Carter Page

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Carter Page

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Feb 15, 2017 10:33 pm

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The Intercept

Carter Page, at Center of Trump Russian Investigation, Writes Bizarre Letter to DOJ Blaming Hillary Clinton

Jon Schwarz
February 15 2017, 8:05 p.m.
CARTER PAGE, briefly a foreign policy adviser to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, sent a peculiar, rambling letter this week to the Department of Justice, asking it to review “the severe election fraud in the form of disinformation, suppression of dissent, hate crimes and other extensive abuses led by members of Mrs. Hillary Clinton’s campaign and their political allies last year.”

Page is reportedly one of several targets of a counterintelligence investigation by the FBI into possible links between Trump associates and Russian officials.

Page provided the lengthy letter to The Intercept when asked whether he would support President Trump using his power as president to declassify any government material to disclose any intercepted conversations between Page and Russian officials. He did not say. Instead he forwarded the letter, which is well-formatted, heavily-footnoted, grammatically correct and has no spelling mistakes. However, its content is bizarre.

To begin with, it is addressed to the voting section of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, which is charged exclusively with enforcing federal laws that protect the right to vote.

It then makes the grandiose claim that “the actions by the Clinton regime and their associates may be among the most extreme examples of human rights violations observed during any election in U.S. history since Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was similarly targeted for his anti-war views in the 1960’s.”

Page repeatedly describes as “outrageous” the news coverage claiming that he has significant connections to Russian officials, and what he says was the Clinton campaign’s hidden hand behind it.

The Clinton campaign, says Page, engaged in “human rights violations,” “illegal activities,” “unlawful deceptions,” “Obstruction of Justice – the charge upon which President Nixon was impeached,” spreading “False Evidence,” and “an obviously illegal attempt to silence me on an important issue of national and international consequence in violation of my Constitutional rights.”

Page also states that he was targeted by the Clinton campaign because he is Catholic, a military veteran and a man.

In addition to the letter, Page included three appendices: A July 2016 speech he delivered at the New Economic School in Moscow; a response to the Director of National Intelligence’s report claiming that Vladimir Putin ordered the Russian government to intervene in the 2016 election to help Trump; and a September 15 letter to FBI Director James Comey asking him to close any inquiry into Page.

In his response to the DNI report, Page addresses the report’s statement that “Putin’s chief propagandist Dmitriy Kiselev used his flagship weekly newsmagazine program this fall to cast President-elect Trump as an outsider victimized by a corrupt political establishment.”

Page writes that “Both as a world-class journalist and as a human being, [Kiselev] is an exceptionally competent, kind and fair individual with the highest level of personal integrity” whose broadcast views “closely align with the perspectives held by tens of millions of hard-working, patriotic Americans.”

In addition being a television host, Kiselev is head of the Russian government news agency Rossia Segodnya. He is notorious for saying on air in 2012 that “I think banning gays from distributing propaganda to children is not enough. … I think they should be banned from donating blood or sperm, and if they die in a car crash, their hearts should be burnt or buried in the ground as unsuitable for the continuation of life.”

PAGE WAS ESSENTIALLY unknown in political and foreign policy circles until Trump listed him as one of five people slated for his foreign policy team in an interview with the Washington Post in March 2016.

In August, then-Senate minority leader Harry Reid wrote a letter to FBI Director James Comey calling for an investigation of evidence he said suggested that Russia might try to manipulate voting results – and referred to the speech delivered by Page the previous month in Moscow, in which he criticized American sanctions policy toward Russia.

Yahoo News in September reported that intelligence officials were specifically looking into whether Page had private communications with senior Russian officials about the possible lifting of economic sanctions if Trump became president. Precisely that kind of conversation – between former national security adviser Michael Flynn and the Russian ambassador to the U.S. – led to Flynn’s resignation.

In an interview with the Washington Post, Page responded to the Yahoo story, saying “All of these accusations are just complete garbage.” But he announced he was taking a leave of absence from his work with the Trump campaign due to the controversy.

Trump’s press secretary said in September that Page had “no formal role” in the campaign, and during a January 2017 news conference before Trump took office, Trump spokesman Sean Spicer stated that “Carter Page is an individual who the president-elect does not know and was put on notice months ago by the campaign.”

Page himself said Wednesday night on the PBS Newshour that “I was a junior member of the campaign’s foreign policy advisory group … compared to other people that had much more direct interaction with Mr. Trump, who I never actually briefed or was in any small meetings with. I went to many rallies with him, but never any direct meetings.”

Page worked in Merrill Lynch’s Moscow office between 2004 and 2007, where he was involved in trades involving Russian state-run energy companies, and rose to the level of vice president.

In 2008, Page founded an investment firm called Global Energy Capital, together with Sergei Yatsenko, a former manager at the Russian state-run oil firm, Gazprom. He is now a managing partner there. The company, according to its website, “invests growth capital in private energy services companies.”

After The Intercept asked Page by email how anything the Clinton campaign had done could be considered a hate crime, Page responded, “It all seems to be pretty textbook definition to me (and my lawyers).” He added: “I’ve been harassed non-stop for the last year, based on these and other lies originated by the Clinton campaign.”

The letter and appendices Page provided to the Intercept can be read below.
https://theintercept.com/2017/02/15/car ... y-clinton/
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Re: Carter Page

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Feb 15, 2017 10:40 pm

Ex-Trump Adviser Carter Page

Sputnik News



Ex-Trump Adviser Carter Page Holds Press Conference at Sputnik HQ


Carter Page, a former adviser to Trump, has held a press conference at Sputnik HQ following the presentation of 'Departing from hypocrisy: potential strategies in the era of global economic stagnation, security threats and fake news'.


Ex-Trump Adviser Carter Page Holds Press Conference at Sputnik HQ
Carter Page, an adviser to US President-elect Donald Trump, speaks at the graduation ceremony for the New Economic School in Moscow, Russia.

'Public Diplomacy': Trump's Ex-Advisor Sent to Moscow 'to Test the Water, Build Bridges'

Moscow and Washington should work closer together on Syria, terrorism and economic growth, Carter Page, a former foreign policy adviser to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, said Monday.
"We have 99 problems in US-Russia relations," Carter Page said. "Change is absolutely necessary today and we absolutely must work together. Each of our countries have major challenges that need to be urgently addressed. Syria, terrorism, economic growth," Page told reporters in Moscow.

"What's preventing us from this task [improving dialogue]? It's definitely misinformation," Carter Page said.

According to Carter Page, the level of misinformation in relations between Russia and the United States reached a new level this year, undermining dialogue between the two countries.

"Unfortunately, there's a deep level of misinformation that gives many people false understanding and that really reached a new level in the last, this year actually," Page told reporters.

Carter Page, an adviser to US President-elect Donald Trump, speaks at the graduation ceremony for the New Economic School in Moscow, Russia.
© AP PHOTO/ PAVEL GOLOVKIN
Former Trump's Adviser Sure New Approaches to Emerge in US Decision-Making on Ukraine
He stressed that Russia and the United States should work together, though there were many obstacles for the cooperation at the moment.
"If you look at where the current state of US-Russia relations is, it's much more toxic and much more dangerous and there's a lot more work that needs to be done to overcome this," Page told reporters in Moscow.

The new Washington administration will face a lot of challenges, a lot of things need to be done. Fake news are among the latest challenge the new administration will need to deal with.

"We have amazing potential right now and I'm proud to be part of it," Carter Page said.

"A lot of attempts that Putin tries to do, like fighting terrorism, are ignored by international ciommunity," Page said. Hovewer, Russia and US can cooperate in many spheres and need to overcome megative trends.

"Change is absolutely necessary today and we absolutely must work together. Each of our countries have major challenges that need to be urgently addressed. Syria, terrorism, economic growth," Page told reporters in Moscow.

Carter Page outlined major strategic challenges:

Anti-Russian sanctions. Russia and US should return to the business field. But it's too early to speak about US easing its sanctions against Russia.

"First, for [lifting of US] sanctions, it's too early to say," Page told reporters.

