Carter Page
Part 3: Secret Kremlin meeting attended by Trump advisor, Carter Page in Moscow
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This is the third part of a point-by-point review of the Russian dossier compiled by former MI6 agent, Cristopher Steele, which documents Trump advisor Carter Page’s interactions with Russian intelligence.
Read Part 2 here.
Who is Carter Page?
Carter Page is a Putin sympathizer and former Merrill Lynch investment banker in Moscow who now runs a New York consulting firm, Global Energy Capital, located around the corner from Trump Tower that specializes in oil and gas deals in Russia, and one of five people named by Donald Trump as his foreign policy advisors when he responded to a question in a March 2016 interview with the editors of the Washington Post.
Despite this statement, members of Trump’s campaign staff claimed in September 2016 that Page had never met or briefed Trump, but still admitted to being part of the campaign, with the campaign signing off on his travel, and Trump publicly having Page’s back, and at one point took a “leave of absence.”
However due mostly to his own bumbling, Page remains one of the most substantive ties to date between a member of the Trump camp and Russian intelligence.
Page was initially recruited by Russian intelligence in 2013, who they thought were getting an asset, but instead held a very dim view of him with one agent writing “I think he is an idiot.”
One Russian intelligence officer was caught on an FBI listening device saying about Page: “He got hooked on Gazprom thinking that if they have a project, he could rise up. Maybe he can. I don’t know, but it’s obvious that he wants to earn lots of money. For now his enthusiasm works for me. I also promised him a lot: that I have connections in the Trade Representation, meaning that you can push contracts [Laughs.] I will feed him empty promises.”
We do know that Page secretly met with the current Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich while in Moscow in July 2016, and shortly after the trip, Mr. Page sent an email to at least one Trump campaign aide describing insights he had after conversations with government officials, legislators and business executives during his time in Moscow.
None of this escaped American intelligence, who was on to Page for many years, including multiple FISA warrants to listen in on his private conversations with foreign entities, both before and after his time in the Trump campaign.
However an Inspector General report found those renewal of the FISA warrant requests were doctored by a single FBI attorney to remove any mention of a relationship between the CIA and Carter Page, and had the judge known of this it would have been “less suspicious.”
The remaining unanswered question is, was the CIA aware of Page’s meeting with Dvorkovich. It also does not take away from the successful campaign by Russia to create ties to the Trump campaign to meddle in the 2016 election.
Igor Sechin, confided the details of a recent secret meeting between him and visiting Foreign Affairs Advisor to Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, Carter Page.
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The Dossier detailed a scandalous secret meeting between Trump foreign policy advisor Carter Page and Igor Sechin, a longtime “utterly loyal” Putin associate and former Russian Deputy Prime Minister who is now the executive chairman of Rosneft, Russian’s leading oil company. For months, Carter Page and the Trump campaign denied this meeting ever took place. Just one problem…
All of this is true.
Let’s start from the beginning.
Two weeks before the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Carter Page left for Moscow for several days for a speaking engagement at the New Economic School, an institution funded in part by major Russian oligarchs close to Putin. Before Page left he checked in with his supervisor, Sam Clovis, his supervisor’s boss Corey Lewendowski, and finally spoke with Hope Hicks, who is known to pass along all information back to Donald Trump.
During Page’s Moscow speech he spent a lot of time heavily criticizing the United States, its values, its leaders, and its foreign policy. Real American stuff, not traitorous at all.
At this time the United States Intelligence received reports that Page held a secret meeting with members of the Kremlin which started to capture the attention of law enforcement, who went out and obtained a FISA warrant to continue monitoring his activity.
When the FISA warrant became public knowledge, Carter Page went on just about every late-night news show, demanding he never met with anyone in the Kremlin or with Russian intelligence, and the Dossier was a smear job creating solely to destroy his life.
But Carter Page is a liar. And not a very good one.
First, Carter Page was the subject of previous FISA warrants before, most notably when he bragged to multiple academics in 2013 about being an “informal adivsor to the Kremlin” and how he even sat in “global” meetings with the Russians, and also handed over documents to a Russian spy the same year.
