The strange saga of former Trump campaign and Russian energy executive Carter Page continues. This time in the form of a letter Page sent to Senate Intelligence Committee chairs Richard Burr and Mark Warner. From Business Insider:
In a letter addressed to the chairman of the committee, Republican Sen. Richard Burr, and ranking Democratic member Sen. Mark Warner, Carter Page wrote that as a Trump "campaign surrogate" with "a peaceful relationship with Russian citizens," he thinks he could have been "an associated political target" of "potentially criminal surveillance" carried out by the Obama administration.
"For your information, I have frequently dined in Trump Grill, had lunch in Trump Café, had coffee meetings in the Starbucks at Trump Tower, attended events and spent many hours in campaign headquarters on the fifth floor last year," Page wrote. "As a sister skyscraper in Manhattan, my office at the IBM Building (590 Madison Avenue) is literally connected to the Trump Tower building by an atrium."
And Team Trump didn’t mind rolling out an anonymous official to try to put more daylight between Team Trump and Page:
In response to questions about Page's claim that he spent "many hours" at Trump campaign headquarters on the fifth floor of Trump Tower, an administration official who worked with the campaign pointed to the fact that its headquarters moved from the fifth floor to the 14th and 15th floors of Trump Tower before the Republican National Convention last July.
As the Guardian notes, Carter Page, like his former mentor Donald Trump, provides ZERO evidence for his claims of being illegally wiretapped:
Page, an oil and energy industry consultant who has spent significant time in Russia, told the Guardian he would be “more than happy” to testify to the Senate committee. He admitted that he had no proof that his phone was put under surveillance but denied he was attempting to put up a smokescreen, turning his fire instead on the Clinton campaign.
“My phone looks clean to me,” he wrote in an email. “More to the point and if they were indeed doing a J. Edgar Hoover-style political attack based on my beliefs, nothing I’ve ever written or said on it could be possibly construed as breaking any U.S. Law ... as per the false evidence and concocted allegations of the Lying Crooked Hillary campaign.”
For what it’s worth, it isn’t hard to see why the Trump camp is so desperate to try and put distance between Page and themselves. Unfortunately, they can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube. Trump himself named Carter Page as one of his foreign policy advisers. Corey Lewandowski signed off on Page's trip to Russia. And there is no doubt Carter Page met with the Russian ambassador during the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. He certainly still appeared to be part of the foreign policy adviser during the RNC. Is Page a bumbling character who someone managed to latch onto the Trump campaign? When he was announced as a member of the foreign policy advisory team, he was one of only six total people on that team, which was led by Jeff Sessions. If he’s the incompetent, over-inflating nobody the Trump camp wants us to believe, how’d he get such an important role to begin with?
Any way you slice it, the American people deserve a full, independent investigation to get to the truth.