Lack of a bridges between Russian and US research institutions.

"We're stuck in that 'cold war' mind set. We have a strong desire to have a new direction in Russia-US relations."

Vladimir Putin and Rex Tillerson attending the ceremony of signing of the Rosneft-ExxonMobil strategic partnership agreement, August 30, 2011
© SPUTNIK/ ALEXEI DRUZHININ

Trump's State Dept Pick Uniquely Placed to Get US-Russia Relations Back on Track
Research, business, education — Russia and US should work together in these three major directions.
Page also praised Tillerson's achievements on the post of the oil company head, highlighting his interaction with Russian business.

"Who will be he next Secretary of State?… I'm very personally excited with this one small example, the major example, is Rex Tillerson being the order of friendship, the major ventures he worked to create in Black Sea, the list goes on. Actions speak louder than words, there's certainly a lot of ways we can certainly work together on," Page told reporters.

Speaking about Russia’s alleged meddling in the presidential election Carter Page said that the US administration should present hard evidence of it.

"They really need to show core evidence … It's very easy to make it look like exactly it was country's acts – in this case Russia that did this. So I think this is very much overestimated until there's serious evidence," Page told reporters.

US media cited intelligence agencies as saying last week they were confident that the Russian government had interfered with the US election process, including hacking the Democratic Party’s servers and leaking sensitive emails to discredit Hillary Clinton and boost Donald Trump’s chances. Trump’s presidential transition team denied the allegations.


Clinton's Salty 'Fake News' Tirade Really 'Aimed at Censoring Alternative Media'
Speaking about fake news phenomenon, Carter Page said that there were written several fakes about him personally. "In my personal case it was perfect example of the fake news. The fact that I was blamed that I'm a navy officer on the Wikipedia page. It was a total misinformation" the data about his personal life published there, Page said.
Page also denied media reports that claimed he had never met the then Republican nominee during his time on the campaign’s staff.

"I’ve certainly been in a number of meetings with him," Page told reporters in Moscow.

In September, the Politico magazine cited an unnamed policy staffer on the Trump presidential campaign who allegedly said Carter had never met or briefed Trump.

"There a lot of lessons we can learn from that," Page said. He thinks it's a sort of good news, that some warmonger information was totally false unlike it seemed at the beginning.

Carter Page also said that Russian people are amazing and he is gratefull to be in Moscow again.
https://sputniknews.com/world/201612121 ... on-moscow/


Allegations of multiple meetings between former Trump campaign member Carter Page and Russian officials (Page left the campaign after allegations of private meetings between him and Russian officials emerged in September):

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Re: Carter Page

Postby Grizzly » Wed Feb 15, 2017 10:50 pm

NEW YORK TIMES: Bill Clinton Earned $500,000 From Russian Bank Speech. Flynn Resigned for Phone Call
“The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it.”

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Re: Carter Page

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Feb 15, 2017 10:51 pm

This is important


Remember—Jeff Sessions is the one who brought Carter Page into the Trump campaign. He must recuse himself from probe


U.S. intel officials probe ties between Trump adviser and Kremlin

U.S. intelligence officials are seeking to determine whether an American businessman identified by Donald Trump as one of his foreign policy advisers has opened up private communications with senior Russian officials — including talks about the possible lifting of economic sanctions if the Republican nominee becomes president, according to multiple sources who have been briefed on the issue.

The activities of Trump adviser Carter Page, who has extensive business interests in Russia, have been discussed with senior members of Congress during recent briefings about suspected efforts by Moscow to influence the presidential election, the sources said. After one of those briefings, Senate minority leader Harry Reid wrote FBI Director James Comey, citing reports of meetings between a Trump adviser (a reference to Page) and “high ranking sanctioned individuals” in Moscow over the summer as evidence of “significant and disturbing ties” between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin that needed to be investigated by the bureau.

Some of those briefed were “taken aback” when they learned about Page’s contacts in Moscow, viewing them as a possible back channel to the Russians that could undercut U.S. foreign policy, said a congressional source familiar with the briefings but who asked for anonymity due to the sensitivity of the subject. The source added that U.S. officials in the briefings indicated that intelligence reports about the adviser’s talks with senior Russian officials close to President Vladimir Putin were being “actively monitored and investigated.”

A senior U.S. law enforcement official did not dispute that characterization when asked for comment by Yahoo News. “It’s on our radar screen,” said the official about Page’s contacts with Russian officials. “It’s being looked at.”

Page is a 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 other Central Asian countries. He declined repeated requests to comment for this story.

Trump first mentioned Page’s name when asked to identify his “foreign policy team” during an interview with the Washington Post editorial team last March. Describing him then only as a “PhD,” Trump named Page as among five advisers “that we are dealing with.” But his precise role in the campaign remains unclear; Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks last month called him an “informal foreign adviser” who “does not speak for Mr. Trump or the campaign.” Asked this week by Yahoo News, Trump campaign spokesman Jason Miller said Page “has no role” and added: “We are not aware of any of his activities, past or present.” Miller did not respond when asked why Trump had previously described Page as one of his advisers.

Donald Trump holds a rally with supporters in Aston, Pennsylvania on September 22, 2016. (Photo: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)View photos
Donald Trump (Photo: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)
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The questions about Page come amid mounting concerns within the U.S. intelligence community about Russian cyberattacks on the Democratic National Committee and state election databases in Arizona and Illinois. In a rare public talk this week, former undersecretary of defense for intelligence Mike Vickers said that the Russian cyberattacks constituted meddling in the U.S. election and were “beyond the pale.” Also, this week, two senior Democrats — Sen. Dianne Feinstein, ranking minority member on the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Rep. Adam Schiff, ranking minority member on the House Intelligence Committee — released a joint statement that went further then what U.S. officials had publicly said about the matter.

“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,” they 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.” They added that “orders for the Russian intelligence agencies to conduct such actions could come only from very senior levels of the Russian government.”
Page came to the attention of officials at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow several years ago when he showed up in the Russian capital during several business trips and made provocative public comments critical of U.S. policy and sympathetic to Putin. “He was pretty much a brazen apologist for anything Moscow did,” said one U.S. official who served in Russia at the time.

He hasn’t been shy about expressing those views in the U.S. as well. Last March, shorty after he was named by Trump as one of his advisers, Page told Bloomberg News he had been an adviser to, and investor in, Gazprom, the Russian state-owned gas company. He then blamed Obama administration sanctions — imposed as a response to the Russian annexation of Crimea — for driving down the company’s stock. “So many people who I know and have worked with have been so adversely affected by the sanctions policy,” Page said in the interview. “There’s a lot of excitement in terms of the possibilities for creating a better situation.”

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.”

At the time, Page declined to say whether he was meeting with Russian officials during his trip, according to a Reuters report.

Russia's President Vladimir Putin (back) and Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin attend a signing ceremony at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum 2014 (SPIEF 2014) in St. Petersburg in May 2014. (Photo: Sergei Karpukhin/Reuters)View photos
Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin with Vladimir Putin at a signing ceremony at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum 2014. (Photo: Sergei Karpukhin/Reuters)
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But U.S. officials have since received intelligence reports that during that same three-day trip, Page met with Igor Sechin, a longtime Putin associate and former Russian deputy prime minister who is now the executive chairman of Rosneft, Russian’s leading oil company, a well-placed Western intelligence source tells Yahoo News. That meeting, if confirmed, is viewed as especially problematic by U.S. officials because the Treasury Department in August 2014 named Sechin to a list of Russian officials and businessmen sanctioned over Russia’s “illegitimate and unlawful actions in the Ukraine.” (The Treasury announcement described Sechin as “utterly loyal to Vladimir Putin — a key component to his current standing.” At their alleged meeting, Sechin raised the issue of the lifting of sanctions with Page, the Western intelligence source said.

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.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/u-s-intel-of ... soc_trk=tw
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Re: Carter Page

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Feb 15, 2017 10:53 pm

this is a OP about Carter Page and there is a thread about Gen. Yellowkekc

what does this have to do with Carter Page?

