuzzFeed lawyers to subpoena specific data and testimony from dozens of agencies or companies across the country and assembled a cyber ops war room to analyze that data, according to sources familiar with the work.
BuzzFeed is being sued for libel by Russian technology executive Aleksej Gubarev, who argues that the news organization was reckless in publishing a series of memos written by former British spy Christopher Steele. Those memos — part of a so-called dossier of information about Trump — include unverified claims that servers belonging to a company owned by Gubarev were used to hack the Democratic Party’s computer systems during the 2016 campaign.
BuzzFeed’s outside attorneys initially hired FTI to verify aspects of the dossier specifically pertaining to the Gubarev lawsuit, but its scope has since expanded. “If it’s fact, it’s not libel, that’s the idea,” one source told FP.
Evan Fray-Witzer, a lawyer for Gubarev, who has strongly denied those claims, mocked BuzzFeed’s efforts.
“They can hire Nancy Drew, Encyclopedia Brown, or Sherlock Holmes – you can’t find what doesn’t exist,” Fray-Witzer wrote to FP. “There is a simple reason why Buzzfeed hasn’t found any evidence to support the allegations in the Dossier against Mr. Gubarev: the allegations are false.”
BuzzFeed’s legal woes don’t end with the Gubarev lawsuit. In January, Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen, who is also mentioned in the dossier, sued BuzzFeed in connection with their publication of the document.
It’s unclear if anyone from FTI will provide testimony before the Florida court presiding over a libel lawsuit against the media outlet. The names of testifying expert witnesses are expected to be disclosed later this week, and there is a hearing currently scheduled for Thursday in Florida.
“We can’t comment on the specific legal tools used to defend BuzzFeed’s First Amendment rights in this case,” BuzzFeed spokesman Matt Mittenthal told FP.
FTI and Ferrante declined to speak on the record.
The FBI referred FP’s request for comment to the special counsel’s office. Peter Carr, spokesman for the special counsel’s office, declined to comment on the ongoing investigation.
Jana Winter is an investigative reporter based in Washington, DC. She worked previously as a national security reporter at The Intercept and breaking news/investigative reporter for FoxNews.com.
CNN's Chris Cuomo appeared to be in disbelief on Tuesday after Carter Page, a former Trump campaign adviser, suggested that the U.S. government interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election more than Moscow did.
In an interview on CNN's "New Day," Page said that "all the evidence" he has seen suggests that there is more interference by the U.S. in elections than there is by Russia.
He pointed to Radio Free Europe, the U.S.-backed broadcaster, as an example.
"All the evidence I’ve seen so far, Chris, indicates that there is much more interference from the U.S. government than the Russian government," Page told Cuomo.
"You think that the United States government interfered in this last election more than the Russians did?" Cuomo asked. "Why deny that Russia was trying to mess with our election? Why do that?"
"Look, I have no evidence," Page replied.
The U.S. intelligence community concluded in a report made public early last year that Russia sought to disrupt and influence the 2016 presidential race in order to boost the campaign of then-candidate Donald Trump.
Special counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating Russia's role in the election, unsealed indictments earlier this month against 13 Russian nationals and three Russian groups for their roles in the plot to interfere in the race.
Those reports did not suggest the outcome of the 2016 presidential election was changed by the interference, or that Trump's campaign worked with Russia.
Page, who served as a foreign policy adviser to Trump in the first months of his campaign, has been a central figure in the counterintelligence investigation into Russian election meddling. He has largely rejected the notion that Russia interfered in the presidential race and has dismissed Mueller's investigation as politically motivated.
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