But not only did Carter Page publicly admit to meeting with a top executive at Rosneft, he also told the House Intelligence testimony that, while he did not meet directly with Igor Sechin as described in the Dossier, he did meet with Sechin’s top deputy Andrey Baranov while in Moscow in July 2016.
That was a big revelation because it proved a major detail in the Russia Dossier.
And this was also really problematic for Page because the Treasury Department named Sechin to a list of Russian officials and businessmen sanctioned over Russia’s “illegitimate and unlawful actions in the Ukraine.”
Furthermore, it was also confirmed that Carter Page held additional secret meetings with other individuals in the Russian government during his 2016 Moscow trip, including those in Putin’s Presidential Administration.
So far only Arkady Dvorkovich has been named, who happens to be the current Deputy Prime Minister of Russia.
Further damning is the fact that Page kept the Trump campaign in the loop. This means Trump, Jeff Sessions, Sam Clovis, and others who claimed on multiple occasions that there were no Russian contacts during the campaign, sometime saying this under oath, were all lying.
After Carter Page’s testimony to the House Intel Committee, there is no doubt the Dossier hit a bulls eye here, increasing its credibility.
Igor Sechin had raised with Carter Page the issues of future bilateral energy cooperation and prospects for an associated move to lift Ukraine-related western sanctions against Russin
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During the same secret meeting above, and collected by US Intelligence, it is noted Sechin’s representative raised the issue of the lifting of sanctions due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and its annexation of the Crimean Peninsula.
Page, of course denied this conversation for months, which can only mean it actually happened and he would eventually slip up and come clean.
And that’s what happened.
During his testimony to the House Intelligence Committee, Carter Page admitted to talking sanctions with a top Rosneft executive and with a lieutenant of Igor Sechin during his July trip, just as the Dossier said.
This is a bombshell revelation. This is a foreign policy advisor to a major political party candidate conspiring with a foreign adversary to affect domestic policy, a clear violation of the Logan Act, and proof of Trump’s collusion with Russia.
Carter Page also had met secretly with Igor Diveykin on his visit
| PROBABLE |
U.S. intelligence agencies have also received reports that Page met with another top Putin aide while in Moscow — Igor Diveykin. A former Russian security official, Diveykin now serves as deputy chief for internal policy and is believed by U.S. officials to have responsibility for intelligence collected by Russian agencies about the U.S. election, the Western intelligence source said.
In their secret meeting, Diveykin raised a dossier of ‘kompromat’ the Kremlin possessed on Democratic presidential rival, Hillary Clinton, and its possible release to the Republican’s campaign team.
This is probably the same dossier mentioned in Part 1, which contained mainly eavesdropped conversations of various sorts rather than details or evidence of unorthodox or embarrassing behavior.
The Russian leadership also had ‘kompromat’ on Trump which the latter should bear in mind in his dealings with them.
| PROBABLE |
In Page’s meeting with Igor Diveykin, it details how Diveykin “indicated more strongly” that Russia had embarrassing information on Donald Trump, effectively blackmailing him.
This could have been a reference to a “pee tape” and other perverted acts mentioned earlier in the dossier that we cover in Part 1. But the Mueller Report shed some light on this that they were probably fake.
But what Russia did have over Trump was knowledge he was working behind the scenes with Moscow to affect the outcome of the 2016 election, such has holding secret meetings with Kremlin spies to accept “dirt” on his political rival. That is absolutely information Russia can use and threaten to take public to win leverage over Trump
Many observers note that, of everyone who has ever wronged him Trump has never publicly said anything critical of Vladimir Putin. Trump has even publicly backed Putin’s word over America’s entire Intelligence Community.
Why?
Conclusion
Carter Page has done the United States a great service by continuously accidentally admitting he was meeting with the Russians on the Trump campaign’s behalf.
Something the Dossier got right.
Read Part 4.
Resources
U.S. intel officials probe ties between Trump adviser and Kremlin, Yahoo News