Grizzly » Wed Feb 15, 2017 9:50 pm wrote:NEW YORK TIMES: Bill Clinton Earned $500,000 From Russian Bank Speech. Flynn Resigned for Phone Call
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Carter Page

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Feb 15, 2017 11:00 pm

The Mystery of Trump’s Man in Moscow
Reports of deep Russian ties swirl around Trump adviser Carter Page. Oddly, nobody in Russia seems to have heard of him.
By JULIA IOFFE September 23, 2016


In March, in a bold “Oh yeah?” moment during an interview with the Washington Post’s editorial board, Donald Trump took the paper’s dare and revealed, then and there, his very short list of foreign policy advisers. There were just five, though he said, “I have quite a few more.” The list was a head-scratcher, a random assortment of obscure and questionable pundits. One of the names, offered without elaboration, was, “Carter Page, PhD.”

Who?


Reporters quickly Googling found that Page is the founder and managing partner of an investment fund called Global Energy Capital, and that he claims to have years of experience investing in Russia and the energy sector. As for his connection to Trump, when Page was reached for comment by the New York Times the day after Trump’s big reveal, he said he had been sending policy memos to the campaign and the paper said he “will be advising Mr. Trump on energy policy and Russia.”

This piqued my interest: I have been a Russia wonk for most of my adult life, I spent years living and reporting from Moscow, still go there regularly for reporting trips, and am in touch with lots of friends there. And yet, despite the tightly knit nature of the expat business community in Russia, no one I spoke to had ever heard of Carter Page.

“What’s this guy’s name?” says one former Western energy CEO who spent years in Russia, and would have overlapped there with Page.

“I had not heard of Carter Page before it came out in the media,” says another prominent Western businessman who has worked in the former Soviet Union for over two decades. “But I am getting a lot of emails from friends asking, ‘Have you heard of this guy?’”

“Strangely, I've never heard of Carter Page until this Trump connection,” Bill Browder responded to me in an email. He was one of the biggest Western players in the Russian market until President Vladimir Putin turned on him and Browder became his fierce critic. “It's odd, because I've heard of every other financier who was a player on Moscow at the time.”

Someone, apparently, has heard of him: On Friday, Yahoo News reported that Page was being probed by U.S. intelligence for purported back-channel ties to Russian leaders. The story resurfaced the name of a character who’d all but vanished from the campaign, and reawakened questions about who, exactly, Trump was surrounding himself with.

This has been a concern swirling around the outsider candidate since he began, a real-estate developer with almost no serious Washington connections to tap for advice. “I’m going to surround myself only with the best and most serious people," Trump famously told a Post reporter last summer about how he would staff his campaign. "We want top-of-the-line professionals.” As the primaries unfolded, it became increasingly obvious that Trump would need all the top-of-the-line help he could get when it came to foreign policy. In an interview with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, Trump confused the Kurds with the Iranian Al-Quds Force, couldn’t tell the difference between Hezbollah and Hamas, and couldn’t recognize the name of the leader of ISIS. (In his defense, Trump said that “Hugh was giving me name after name, Arab name, Arab name, and there are few people anywhere, anywhere, that would have known those names.”) The Republican foreign policy specialists who would normally be a brain trust began slamming him in the press or publicly signing on to anti-Trump manifestos. And since they increasingly were fleeing the candidate, who were the people who would line up to advise him instead? What would they be like?

Enter Carter Page, a 44-year-old Ph.D., and business school graduate who claims an expertise in Russia and energy, yet who, I quickly discovered, was known by neither Russia experts nor energy experts nor Russian energy experts. (“I can poll any number of people involved in energy in Russia about Carter Page and they’ll say, ‘Carter who? You mean Jimmy Carter?’” says one veteran Western investor in Russian energy.) Page also, as I would be surprised to discover, appears largely unknown to Trump’s own campaign.

What I did find, however, is that while Page might not be helping Trump, Trump has been a significant help to Page. Since being named by Trump as an adviser, Page, who has spent his career trying to put together energy deals in Russia and the former Soviet Union, has finally begun to be noticed in the region. He is being treated in Russia as a person with potentially important ties in America. “He’s an extremely well-informed, authoritative expert on Russia,” says Mikhail Leontiev, a pro-Kremlin talking head and spokesman for Rosneft, Russia’s state oil giant. “People really respect him in this industry. He’s a very serious guy, and he has a good reputation.” According to the Yahoo report, U.S. intelligence believes Page had an audience with top Russian officials—including Rosneft head Igor Sechin—during a summer trip to Moscow. From what I could find about him, it’s hard to imagine he could have secured those meetings without that mention by Trump.

Page has also been the subject of some breathless coverage in the American press. A March Bloomberg profile touted his “deep ties” with “executives at Gazprom,” the state-owned Russian gas giant, whom he says he advised on some of its biggest deals of the past decade. Last month, the Post ran a piece that was breathless in a different way, casting him as a shadowy broker with potentially important ties in Russia, some of them unsavory. The Yahoo story also portrays Page as a well-connected, high-rolling businessman with “extensive business interests in Russia” and an office “around the corner from Trump Tower.”

Page has fueled all this by making some remarkable statements, including saying Putin is a better leader than President Barack Obama to a June closed-door meeting of foreign policy Brahmins in Washington. In July, in Moscow, he spoke at the New Economic School’s commencement ceremony, a university that had hosted Obama just seven years ago. Page used the speech to slam the “hypocrisy” of American foreign policy in front of a Russian audience, saying, “Washington and other Western powers have impeded potential progress through their often hypocritical focus on ideas such as democratization, inequality, corruption and regime change.” He is now frequently quoted on Russian television, which hails him as a “famous American economist” and “adviser to Donald Trump on questions of foreign policy.”

All of which reveals something deeply strange about Trump: when he shoots from the hip, his remarks do more than just whip up Twitter controversies. They also occasionally and unintentionally mint a new species of “insiders,” people who seem to be in Trump’s orbit but who may not have—and may never have had—any access to the gilded inner sanctum at all.

But someone is paying attention. As I started looking into Page, I began getting calls from two separate “corporate investigators” digging into what they claim are all kinds of shady connections Page has to all kinds of shady Russians. One is working on behalf of various unnamed Democratic donors; the other won’t say who turned him on to Page’s scent. Both claimed to me that the FBI was investigating Page for allegedly meeting with Igor Sechin and Sergei Ivanov, who was until recently Putin’s chief of staff—both of whom are on the sanctions list—when Page was in Moscow in July for that speech.

So the question continued to linger: Who is Carter Page?

***

I should tell you before we get any further that Page wouldn’t talk to me for this story. I called his fund and left messages, both on the general line and his personal voice mail. I emailed him repeatedly. I asked the Trump campaign to put me in touch. I emailed the Bloomberg journalist who interviewed him, who passed the request on. I even called Carter Page’s father in Poughkeepsie, New York, who told me he would ask his son to talk to me. But alas, no dice.

This was disappointing: No one who worked in Moscow when Page was there seemed to know who he was, and I just wanted to talk to someone who did. At a certain point, I just needed confirmation that he even existed.

OK, I thought. Try a different route. Maybe all these prominent Western businessmen who worked in Russia for decades didn’t know Page, but maybe it was because some of them worked in different spheres of the Russian economy. He did, after all, have such an impressive résumé.

Page’s biography on the website of his energy fund, Global Energy Capital, hits all the right notes. It was, at first glance, the résumé of an up-and-coming player in the opaque but lucrative Russian energy market. “He spent 7 years as an investment banker at Merrill Lynch in London, Moscow and New York where he most recently served as Chief Operating Officer of the Energy and Power Group,” his bio reads. “He was involved in over $25 billion of transactions in the energy and power sector. He spent 3 years in Moscow where he was responsible for the opening of the Merrill office and was an advisor on key transactions for Gazprom, RAO UES and others.”

Those were some of the biggest energy deals of the 2000s, and Page’s tenure in Merrill Lynch’s Moscow office, from 2004 to 2007, would have put him in the right place at the right time. He says he was part of the carving up of RAO UES, a massive Russian electric power holding company. He told Bloomberg that he advised Gazprom when it bought a stake in the Sakhalin II oil and gas project. Those were huge, huge things. If he were deeply involved, he would definitely count as a player. And surely he left at least a trace in the records of those deals.

So I called Ian Craig, the CEO of Sakhalin Energy from 2004 to 2009, who was doing the negotiations with Gazprom and stayed on as CEO after the deal went through. (It wasn’t really a deal, to be clear: Sakhalin II was a large project in the Far East, and Gazprom essentially elbowed its way into the project when the government forced the consortium to sell the gas giant a controlling stake.) But Craig said he didn’t know anyone named Carter Page. He was also surprised to hear about Merrill Lynch’s purported involvement in the deal. “I don’t think Merrill Lynch or anyone else was front-lining the negotiations, because it was all done at the highest level, because it was very political,” says Craig . “It closed at CEO level, and eventually Putin himself signed off on it.”

When I asked a prominent Western businessman, who has worked in the former Soviet Union for over two decades and who is said to socialize with Sechin and other members of the Russian elite, about Page’s claim to Bloomberg that he advised Gazprom on Sakhalin II, he said, “I rolled my eyes at that one.” (He, too, said he hadn’t heard of Page until Trump’s announcement.)

Fine. OK. Maybe Page exaggerated a bit on that one. But what about the reorganization and privatization of RAO UES, the Russian electricity giant? Maybe some of the Russians he worked with remembered a Carter Page?

Turns out, they did.

“His nickname was stranichkin,” from the Russian word stranichka, or “little page,” says Artem Torchinsky, who met Page during the breakup of RAO UES. Torchinsky, who was part of the company’s financial department, worked alongside Page, who, at the time worked in Merrill Lynch’s Moscow office. It was 2007, and Merrill Lynch was underwriting the sale of one part of RAO UES, and Torchinsky was resentful of Page and the other Merrill Lynchers: Torchinsky and the in-house team did all the work, and Page and his team would swoop in to give the presentation. They were the fancy Western window dressing. “It really irritated our team,” Torchinsky told me over Skype. “We worked around the clock, and then they would come in and say something incomprehensible and we’d have to correct them. These guys didn’t know what they were talking about.” As for Page, “He made no impression whatsoever. Whether he was there or not, it made no difference,” Torchinsky says. “When you’re dealing with a pro, you see it. Page, unfortunately, did not leave that impression.”

OK, harsh. But then I talked to Page’s former boss, former Russian Central Bank Chairman Sergei Aleksashenko, who ran the Moscow office of Merrill Lynch for part of the time Page worked there. “He wasn’t great and he wasn’t terrible,” Aleksashenko says, exasperated and confused by the interest of all these journalists pestering him for information about someone “without any special talents or accomplishments,” someone who was “a gray spot.” “What can you say about a person who in no way [is] exceptional?” he asked me.

Page was a vice president at Merrill Lynch in Moscow, which sounds senior but is a common title in the finance world; a big firm like Merrill Lynch might have thousands of VPs. In the Moscow office, there were five ranks, and VP was right in the middle. In effect, it was “just the oldest of the youngest, three from the bottom,” says Aleksashenko.

When it came to finance, Aleksashenko says, Page “was not a specialist in any branches of finance or in any instruments.” When it came to energy, Page and his team were, according to Torchinsky, “mildly speaking, not competent in the field of energy.” And, says Aleksashenko, “judging by the drivel he spews on Russia, you can tell he doesn’t really understand the topic.”

Trump’s putative adviser on Russia and energy and foreign policy, in other words, “did not create the impression of someone who was intellectual or well-educated, or someone who was in any way interested or knowledgeable in foreign policy,” says Aleksashenko.

***

For the past few years, Page has styled himself a foreign policy expert. He has written columns in Global Policy Journal, a new peer-reviewed journal run out of Durham University. They are confoundingly written and make logically curious leaps. “In recent months, renewed calls for equal justice have brought social tension across the United States after the killing of Michael Brown and Eric Garner by police officers in Missouri and New York respectively,” he wrote. “Although commonly overlooked, the impact of other fatal mistakes by government officials in the foreign policy arena might vastly outweigh these tragic deaths in potentially catastrophic proportions.” He is the kind of thinker who writes that Kanye West’s “New Slaves” and the “artist’s creative work offers valuable ideas that could fundamentally improve the direction of U.S. foreign policy and world affairs” but does it by opening with a citation from the Oxford English Dictionary (“Slave; Pronunciation: /slāv/…”), roping in Adam Sandler, William F. Buckley and Dick Cheney.

His speech in Moscow’s New Economic School was a similar construction of empty spaces held together with repetition, tautologies, and abuses of the word “ironically.” “For the last 15 years, I’ve been researching, teaching, and writing about fundamental trends in the world economy, which have really continued to evolve in this period and in the years immediately preceding it,” he began. The video of the speech also suggests that after three years living there and a lifetime studying the place, he couldn’t really speak Russian—he had to have his questions translated for him into English. Except to quote, haltingly, brokenly, Vladimir Putin: “We never meddle in the internal political affairs of other countries. Unlike the USA.” Which is troubling for two reasons: that the adviser of a presidential candidate of a major party is criticizing America abroad by citing Putin, and that the comment implied that he seemed to not know anything about anything going on in, say, Syria or Ukraine.

Page also managed to find his way into a fellowship at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he cut a strange figure. Like other Westerners doing business in Russia, Page took the view that Putin was not the blood-stained and corrupt tyrant some in the West imagine him to be, defending him as a strong leader who brought order and prosperity to Russia. But unlike other entrepreneurial defenders of Putin, people at the Council recall that Page was not particularly good at it. “He had a guilty-seeming style in making these arguments, making it seem like he didn’t really want to engage,” one person from the Council says. His columns made the rounds and raised eyebrows. “That blog post about the slaves. That’s just … strange,” says the Council member.

“He’s a nice guy, but of the people that I know that have Russian foreign policy experience or access and contacts, he wouldn’t be in the last decile, but he’d be in the second-to-last decile,” says one American executive with experience in Russia and its energy sector. “You’d have to dip really far and wide to find a guy like Carter Page. I mean, wow.”

***

I should’ve just dropped the Carter Page story, but in the months since Trump named him an adviser, the campaign’s Russia connections have become a bigger and bigger issue. Fancy Bear, who was probably a Russian hacker, broke into the Democratic National Committee emails, seemingly handed them over to Julian Assange, who continues to leak the information in a way that is clearly designed to help one campaign and hurt the other. Trump’s second campaign manager, Paul Manafort, flamed out in August because of his shady business dealings with the pro-Kremlin side of Ukraine, and Trump himself continues to say absurd things about Russia and Putin, like publicly inviting the Russian government to continue hacking American servers. Washington was in full Hunt for Red October mode, and it was all I could do to stay on Page’s trail, which began to look more and more like an infinity sign.

I was not the only one. Seemingly everyone I talked to had also talked to the Washington Post, and then there were these corporate investigators who drew a dark and complex web of Page’s connections. Then there was Page, praising Putin. I found myself juggling two mutually contradictory Page narratives: Was Page, like Manafort, followed by a long train of sordid dealings with dark and powerful players with deep pockets and deep resentments toward the West? This was the person described by the corporate investigators trying to whisper into my ear. Was Page a man wheeling and dealing in energy contracts with China and Turkmenistan, who was a vehicle for the Kremlin to influence the American election? Was he a man who, during a three-day trip to Moscow, met with two of Russia’s most powerful men and was now being investigated for it?

But it was hard to see that man when I actually talked to people who knew him. Page made his way into the financial sector as it ballooned in the early part of the past decade, securing a spot at Merrill Lynch’s London and Moscow offices. Today, he claims he was cozy with Gazprom executives; his former colleagues laugh at the suggestion. “No one let him into Gazprom,” Aleksashenko says. “He didn’t go shake [Gazprom chief Alexey] Miller’s hand. He made sure there were cars, hotels and meetings for investors in London.” Another of Page’s colleagues from Merrill Lynch confirmed that Page’s role was simply arranging meetings between Gazprom and Western investors, something normally done by analysts, the lowest rank on the totem pole. “People organize meetings with Gazprom all the time,” the former colleague said. “He hosted these guys in New York City but they would have done this 10 times a year… I used to do this; it doesn’t require all that much skill. You just send out an email to 20 people saying Gazprom agreed to dinner at this place at 8 p.m., do you want to come? The main thing is just getting those two [Gazprom] guys to agree. But because they agreed doesn’t mean they’re close to him.”

But the meetings did provide him with something else. “Gazprom didn’t need money at the time,” says the former colleague. “They were the most profitable company at the time. Their net profit was something like $36 billion a year. Their problem was not getting investors, but figuring out how to spend money in a non-efficient way if you read between the lines. He was probably aware of that. He would have known how inefficient and wasteful the company is.” Page became an investor in the company, and has, according to filings, advised other companies he’s worked for to invest in them.

After Merrill Lynch, Page tried to set up his own fund to invest in energy projects and called it Global Energy Capital. But he tried to do this in 2008, and we know what happened to the markets in 2008. The fund is registered to his father’s address in Poughkeepsie; Page listed himself as “founder and managing partner,” even though the only other partner seemed to be Sergei Yatsenko, who was once a mid-level executive at Gazprom. He also maintained a website and handed out business cards that listed a fancy Madison Avenue address—that’s the one “around the corner from Trump Tower”— which was actually the address of a co-working space.

“That’s Carter Page,” says an American businessman who has spent nearly a decade working in Russia. “That’s what he’s been doing, without any actual funding, without any actual experience, without any actual connections or core capabilities, he’s been trying to throw together these deals. He’s always been operating at a level far beneath that at which business in Russia is done. I admire that, it takes a lot of gumption.”

In the interest of due diligence, I also tried to run down the rumors being handed me by the corporate investigators: that Russia’s Alfa Bank paid for the trip as a favor to the Kremlin; that Page met with Sechin and Ivanov in Moscow; that he is now being investigated by the FBI for those meetings because Sechin and Ivanov were both sanctioned for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

“I don’t know this person,” said Pyotr Aven, one of the two founders of Alfa Bank, which is considered the Western Russian bank. Aven and his partner, Mikhail Fridman, have transferred much of their assets out of Russia and have been quite critical of Putin. As for who paid for Page’s trip, Aven was no less irritated by the question. “I give them money, I don’t know how they spend it, who they invite, when they invite them, I have no idea,” he said of the New Economic School, which hosted Page and of which Aven is the main benefactor. Exasperated by my questions, he snapped, “Don’t bring these Russian-style conspiracy theories to me.”

“You are engaged in onanism,” said Leontiev, the spokesman for Rosneft and Sechin when I asked him if Page had met with Sechin. “It’s bullshit. Just bullshit. You need to understand who Sechin is to even ask this question. It’s hard to have a meeting with him at all. It’s absurd.”

As for the FBI investigation, well, it’s unclear. A State Department official who works on Russia sanctions but was not authorized to speak on the record told me that, for one thing, there is “no prohibition meeting with a designated [sanctioned] individual. Moreover, sanctions violations are not criminal in nature and not enforced by the FBI. OFAC runs them.” He added, “the story doesn't add up.” What does seem to have happened is that various U.S. intelligence agencies were looking into Page’s time in Moscow, then briefed Senate minority leader, Democrat Harry Reid, who wrote a letter to FBI Director James Comey asking him to investigate, among other things, “whether a Trump advisor who has been highly critical of U.S. and European economic sanctions on Russia, and who has conflicts of interest due to investments in Russian energy conglomerate Gazprom, met with high-ranking sanctioned individuals while in Moscow in July of 2016, well after Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee.”

***

I got my next surprise when I called Stephen Miller, Trump’s senior adviser. I caught him just as the Trump plane was about to take off, and asked him the tired, old question: Who is Carter Page?

“Who?” says Miller, and then went off the record to expound on his lack of involvement in the campaign.

“He has no formal role in the campaign,” Hope Hicks texted responding to my question.

Now my interest was piqued. There were whispers all over Washington that, despite Hicks’s denial, Page was not only still part of the Trump campaign, but its conduit for Russian influence. Was he?

One way to answer the question was to figure out how he even got on that list to begin with.

One source suggested to me that Richard Burt, former U.S. ambassador to Germany, START treaty negotiator, and longtime lobbyist for Alfa Bank, was the nexus. It was Burt who helped draft Trump’s foreign policy speech in April, and had been advising the Trump campaign, via Senator Jeff Sessions, on foreign policy. But when I met Burt at his office at the McLarty Associates lobbying shop, he looked at me and said he had never even met him. “The only person I talked to about Carter Page is this guy at the Washington Post,” Burt told me. “And I told him I’d never met the guy. Let me put it this way: if I have met him, I’ve forgotten. He’s the former Merrill Lynch guy, right?”

Someone else told me that the Page connection was Rick Dearborn, Sessions’ chief of staff, who hired Page because Dearborn knew nothing about foreign policy but needed to put together a foreign policy staff for Trump’s Alexandria, Virginia, policy shop and he happened to know Page. But Dearborn wouldn’t return my calls, and someone who once worked for that policy shop told me it was neither Dearborn nor Burt, but campaign co-chair Sam Clovis who recruited Page. “If he was part of that original group of people, I can say with 70 percent confidence it was Sam Clovis,” this person told me.

“I’m not answering your questions,” Clovis told me. He refused to tell me if he was the one who found Page, but Jason Miller, the campaign’s other spokesperson, says, “Carter Page isn’t someone I’ve interacted with.” Which confirmed what a policy staffer on the Trump campaign told me: “Carter is a red herring, not a Rasputin. He’s never met Trump, never briefed him. He has zero influence, none.”

***

Was Page the shadowy messenger between the Kremlin and Trump Tower, or was he the nebbishy, not-very-successful man trying to profit from the arbitrage between what Trump said—he’s my adviser—and what his associates said—“Who?” Maybe I wasn’t doing this right, and maybe everyone was lying to me, but it was hard not to come to the conclusion that, regardless of whatever game the Russians were running, Page was firmly in the latter camp.

“I don’t know about his Russia fund, other than it’s never really materialized,” says the prominent player in the energy space whom Page has pitched on various energy projects. “Every conversation I’ve had with Carter has not been terribly serious. They’ve all been pie-in-the-sky ideas. There are usually issues with traction and execution capabilities.” He went on. “I couldn’t name a project that I could connect Carter’s name to, any project that actually happened.”

“I don’t know how he’s earned a living off this,” the energy player says, “but I think he’s been trying to be an intermediary. If you hang around Russia long enough, it’s sort of like a pinball machine, something will hit you.”

Strangely, it was not a Russian pinball that hit him; it was Trump. According to the Trump policy adviser, this winter, Clovis began to draw up a list of people who could serve as policy advisers to the campaign and give it some intellectual and policy heft. At a time when established Republican foreign policy specialists were tripping over each other to get away from Trump, “a lot of people came to Sam Clovis in February, March, and said, ‘I want to be part of the team,’” says the Trump adviser. And that’s how it happened. “He’s just a guy on a list. Trump looked at the list and said, ‘He’s an adviser.’ And now he’s milking it for all it’s worth.”

Now, someone whom no one in the field had ever heard of was suddenly a Very Important Person in Washington—or at least could plausibly market himself as one. “I was not aware of him at all until he was named to the campaign, and even after that, I had never heard of him,” one Russia specialist in Washington told me. He saw Page at a Washington roundtable in June for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and what he saw was a strange kind of person: one who was very differential to everyone there “in a way that someone who is junior would use it to network,” but who was dropping hints full of meaning to anyone who would listen—and be impressed. “He was saying he was planning to go to Moscow,” the Russia specialist recalls. “He didn’t say what he was going to do there, but he created the impression that there could be some meaning to the trip.”

According to a congressional leadership staffer familiar with the intelligence briefings on Page’s trip to Russia, “the meetings did happen and that’s been established as a fact. I think the investigation is more what happened in them.” But it remained unclear, the staffer told me unprompted, what this even meant. “It’s not just did he met with them or not, but now looking into the bigger question of what the hell is going on?” said the staffer. “Is he acting as a conduit in ways that are against America’s national security interests? Wittingly or un-, I should add. It’s what’s hard to parse about this. Is he doing this with nefarious intent or is this just about guys who are thrilled to be living in a John le Carré novel? Or are they being played by much smarter people in the Kremlin?”

This seems to be vintage Carter Page, a man whose story never quite adds up, as much as he tries to make the numbers work. But he’s also mastered the art of manipulating the distance between his story as it is and his story as he wants it to be, playing on the uncertainty in between to make himself seem more successful, more connected, even more evil than he really is—and to try to turn a profit off of that. “If Page using his status as ‘Trump advisor’ for personal gain, that’s another matter: Time for Page to join Twitter!” Michael McFaul, former U.S. ambassador to Russia, tweeted after news of the investigation broke. The Russians may be feeling out the Trump campaign via Page, but Page must be loving every minute of it. After all, meeting Russia’s energy czar is an impossible dream for a would-be investor struggling to make it in the world of Russian energy—but the dream entered the realm of the possible when Trump said three words in March: “Carter Page, Ph.D.” Now Carter Page, Ph.D., has found a perfect candidate to latch on to, like a pilot fish feeding off the carnage wrought by the oblivious Trump shark.

For months now, the American press has been twisting itself in knots trying to explain men like Page and Manafort, and, through them, to answer the questions of whether Putin is trying to destroy America by their hands, and is Trump a Kremlin stooge or a just a useful idiot, and is there even a difference?

There doesn’t seem to be one in the world of Trump, which in some ways resembles Putin’s: the waters of truth are muddy and deeply suggestive. And that is all that matters. Is Putin actually meddling in our election and undermining the foundations of Western democracy in a massive way, or doing just enough to make us think he is, and thereby acquiring powers he holds only because we believe him to have them? “I want to hope that this is connected with the growing influence and significance of Russia,” Putin says of the rumors of Russian meddling in the American election—as we in the media continue to squeegee them around, rarely really getting closer to the truth, and watching it disintegrate in our hands when we think we’ve finally grasped it.
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/ ... cow-214283
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Carter Page

Postby Grizzly » Wed Feb 15, 2017 11:06 pm

I thought I was in the Trump is dangerous thread, sorry.
“The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it.”

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Re: Carter Page

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Feb 15, 2017 11:09 pm

well Gen. Yellowkekc didn't resign because of a phone call
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Carter Page

Postby Grizzly » Wed Feb 15, 2017 11:16 pm

well Gen. Yellowkekc didn't resign because of a phone call


That's certainly true, I do think there is much more going on here. reminds me of, Oglesby's 'The Yankee and Cowboy War'. What's that saying, "When elephants fight, ..."
“The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it.”

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Re: Carter Page

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Feb 16, 2017 12:37 am

Trump's Ex-Advisor Sent to Moscow 'to Test the Water, Build Bridges'
POLITICS
21:28 08.12.2016(updated 10:55 14.12.2016)
Carter Page's December trip to Moscow has prompted a lively debate about the genuine purpose of the visit of US President-elect Donald Trump's former foreign policy advisor to Russia. Page's major goals are to test the water and, possibly, to start building bridges, Russian political analyst Dmitry Abzalov told Radio Sputnik.

Carter Page, a former foreign policy adviser to US President-elect Donald Trump's campaign, came to Moscow to test the water and, probably, build bridges between the US and Russia ahead of Trump's inauguration, Russian political analyst Dmitry Abzalov of the Center for Strategic Communications told Radio Sputnik.

"I believe that the major purpose of [Page's] visit is to test the water so that he could act then as an intermediary," Abzalov suggested adding that Page's visit indicates the Trump team's interest in economic and political cooperation with their Russian counterparts.

A view of Moscow City international business center
© SPUTNIK/ MAKSIM BLINOV
Trump's Ex-Adviser Arrives in Moscow to Meet With Businessmen, 'Thought Leaders'
Still, it is unlikely that Page is pursuing a goal of a certain kind in Russia, Abzalov believes.
"Before the inauguration Trump has a few instruments of influence," the Russian analyst highlighted, "therefore he is using his advisers and partners. I believe that one of [Page's] goals is to build bridges without leaving Trump open [to criticism]."

In his Thursday interview with Sputnik Page specified that he had arrived in Moscow to hold several meetings with businessmen and "thought leaders."

"I will be meeting with business leaders and thought leaders," Page emphasized.

It is known that Page, an American oil industry consultant, maintained ties with Russia's Gazprom in the 2000s.

In July, Page delivered a lecture in Moscow at the invitation of the New Economic School, prompting a storm of criticism from Hillary Clinton's campaign. Still, contrary to numerous allegations, Page didn't hold meetings with Russian officials.

Likewise, in December he is unlikely to hold any top-level talks, according to Abzalov.

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov signaled Thursday that the ministry has no plans to meet with Carter Page.

"No, I have no comments on this. As of this morning, there are no plans to hold meetings in the foreign ministry," Ryabkov told reporters.

For his part, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov confirmed that there are no plans for a meeting of Russian presidential administration officials with Trump's former foreign policy adviser.

"No, frankly speaking, we have had no contacts… and have no such plans," Peskov remarked.

Cars drive past the Russian Foreign Ministry.
© AFP 2016/ JOEL SAGET
Russian Foreign Ministry Has No Plans to Meet With Trump's Ex-Adviser Page
The crux of the matter is that Page's contacts with Russia's senior officials may harm Trump's interests, Abzalov believes.
He highlighted that Trump's nominees have yet to be approved by the US Congress.

Page's negotiations with high-ranking Russian officials would have attracted a lot of attention from both Trump's supporters and antagonists, the Russian analyst stressed, adding that it would have hardly played into Trump's hands.

"It would be reckless for [Page] to meet, for instance, with [Russian] parties' leaders before [Trump's] inauguration. It is believed that it's against the rules set by the US State Department and it may also trigger tensions with the Congress. But if [he meets] with some thought leaders there won't be any problems," Abzalov assumed.

Donald Trump smiles during a town hall, Tuesday, Sept. 6, 2016, in Virginia Beach, Va.
© AP PHOTO/ EVAN VUCCI
Trump Receives Information on US Election Voter Fraud - Top Adviser
At the same time, the Russian analyst continued, Page could meet with Trump's former business partners in Russia. This circle includes businessmen involved in construction and development.
"Let me remind you that the major economic direction Trump has chosen is to support machine-building enterprises, real sector and raw materials… It is quite possible that meetings with [Russia's] fuel and wnergy complex's [representatives] are on Page's agenda," Abzalov suggested, adding that Trump's ex-adviser may also test the water in Russia's companies related to Rostec Corporation.

According to the Russian analyst, Page's visit to Moscow resembles nothing so much as the so-called "public diplomacy" — communication and relationship building with foreign publics for the purpose of establishing a multi-level dialogue.
https://sputniknews.com/politics/201612 ... ow-russia/
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Re: Carter Page

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Feb 16, 2017 12:57 am

A view of Moscow City international business centerTrump's Ex-Adviser Arrives in Moscow to Meet With Businessmen, 'Thought Leaders'

© Sputnik/ Maksim Blinov
RUSSIA
09:11 08.12.2016(updated 06:27 10.12.2016)
Once adviser to US President-elect Donald Trump's campaign has arrived in Moscow to hold talks with businessmen and "thought leaders."

MOSCOW (Sputnik) — Carter Page, who served as an adviser to US President-elect Donald Trump's campaign, told Sputnik Thursday he had arrived in Moscow to hold several meetings with businessmen and "thought leaders."
"I will be meeting with business leaders and thought leaders," Page, who used to work with Russian energy giant Gazprom, said.

"Thought leaders" is a broad definition, which may include government officials or people close to the establishment.

Carter Page, an adviser to US President-elect Donald Trump, speaks at the graduation ceremony for the New Economic School in Moscow, Russia.

Carter Page, an adviser to US President-elect Donald Trump, speaks at the graduation ceremony for the New Economic School in Moscow, Russia.
He added he would stay in Moscow until December 13.


Trump & Putin. Yes, It's Really a Thing

ByJOSH MARSHALL

PublishedJULY 23, 2016, 4:15 PM EDT 23282 Views

Over the last year there has been a recurrent refrain about the seeming bromance between Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. More seriously, but relatedly, many believe Trump is an admirer and would-be emulator of Putin's increasingly autocratic and illiberal rule. But there's quite a bit more to the story. At a minimum, Trump appears to have a deep financial dependence on Russian money from persons close to Putin. And this is matched to a conspicuous solicitousness to Russian foreign policy interests where they come into conflict with US policies which go back decades through administrations of both parties. There is also something between a non-trivial and a substantial amount of evidence suggesting Putin-backed financial support for Trump or a non-tacit alliance between the two men.

Let me start by saying I'm no Russia hawk. I have long been skeptical of US efforts to extend security guarantees to countries within what the Russians consider their 'near abroad' or extend such guarantees and police Russian interactions with new states which for centuries were part of either the Russian Empire or the USSR. This isn't a matter of indifference to these countries. It is based on my belief in seriously thinking through the potential costs of such policies. In the case of the Baltics, those countries are now part of NATO. Security commitments have been made which absolutely must be kept. But there are many other areas where such commitments have not been made. My point in raising this is that I do not come to this question or these policies as someone looking for confrontation or cold relations with Russia.

Let's start with the basic facts. There is a lot of Russian money flowing into Trump's coffers and he is conspicuously solicitous of Russian foreign policy priorities.

I'll list off some facts.

1. All the other discussions of Trump's finances aside, his debt load has grown dramatically over the last year, from $350 million to $630 million. This is in just one year while his liquid assets have also decreased. Trump has been blackballed by all major US banks.

2. Post-bankruptcy Trump has been highly reliant on money from Russia, most of which has over the years become increasingly concentrated among oligarchs and sub-garchs close to Vladimir Putin. Here's a good overview from The Washington Post, with one morsel for illustration ...
Since the 1980s, Trump and his family members have made numerous trips to Moscow in search of business opportunities, and they have relied on Russian investors to buy their properties around the world.
“Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets,” Trump’s son, Donald Jr., told a real estate conference in 2008, according to an account posted on the website of eTurboNews, a trade publication. “We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

3. One example of this is the Trump Soho development in Manhattan, one of Trump's largest recent endeavors. The project was the hit with a series of lawsuits in response to some typically Trumpian efforts to defraud investors by making fraudulent claims about the financial health of the project. Emerging out of that litigation however was news about secret financing for the project from Russia and Kazakhstan. Most attention about the project has focused on the presence of a twice imprisoned Russian immigrant with extensive ties to the Russian criminal underworld. But that's not the most salient part of the story. As the Times put it,

"Mr. Lauria brokered a $50 million investment in Trump SoHo and three other Bayrock projects by an Icelandic firm preferred by wealthy Russians “in favor with” President Vladimir V. Putin, according to a lawsuit against Bayrock by one of its former executives. The Icelandic company, FL Group, was identified in a Bayrock investor presentation as a “strategic partner,” along with Alexander Mashkevich, a billionaire once charged in a corruption case involving fees paid by a Belgian company seeking business in Kazakhstan; that case was settled with no admission of guilt."
Another suit alleged the project "occasionally received unexplained infusions of cash from accounts in Kazakhstan and Russia."

Sounds completely legit.

Read both articles: After his bankruptcy and business failures roughly a decade ago Trump has had an increasingly difficult time finding sources of capital for new investments. As I noted above, Trump has been blackballed by all major US banks with the exception of Deutschebank, which is of course a foreign bank with a major US presence. He has steadied and rebuilt his financial empire with a heavy reliance on capital from Russia. At a minimum the Trump organization is receiving lots of investment capital from people close to Vladimir Putin.

Trump's tax returns would likely clarify the depth of his connections to and dependence on Russian capital aligned with Putin. And in case you're keeping score at home: no, that's not reassuring.

4. Then there's Paul Manafort, Trump's nominal 'campaign chair' who now functions as campaign manager and top advisor. Manafort spent most of the last decade as top campaign and communications advisor for Viktor Yanukovych, the pro-Russian Ukrainian Prime Minister and then President whose ouster in 2014 led to the on-going crisis and proxy war in Ukraine. Yanukovych was and remains a close Putin ally. Manafort is running Trump's campaign.

5. Trump's foreign policy advisor on Russia and Europe is Carter Page, a man whose entire professional career has revolved around investments in Russia and who has deep and continuing financial and employment ties to Gazprom. If you're not familiar with Gazprom, imagine if most or all of the US energy industry were rolled up into a single company and it were personally controlled by the US President who used it as a source of revenue and patronage. That is Gazprom's role in the Russian political and economic system. It is no exaggeration to say that you cannot be involved with Gazprom at the very high level which Page has been without being wholly in alignment with Putin's policies. Those ties also allow Putin to put Page out of business at any time.

6. Over the course of the last year, Putin has aligned all Russian state controlled media behind Trump. As Frank Foer explains here, this fits a pattern with how Putin has sought to prop up rightist/nationalist politicians across Europe, often with direct or covert infusions of money. In some cases this is because they support Russia-backed policies; in others it is simply because they sow discord in Western aligned states. Of course, Trump has repeatedly praised Putin, not only in the abstract but often for the authoritarian policies and patterns of government which have most soured his reputation around the world.

7. Here's where it gets more interesting. This is one of a handful of developments that tipped me from seeing all this as just a part of Trump's larger shadiness to something more specific and ominous about the relationship between Putin and Trump. As TPM's Tierney Sneed explained in this article, one of the most enduring dynamics of GOP conventions (there's a comparable dynamic on the Dem side) is more mainstream nominees battling conservative activists over the party platform, with activists trying to check all the hardline ideological boxes and the nominees trying to soften most or all of those edges. This is one thing that made the Trump convention very different. The Trump Camp was totally indifferent to the platform. So party activists were able to write one of the most conservative platforms in history. Not with Trump's backing but because he simply didn't care. With one big exception: Trump's team mobilized the nominee's traditional mix of cajoling and strong-arming on one point: changing the party platform on assistance to Ukraine against Russian military operations in eastern Ukraine. For what it's worth (and it's not worth much) I am quite skeptical of most Republicans call for aggressively arming Ukraine to resist Russian aggression. But the single-mindedness of this focus on this one issue - in the context of total indifference to everything else in the platform - speaks volumes.

This does not mean Trump is controlled by or in the pay of Russia or Putin. It can just as easily be explained by having many of his top advisors having spent years working in Putin's orbit and being aligned with his thinking and agenda. But it is certainly no coincidence. Again, in the context of near total indifference to the platform and willingness to let party activists write it in any way they want, his team zeroed in on one fairly obscure plank to exert maximum force and it just happens to be the one most important to Putin in terms of US policy.

Add to this that his most conspicuous foreign policy statements track not only with Putin's positions but those in which Putin is most intensely interested. Aside from Ukraine, Trump's suggestion that the US and thus NATO might not come to the defense of NATO member states in the Baltics in the case of a Russian invasion is a case in point.

There are many other things people are alleging about hacking and all manner of other mysteries. But those points are highly speculative, some verging on conspiratorial in their thinking. I ignore them here because I've wanted to focus on unimpeachable, undisputed and publicly known facts. These alone paint a stark and highly troubling picture.

To put this all into perspective, if Vladimir Putin were simply the CEO of a major American corporation and there was this much money flowing in Trump's direction, combined with this much solicitousness of Putin's policy agenda, it would set off alarm bells galore. That is not hyperbole or exaggeration. And yet Putin is not the CEO of an American corporation. He's the autocrat who rules a foreign state, with an increasingly hostile posture towards the United States and a substantial stockpile of nuclear weapons. The stakes involved in finding out 'what's going on' as Trump might put it are quite a bit higher.

There is something between a non-trivial and a substantial amount of circumstantial evidence for a financial relationship between Trump and Putin or a non-tacit alliance between the two men. Even if you draw no adverse conclusions, Trump's financial empire is heavily leveraged and has a deep reliance on capital infusions from oligarchs and other sources of wealth aligned with Putin. That's simply not something that can be waved off or ignored.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/tru ... ly-a-thing
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Re: Carter Page

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Feb 16, 2017 7:34 am

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
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
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Re: Carter Page

Postby seemslikeadream » Thu Feb 16, 2017 1:54 pm

All of Putin’s / Trump’s Men
By Juan Cole | Feb. 15, 2017 |

By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – –
The NYT has broken the story that several Trump associates are under investigation by the FBI for their contacts with Russian intelligence and other officials during the 2016 presidential campaign. These contacts worried the FBI and other intelligence agencies, given that they were seeing Russian hacking of campaign accounts at the same time.
The links between Trump and his associates on the one hand and the Russian Federation on the other are both broad and intense.
Donald J. Trump did pursue Russian business deals in Russia in 2013 (despite his denials), but these never bore fruit. However, Trump subsequently partnered with businessmen from Russia or its ‘near abroad,’ bringing them into the New York real estate market. Some observers have wondered whether these deals allowed those individuals to engage in money laundering.
Trump’s Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, is actually a partner in a Russo-American oil firm, Exxon Naftegas, which is headquartered in an offshore tax haven in the Caribbean. Even just as ordinary everyday CEO of ExxonMobil, Tillerson did a $500 billion joint deal with Russia’s Rosneft to extract oil from the arctic. That’s evil no matter who he partners with. Also ironic, since such drilling is only made possible by the global warming caused by Tillerson’s billions of tons of annual carbon dioxide emissions. It is an unvirtuous circle.
President Obama’s sanctions on Russia rather interrupted the plans to drill the Russian arctic, and apparently Mike Flynn was sent to the Russian ambassador to the US to reassure him that those sanctions would be undone. Given that the price of petroleum has been halved in the past two years, Russia is desperate for new drilling, so it can make up some of the shortfall by new production. Moreover, both Tillerson and his Russian partners know that electric cars are coming fast and furious, and that the petroleum won’t be worth much in 20 years. So they’re eager to extract it and sell it while they still can.
$500 billion is a lot of money. People sometimes rob banks to get $10,000.
Wilbur Ross, Trump’s pick for Commerce Secretary, has a joint venture (a bank in Cyprus) with Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg. Ross has announced that he will keep ownership of 11 assets overseas, opening him to foreign influence.
Paul Manafort has for a decade been close to pro-Russian businessmen and politicians in the Ukraine. Ironically, the two discussed by Politifact are both Muslims, presumably Crimean Tatars. Manafort, as a major figure in the Trump campaign, apparently did not let Jared Kushner know about the full extent of his Russian connections. He also is alleged to have used his position to introduce changes into the Republican Party platform that benefit Russia. Kushner forced Manafort out last summer.
Trump foreign policy adviser Carter Page flew to Moscow just days before the Republican National Convention. No one knows what that was all about. But a high Russian official admitted that numerous members of the Trump team were in constant contact with Russian officials
So Mike Flynn calling the Russian ambassor to the US in late December and reassuring Moscow about sanctions being lifted looks much more likely to have been a joint effort by the Moscow Gang of Trump and associates than a one-off piece of dark comedy.
http://www.juancole.com/2017/02/all-putins-trumps.html
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
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Re: Carter Page

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Mar 01, 2017 11:09 am

Jeff Sessions allegedly steered Russian operative Carter Page to Donald Trump campaign
By Bill Palmer | February 28, 2017 | 0

Republican Congressman Darrell Issa surprised many by calling for Attorney General Jeff Sessions to recuse himself from the investigation into Donald Trump and Russia if and when it reaches the prosecution stage. But considering what’s already publicly known about Sessions’ pivotal role in the Trump-Russia scandal, it shouldn’t come as a surprise. Issa already knows what we know, and considering his role on the House Judiciary Committee, he probably knows much more than we do.

One of the key questions in the investigation into Donald Trump and Russia is where Carter Page came from and why. His resume up to that point had largely consisted of doing financial business with Russia and giving speeches that praised Russia. But he was almost inexplicably hired by the Trump campaign as a foreign policy adviser, despite having no background to justify such a role.

During the election it was revealed that the FBI was investigating Page’s ties to Russia. And after the election, he infamously turned up in Moscow for unknown reasons in December. And then in February it was revealed that he’d been colluding with Russian intel officials during the election. So how did Carter Page first find his way to Donald Trump? Just ask Jeff Sessions.

Back in September, a Politico report on Carter Page included the following revelation way down around the twentieth paragraph: “Someone else told me that the Page connection was Rick Dearborn, Sessions’ chief of staff, who hired Page because Dearborn knew nothing about foreign policy but needed to put together a foreign policy staff for Trump’s Alexandria, Virginia, policy shop and he happened to know Page.”

That same Politico article goes on to report that another source believes it was instead Republican operative Sam Clovis who steered Carter Page to the Donald Trump campaign. But here’s what we know for sure: there is at least one source out there who claims Page was routed to the Trump campaign through the Senate office of Jeff Sessions – and Politico considered that source credible enough to include the claim in its reporting.

That alone creates enough of a grey area such that Jeff Sessions must recuse himself from any investigation into Donald Trump and Russia, considering that one of the key conspirators is being credibly accused of having been hired to the Trump campaign by Sessions’ chief of staff Rick Dearborn. And that’s before getting to the conflict of interest involved in Trump going on to Sessions as Attorney General, and going on to hire Dearborn as Deputy White House Chief of Staff
http://www.palmerreport.com/politics/je ... rump/1709/
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
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Re: Carter Page

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Mar 03, 2017 8:50 am

Carter Page panics over Trump-Russia, inexplicably goes on MSNBC and admits culpability
By Bill Palmer | March 3, 2017 | 0

If you’re obscure Trump-Russia suspect Carter Page, you should have been breathing a sigh of relief on Thursday. Suddenly bigger fish like Jeff Sessions had become the focus of the scandal. Page should have laid low for awhile and hoped the world (and the Feds) stopped caring that he existed. But instead, Page panicked by appearing on MSNBC to proclaim his innocence, but ended up changing his story and admitting culpability instead.

There is still no one outside of the Donald Trump campaign who knows for sure who Carter Page is, or why he was given a key foreign policy role in the campaign despite being a nobody with no qualifications. He appears to have spent much of his adult life working in Russia or for Russian companies. He ran off to Moscow for a week after the campaign, for unexplained reasons. While he was there, he was quoted (correctly or not) in Russian state-controlled media making threats against John McCain. He’s a bizarre ghost of a figure who may be the linchpin of the Trump-Russia investigation or may just be a pivotal rube who didn’t know what he’d gotten into.

We’ve previously reported on the strong evidence that suggests it was Jeff Sessions (or Sessions’ then chief of staff Rick Dearborn) who hired Carter Page into the Donald Trump campaign to begin with. They both went on to collude with the same Russian Ambassador in the same meeting, so that’s not a coincidence. So perhaps Page felt he needed to appear on MSNBC in order to stick up for Sessions, whose career and legacy fell apart yesterday. But let’s just say that the appearance didn’t go well.

Carter Page had long claimed he never met with the Russians during the campaign. But during his interview last night, he told Chris Hayes that “I’m not going to deny that I talked with” Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, which is an admission that he did. Why do this? Why go volunteer to go on TV and then admit complicity, establishing that he lied to begin with, and putting the investigation spotlight back on himself? Page also refused to confirm last night that he’s ever met Donald Trump. Who is this guy?

Watch Carter Page’s interview with MSNBC host Chris Hayes in the video below:

http://www.palmerreport.com/news/carter ... lity/1757/
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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